Qin Mo's lips curled into a faint smile as he looked at Kalon.
"Unlock a psyker's collar?" he mused. "Are you sure about that?"
He did not ask it like a condemned man begging for mercy.
He asked it like someone watching another person prepare to pull the pin from a grenade without checking whether they were standing inside the blast radius.
He wasn't mocking the old man. He was genuinely asking.
Psykers were dangerous abominations.
Not in the way ignorant underhive preachers screamed about during fire-and-brimstone sermons, and not in the way frightened soldiers spat the word like a curse whenever Kalon passed too close. The danger was not superstition. It was real, measurable, repeatable, and horrifyingly consistent.
A psyker was a walking breach point, a living fault line between realspace and the Warp, a battlefield disaster wearing skin and nerves.
The Imperium feared them for good reason.
An untrained psyker losing control could annihilate an entire defensive position in seconds. A burst of uncontrolled telekinesis could pulp men against ferrocrete. A flare of pyromancy could turn a firing step into an oven. A botched attempt at foresight could leave everyone nearby bleeding from the eyes while something on the other side noticed the disturbance.
But raw destruction was never the true horror.
The real threat lurked beyond reality.
That was the part most people feared without understanding. Qin Mo understood it too well. He had read the lore as entertainment once. Here, entertainment had become a survival manual written in blood.
A desperate psyker trapped in a battlefield filled with death, fear, pain, and Warp-tainted cultists was exactly the kind of situation that ended with screaming, possession, and a commissar ordering artillery onto his own coordinates.
A psyker's soul acted like a lighthouse within the Immaterium. Every spike of terror, rage, or desperation sent ripples through the Warp. Every reckless use of psychic power increased the likelihood of attracting something from the darkness beyond reality.
At any moment, a whisper could become a command. A flicker of temptation could become surrender. A moment of weakness could turn a human being into a door, and through that door the nightmares of the Immaterium would pour into realspace wearing a familiar face.
To remove a suppression collar?
That was suicide.
And yet, Kalon said it so casually.
No. Not casually, Qin Mo corrected himself. Kalon said it with the cold certainty of a man who had already accepted every possible death in the room, including his own.
"Worry not, mongrel," the old psyker rasped, his voice rough like rust scraping against metal. "Your leash remains fastened. If I release it, you will burn bright… and brief."
His pale, pupil-less eyes narrowed.
"You will either die killing the cult's filth or die by my hand afterward. Either outcome serves the Throne."
Burr made a low sound that might have been approval. Around them, the nearest soldiers pretended not to listen. They failed. Everyone in the trench understood the meaning behind Kalon's words. Prisoner No. 444 was not being offered trust. He was being marked as ammunition.
Qin Mo's eyes shifted toward Kalon's staff.
A golden scepter crowned with the Imperial Aquila rested in the old man's grip. Faint psychic energy pulsed across its surface.
It wasn't just an old man's walking stick.
It was a weapon. A psychic focus.
Scratches covered the haft where gloved fingers had gripped it through too many campaigns. Thin bands of brass and silver ran along the shaft, etched with warding script and repair marks. The Aquila at the top had been polished so often that the edges were soft, but there was nothing ceremonial about the way Kalon held it. His fingers rested exactly where a swordsman's hand would settle on a hilt.
"From this hour onward," Kalon continued, "you labor not with hands, but with waiting. Conserve your strength… for the pyre."
Then the old psyker turned and walked away without another word.
Burr lingered for a moment longer, glancing at Qin Mo with an expression that was neither pity nor contempt.
Just calculating coldness, like measuring the worth of a tool before throwing it away.
The captain's gaze paused on the suppression collar, then on the metallic lines half-hidden beneath Qin Mo's torn shirt. Burr was not a scholar, not a mystic, and certainly not an engineer. But he understood weapons. He understood when something might kill his enemies before it killed him.
Finally, Burr followed after Kalon.
"Charming people." Qin Mo rolled his eyes and lowered his head, flipping open his journal.
It was one of the two things keeping him sane.
The first was rereading old entries from Earth.
Fragmented memories. Names, habits, arguments, useless trivia, internet jokes, and random thoughts from a life that already felt unreal with each passing day.
He had written some of them down with desperate precision after realizing how quickly memory decayed under hunger, exhaustion, and fear. The exact layout of his old room. The brand of instant noodles he used to buy. A joke a friend had repeated until everyone hated it, then kept repeating until it somehow became funny again. A password hint that was useless now. The lyrics to half a song he could not quite remember.
None of it could help him survive a bolter round, a daemon, or an Imperial firing squad.
It still mattered to him.
The second was designing.
