Minos: Imperium holds on

On Minos the brutal fighting had taken its toll on both sides by the end of 05.015M42. However it was the imperial army which was better able to absorb these kinds of losses, as the iron warriors were an elite force of ancient super humans . The simply couldn't afford to suffer the attritional losses the same way the Novgorod could. With no hope of immediate re supply the imperial commanders simply had to dig in and await what was coming for them.

The next assault on the imperial lines came on 2205.015M42. Rather than expend his precious elite forces or even his limited mortal human units, Warsmith Stahl consented to a plan put forward to him by one of his allies, a tzeentch sorcerer who Stahl despised. The sorcerer proposed utilising the power of the warp to defeat the common foe, and while the Iron Warriors' leader detested the denizens of the empyrean, he was not above using them as tools to meet an end. In fact many of his war engines were powered by the shackled spirits of warp entities, so the plan was approved.

The daemonic hordes were duly summoned in front of the lines of Novgorod soldiers, and they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the fight, capreing gleefully at the opportunity to wreak havoc in the mortal realm. Once again the imperial forces took heavy casualties and were inexorably forced to give ground, but despite the ferocity of the daemonic onslaught, the lines held long enough for the imperium to weather the storm, and before very long the unnatural army began crumbling, its tether to the physical plane slowly dissolving.

The operation had caused carnage, but the line had not been broken. Stahl made his displeasure clear to the tzeetch sorcerer, who was summarily dismembered in front of the ranks of his loyal followers, but the warsmith knew the casualties inflicted had been useful and his own forces had not been diminished. The fall of Minos was only a matter of time so long as the corpse god's followers failed to send any reinforcements to the beleagured Novgorod defenders.