The most absurd joke in the world is a Kriegsman who can't die. On the 47th day of the siege of Warren Hive, the sky outside is blotted out by a swarm of Leviathan Tyranids, while inside, Genestealers that have lain dormant for three generations are stirring. As a mass-produced infantryman in the 41st Siege Regiment, Otto Brandt should have long since become a lump of mud in the trenches. But he is still alive. Every time he charges into a suicide attack that should kill him, every time his whole army is trapped with no way out, he somehow survives by a miracle. The price is that, every time, a comrade takes his place and dies before his eyes. The death tags around his neck keep piling up, growing heavy as the chains of a gallows; Commissar Victor's black ledger also records every one of Otto's "resurrections" in painstaking detail. Otto just wants to die, to wash away this accursed shame. On a battlefield where everyone is scrambling to atone before the Emperor, what is the thing that simply refuses to let him die?
