He was supposed to be moving stealthily. Not even his leader should have been able to pick out his position by the noise he was making.
Of course, Ragnar had other ways of spotting his troops. The wind carried their distinctive scent to his sensitive nostrils even over a gap of fifty paces. He could pick their clean, cold aroma out from all of the tangled mess of background stinks — the rotten-egg taint of industrial pollution, and the even subtler, sicker taint, which marked the Chaos-touched presence of heretics. Bones of Russ, how he hated that foul stench! He had never got used to it, though it had assailed his nostrils on countess occasions for over a century. There was something deeply offensive to him in the very odour of those who had forsworn their souls to Chaos, a thing that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and filled his heart with a red desire to kill and rend. Not even the fact that he suspected that this was a deliberate product of the process of alteration that had turned him into a Space Marine, could alter the basic, primal nature of his hatred. The unquenchable anger affected him as instinctively as the urge to seek its prey drives a wolf. An apt analogy, thought Ragnar, for he was a human wolf, and the Chaos-worshipping scum were his rightful prey, fit subjects for the Emperor’s vengeance, delivered by he and his fellows, humanity’s superhuman protectors. They had turned their backs on humanity and offered themselves up to the gods of darkness in return for power, or more likely the promise of power. Ragnar knew that it was a false promise. The only reward most of those deluded fools would receive would be the stigmata of mutation, and a degeneration of mind and spirit until their souls matched their twisted bodies. It would be a mercy to kill them before that happened, although most of them would never appreciate the natural justice of such an end. Here, amongst these blasted rains, the stink seemed worse, even, than before, for along with the taint of Chaos was the stench of sickness, of some foul pestilence that had infected the heretics, and the people of Hesperida alike. It was a sour, unclean reek that made his throat constrict. It brought back too many old memories, ones he had thought long buried. He pushed them to the back of his mind; now was not the time to lose himself in reverie.
These reflections had taken less than five heartbeats perhaps. In the midst of battle, Ragnar’s mind worked at a speed far beyond the merely human. He realised he had only been keeping himself occupied until his troops were massed in position for the final assault. He focussed his mind back on the problem at hand, selectively editing the memory of the scene he had just witnessed, using his superhuman abilities with a skill born of long decades of practice. Using ancient meditation techniques taught to him in the fortress-monastery of his order, he concentrated upon the impression of the one part of the battlefield that was currently important to him:

the rebel position directly ahead. He consciously selected all the crucial details. The walls of sandbags
hastily thrown into position to plug the gaps in the building walls. The heavy bolter team ensconced in the twisted wreckage of a tank just in front of the building. The edge of a peaked cap which marked the presence of a rebel officer glaring out of the barred windows on the remains of the second floor. All was more or less as he had expected it to be when he had surveyed the enemy stronghold earlier. There had been no important changes in the heretics’ disposition. His basic plan remained sound. It would simply be a matter of hitting them at their weakest point, blasting the sandbags out of the way and then scouring the building of every last Chaos-worshipping wretch. Nothing too difficult, he thought — even though his force was outnumbered at least five to one.