title: Space Marine Battles: Flesh Tearers
author: Andy Smillie
description: Andy Smillie is best known for his visceral Flesh Tearers novellas, Sons of Wrath and Flesh of Cretacia. He has also written a host of short stories starring this brutal Chapter of Space Marines and a number of audio dramas, including The Kauyon, Blood in the Machine, Deathwolf and From the Blood.
zlib_text: Reparation
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Andy Smillie
  
  Thorolf coughed, sending flecks of blood and filmy matter onto the dirt.
  Touching a hand to his aching ribs, he scolded himself for allowing the human
  to get so close. Human, the term barely applied to the gene-bulked creature
  growling at him from across the arena. The mans, if he had been a man,
  musculature was swollen to insane proportions, his head lost between boulder-
  like shoulders. His nervous system had been replaced by a network of cables
  that poked through pallid skin like rusting veins, and his legs were powered
  by pistons sunk into the meat of enlarged thighs. In a century of warfare,
  Thorolf had yet to encounter such a nightmarish union of flesh and science.
  The chrono-gladiator had been quicker than his bulk belied, steaming into
  Thorolf to deliver a punch to the Space Marines midriff that would have
  killed him if it were not for the hardened bone structure and numerous
  implants his Chapters Apothecaries had gifted him. Even now, Thorol