[header=Magnus]
Name: Guardsman Magnus 'Stormhammer' Cathar

Age: 36

Gender: Male

Height and Weight: 180cm, 85kg

Speciality: Guardsman Close-quarter combat, Magnus has also received training as a combat medic prior to his redeployment. His main ability is simply being able to survive, out of blind luck where millions have fallen.

Appearance: There is an old saying within the Astra Militarum is that 'There are bold Guardsmen and old Guardsmen but no bold and old guardsmen'. Magnus is an old Guardsman,as is anyone who has survived beyond 35 in the guard. Whereas most guardsmen keep their hair short, Magnus chooses to remain bald. This has the advantage of helping him fight off the lice that seem to infest every army barracks. It also teaches the younger recruits to keep a fair distance from him as no zealout wants to be associated with a man who bears the tattooed bar-code of the 852nd Penal Legion. Magnus's eyebrows have begun to turn grey and his skin has begun to lose its elasticity due to time but his muscles remain as strong as ever. Despite his slightly above average frame Magnus has lightning-quick reflexes, which have managed to save him many a dangerous encounter as he is quick with a blade or a blunt object.

Under his armour, scars seem to cover every square centimeter of skin. If he believed in Miracles Magnus might think that the Emperor himself was watching out for him so often has he avoided death. the Few Colleagues that knew him gave him the nickname 'Stormhammer' after the heavy tank for his sheer ability to survive.

Uniform: Magnus wears a battered Flak Armour, Swamp Green battle helmet, fatigues brown with the dirt of a dozen different worlds.

Armament: He still wields his Penal-issued Mark 4 lascarbine preferring it's practicality and accuracy to the range of the Standard las Rifle. He also carries two combat knives, demolition charges, smoke grenades and his most prized possession a Lyndwyrm "Volcano" Autopistol, taken from the body of a dead officer.

Personality/Demeanour: Magnus is a surly, frequently angry guardsman who few people get on with. Magnus has fought too dozens of different Xenos on dozens of worlds but in his eyes there are few differences between those who fight for the emperor and those who fight against him. He knows this is heresy but does not care, he think he has seen and survived the worst of what the Imperium can do to a man and survived. He has seen too many of his comrades die to care about what he his fighting for anymore, he lives day by day, making few friends and keeping to himself to avoid forming a bond that will inevitably be severed by battle or to avoid involving his comrades in his heretical thoughts.

Greatest Ambition: To survive long enough to be demustered and sent to retire on a Farm planet and raise a family far from war and the Xeno.

Greatest Hatred: The futility of the struggle, the unending, ceaseless slaughter that achieves so little. The sacrifice of the common man to preserve to comfort of the powerful lords of the imperium.

Skills: Magnus has a talent for surviving situations that would bring down even an ogryn, he attributes his continued survival to his complete disregard for his own life, a powerful cocktail of chems, years of soul grinding training before even joining the guard as he was born the bastard child of a guardsman and pure blind luck.

History: Magnus was born on some forgotten feral world where his father had been stationed, enjoying the relatively cushy job of a member of an Imperial Planetary Defence Force on a planet with a low native population. However, before Magnus turned 9 his father's unit was taken off planet and merged with foreign conscript regiments into a new garrison regiment intended to man defensive positions on conflict planets whilst regularly trained guardsmen could go on the offensive. This mean that by age 11 Magnus had killed his first Xeno; an eldar who had tried and failed to infiltrate the guardsman barracks after the a small Eldar force had drawn off the main Guardsmen unit leaving only a few members of the Departmento Munitorum, the medics and the regimental children to man the fixed emplacements. His excitement was short lived as he learned two weeks later that his father had died on the day he had made his first kill, slain by far from home on some swamp planet.

