Long before Nurgle's touch transformed the Legion's flesh, a Death Guard Tactical Squad already carried a reputation for absorbing losses that other Legions considered unacceptable, advancing through withering fire with a grim, methodical patience rather than seeking cover or hesitating at cost. Mortarion trained his sons to treat hardship as the ordinary condition of war rather than an aberration to be avoided, and that expectation bred squads capable of sustaining offensives long after equivalent formations from other Legions would have broken.
After the horror of Istvaan III and the plague-soaked ordeal that followed, this same doggedness took on a far darker character, Tactical Squads continuing to advance despite wounds that should have ended them, their bolters firing from bodies already rotting beneath cracked ceramite. What had once been simple battlefield discipline became something closer to a horror weapon in its own right, an infantry line that quite literally refused to stop coming no matter how thoroughly it was cut down.
Order of battle
