Kor Melis

Sergeant Kor Melis of the XVth Legion, later to be known as the Riven, was an exemplar of a Space Marine across the Legiones Astartes.

Background
Recruited on Terra from one of the innumerable war refugee camps, Melis was at first glance, a standard initiate and recruit. He passed through all the tests and trials to become a legionnaire, but never excelled in any field or subject. Legionnaire Melis was inducted into the 14th Chapter of XVth Legion as a line marine. During the hive-clearings of the Terran Unification, Melis distinguished himself as an inspiring orator and fire team leader, exhorting his brothers to greater efforts and leading from the front. After his squad sergeant was killed in action during the XVth's first compliance action in the Great Crusade, Kor Melis was promoted to sergeant.

He continued to perform well, eventually leading the Terminator veterans of the 1st Company as a veteran sergeant. It was here where his promising career was cut short, a mere three years from the Legion being reunited with their Primarch, and the loss was devastating to the 14th Chapter and the XVth as a whole. Sergeant Melis' lectures on small-unit tactics and morale were greatly attended and formed some of the basis for the formation of the Riven's Heirarch Order in later years. Melis' death came in the compliance action on the planet Nelcore. The planet was home to a tainted machine-intelligence that dominated its servile human population. The serfs, clad in a primitive form of powered armor and wielding high-powered laser weaponry, proved to be a difficult enemy for the Imperium's forces. Implanted augmetics gave the machine the ability to see and coordinate all of its forces with precision, turning what would have been a difficult, but standard compliance action to a grinding war that lasted six months.

Sergeant Melis lead a strike at a vox-cogitator node in the enemy capital, a pinpoint strike to compromise the machine's ability to send and receive tactical information. The Thunderhawk carrying the strike force managed to drop off the marines before succumbing to enemy fire, and Melis' men ran to the fortress-like cogitator array. Fighting their way in, the strike force reached the main array and after advancing through a withering firefight were able to capture the control center. While Techmarine Dorian inloaded the meme-virus to the cogitator, Sergeant Melis lead the defense of the control center from enemy counter attacks. One by one, the thirty legionnaires fell to the lasblasts and missiles of the enemy. Dorian completed his work, only to receive a sniper's shot through his eye-lens. Knowing the meme-virus would take time to work its way through the cogitatior-network, Melis stood alone and faced the enemy. His combi-bolter soon ran out of ammunition, so he grabbed a rotor cannon from one of his dead support marines. Slashing his power axe through the cannon's long barrel, he began to spray rounds at the enemy, turning the weapon into a large-scale submachinegun.

Tactical data recovered from Melis' body, covered in lasburns, shrapnel, and dozens of melee wounds, showed that the indominable sergeant personally lasted a full hour alone in the face of an all-out enemy assault. His refusal to fail allowed the meme-virus to work, taking over portions of the vox network and corrupting the machine's ability to communicate with the warrior-serfs. In response to his example, members of the Terminator-clad first company of the 14th Chapter began to utilize rotor cannons as their standard armament. When Morrigar took up command of the Riven, he formalized the unit formation, naming them Melissian Terminators in honor of their dead hero and personally commissioning the tech-adepts of Forgeworld Xana II to make a rotor cannon variant more readily usable by terminators; eventually culminating in the creation of the Xana-pattern assault cannon which combines mobility with a withering amount of short-range firepower. The Melissian Terminators lived up to their name, becoming known for taking hard-held enemy strongpoints and then turning them into bulwarks of defense, destroying any assault launched to recapture them. Melis' influence extends to the Heirarch Order as well, his morale-lifting and inspirational treatises serving as standard learning material for all Heirarch initiates.