After being pressed into the guard to fill his fathers' place, Magnus fought on dozens of planets. He was fortunate enough to be sent to battles where the Imperium emerged victorious but on his 24th year he first tasted defeat. Despite the best efforts the Guard the Tau fire caste warriors had all but eradicated human resistance on the forge world of Terrok Antera. As ever the orders had been to hold on and keep fighting until reinforcements arrived, this was somewhat of a joke among Guardsmen. Off-world reinforcements were always coming, always almost there but somehow never made it to the battlefield when you needed them. His regiment had been bombarded for weeks on end and had not received the proper weaponry to successfully fight off the Tau in their battlesuits. So Magnus did what came naturally, and in the dead on night during his guard duty he abandoned his post and surrendered himself to the Tau. He had considered himself lucky knowing that the Tau were some of the only Xenos that would actually take prisoners and sometimes give them a fair life. His guilt at abandoning his comarades was lessened by the fact that he knew that had he stayed the position would have fallen in days. Only this time the reinforcements Did come. Of all the thrice-damned off-world reinforcements that could arrive it had to be the Holy hundred and fifteenth imperial Guard Regiment led by the bloody Deathwatch. In seemingly no time at all, all the advances the Tau had made were undone as the veteran Adeptus Astartes pounded his captors further and further back. When Magnus and his other 'colleagues' were 'rescued' they quickly found their way before Arbites Legatus who dispatched them to a penal world where they were to be remolded as men and given the chance to pay for their weakness and treason through diligent and unquestioning service in the Emperor's 852nd penal Legion. For the better part of a year, Magnus was starved, shocked,drugged, whipped and beaten into obedience until, at last the 852nd was sent off world. Immediately after emerging from The Warp the Penal Barge on which Magnus found himself, was boarded by Orks as a space battle was waged between the Imperial Navy and and Orkish fleet. Still chained, unarmed most of the legion were unable to defend themselves and were butchered by the boarders. As luck would have it, the cell block in which Magnus was being detained was not functioning correctly and would not open to let in the Orks. Eventually the boarders broke down the gates into the cell but this had bought precious time for Magnus and his fellow detainees to arm themselves with furniture, canteens and other improvised weaponry. By this time , the Imperial Navy had smashed the Ork fleet and had began retaking the prison hulk saving the lives of the remaining Penal Legionaires much to the disgust of the Fleet Commander.

For the next 9 years Magnus and the 852nd were thrown into conflicts all across the Imperium but somehow he always found ways to survive, knowing that short of execution there was little that could be done to punish him further. On his tenth year in the 852nd Magnus had been deployed to the core of a Organic world where the Imperium had been battling the fearsome Tyrannids. The 852nd had been sent into deep and ancient underground tunnels to catch any incoming fire for Adaptes Astartes. These were following close behind and had orders emerge from the tunnels and to launch a surprise attack behind the Tyrannid rear. It was hoped that the Hive-mind would be so distracted by the regular forces engaging it on the surface that the Xeno would be incapable of reacting in time to a last-ditch Asartes attack. The General Staff clearly did not understand how the hive mind worked and their plan resulted in Dozens of Blood Angels and tens of thousands of Penal Legionnaires. Then the Imperial Commander took a drastic decision, with his ground forces decimated, the Tyrannids in total occupation of an Organic world and his fleet desperately needed elsewhere, he gave the order for a Planetary Exterminatus. The Imperial Navy's Vessels bombarded the planet's surface for two days,incinerating all hostile, natural and friendly life before departing. Only those who had been in the planet's core tunnels had been able to survive the incineration of the planet surface. Those Legionaires who had gone underground on a beautifully green planet full of life emerged from the dark to witness the charred remains of millions of years of nature. All but those deepest underground were incinerated by the initial blasts. Magnus was one of these and after understanding just what had happened, he began to provide basic burn and shrapnel care to all those who stood a chance of surviving. For the most part, this meant treating Adeptus Astartes who despite taking massive damage from the planetary bombardment, had been engineered in such as way as to be able to survive in all but the most hopeless of situations. Thus it was by Magnus's act of saving the remaining Astartes and contacting a passing Imperium fleet in order recover the Geneseed of the fallen that the entire 852nd was rehabilitated. In recognition for their heroic efforts and surviving an Exterminatus the 852nd was given the singular honour of rejoining the Emperor's forces as an Imperial Guardsmen. After a brief and cost-effective ceremony these new Guardsmen were herded onto vessels once more and pointed in the direction of Vernum Primas.
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