When a mighty Chaos Space Marine is mortally wounded, his warband may deny him death by interring his shattered body within the armoured shell of a Helbrute. There, wired into the machine and kept alive against his will, the warrior festers in agony and rage, his sanity slowly consumed by the horror of his confinement.
Between battles the Helbrute is often kept dormant, chained or sealed away, for its madness makes it a danger even to its allies. Only when war calls is it roused, and then all that accumulated fury is loosed upon the enemy. The Helbrute stalks the battlefield on massive legs, tearing armour apart with crushing fists and blasting foes to atoms with the heavy weapons grafted to its frame.
Corruption seeps through every Helbrute. Faces sometimes press against the armour from within, and daemonic influence twists the machine into something that is as much monster as engine. To the warband it is both a weapon and a warning, a reminder of the fate that awaits those who fall in the endless war yet are too valuable, or too cursed, to be permitted the mercy of a clean end.