"Show your enemy mercy and he shall one day seek vengeance upon you for every petty, imaginable slight. Mercy is therefore a weakness; a crime waiting to be born. Mercy I have long since expunged, both from myself and my Legion."
A Terror Squad was a specialist squad of Space Marines utilised exclusively by the Night LordsLegion during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. No Legion of the Legiones Astartes ever elevated the use of fear itself as a weapon to the extent that the Night Lords did. Through their fearful and bloody acts entire star systems were cowed into submission, often occasioning far less ultimate loss of life than a conventional war might have brought.
The midnight and storm-clad VIII Legion served also as dark judges and executioners; they enacted the Emperor's retribution on renegade planetary governors, recidivist cults and rebels alike, where their crimes proved severe enough to have called down the Imperium's wrath so utterly upon them.
When such punishments were intended to be at their most visceral and personal, the Terror Squads of the VIII Legion were unleashed. Head hunters and torturers, flayers and mutilators; within the ranks of the Terror Squads were found both the most coldly dispassionate and darkly imaginative of the Night Lords brethren, and where once the terrifying arts of murder and mayhem they perpetrated were a coldly calculated means to an end, as the solar decades of the Great Crusade progressed, the Terror Squads became a sink-hole for the most unstable and unsubtle elements within their Legion, many within them standing under their own sentences of death -- commuted so long as they proved useful to their macabre master, the Night Haunter, Konrad Curze himself.