The journal was filled with schematics, formulas, structural breakdowns, and weapon concepts. Some were incomplete. Some were absurd. Some could realistically shift the balance of an entire planetary war if properly manufactured.
And every single one was written with a level of precision that still surprised him.
He had never been a scientist.
Back on Earth, he barely survived mathematics courses.
But whenever he focused on creating something, the required knowledge surfaced naturally in his mind.
Material tolerances. Energy transfer equations. Structural stress analysis. Electromagnetic field behavior.
Metallurgical compatibility. Heat dissipation pathways. Microfracture growth under repeated stress. The failure points of cheap insulation. The expected draw from a lasgun power cell if its regulator was bypassed and its machine spirit, or whatever passed for one, was not allowed to complain first.
The information appeared instinctively, as though it had always existed somewhere inside him.
"Maybe I've been blessed by Tzeentch," he muttered dryly.
The joke immediately reminded him where he was.
Warhammer 40K was not the kind of universe where casually naming Chaos Gods counted as healthy behavior.
The first time he had spoken the name aloud, he regretted it almost immediately.
You did not say their names unless you wanted attention from the Warp.
Yet… nothing had happened.
Maybe "Tzeentch" was only a translated name from English and carried less metaphysical weight.
Maybe it was something else entirely.
Maybe the universe had decided that one exhausted prisoner making a bad joke in a trench did not merit divine notice.
That possibility was not comforting. It only meant the eye looking for him had not turned his way yet.
Either way, since there were no whispers in his head, no daemonic claws raking at his soul, he had stopped worrying about it.
For now.
His attention returned to the newest design in the journal.
A Gravity Shield.
Not a traditional energy barrier.
No shimmering wall of light. No void-shield bubble begging to be overloaded by sustained fire. No Mechanicus-approved miracle-box filled with sacred oils, incense, and a priest yelling at the machine spirit until physics surrendered out of embarrassment.
This design was cleaner. Cruder, in some ways, because it had to be built from what the Underhive could provide, but conceptually cleaner.
The shield generated a localized gravitational distortion field around the user, extending roughly two meters outward. The field disrupted external momentum while leaving the protected individual unaffected through internal inertial compensation.
Anything entering the field from outside would encounter a steep gradient in local acceleration. The projectile's momentum would not vanish; it would be redirected, compressed, and bled away through carefully shaped gravitational shear. In theory, the user would stand inside a calm pocket while the world immediately around him tried to fold bullets into useless metal.
Bullets would lose velocity instantly and collapse under extreme gravitational pressure.
Artillery fragments would deform before impact.
A las-bolt would be more complicated. Coherent energy did not behave like a lump of metal, but the field could distort the medium around the beam path, interfere with thermal transfer, and reduce the effective energy density before contact. Not perfect. Not elegant. Still better than trusting prison rags and optimism.
A defense that nullified conventional ballistic weapons.
The blueprint was complete.
Now it just needed to be built.
And Qin Mo had already thought of a hundred different ways to manufacture it using local Imperial materials.
Broken suspensor plates from cargo lifters. Heat sinks stripped from heavy laspacks. Copper stolen from dead vox-lines. Ceramite scraps from shattered armor panels. A control core small enough to hide in a ration tin, provided he could fabricate the focusing lattice without an enginseer noticing and accusing him of techno-heresy before lunch.
The absurdity of it almost made him laugh. In another life, he had struggled with homework. In this one, he was designing personal gravitic defense systems in a penal trench while waiting for an old witch to decide when he should die for the Emperor.
"Perfect."
Satisfied, he closed the journal and let his gaze drift downward toward a puddle at the bottom of the trench.
Technically, it wasn't water. The liquid carried a faint chemical sheen and smelled like burnt metal.
Coolant fluid.
Probably leaked from an overheating lasgun power pack after some idiot ignored maintenance procedures.
A thin rainbow film shifted across its surface whenever the trench trembled. Bits of grit floated in it. Somewhere beneath the mud, a cracked conduit hissed softly, venting warm vapor that made the puddle ripple in tiny rings.
The liquid reflected his face perfectly.
Qin Mo stared at himself for a moment before sighing dramatically.
"Qin Mo, you're a damn genius."
His reflection looked unconvinced. Hollow cheeks. Dirt under one eye. Dried blood near his hairline from Burr's earlier lesson. The suppression collar sat around his throat like an iron accusation. Beneath it, faint metallic lines disappeared into torn cloth and skin.
Genius, yes. Also barefoot-adjacent, underfed, imprisoned, and one artillery shell away from becoming a cautionary stain.
But as he basked in his own brilliance, something flickered in the reflection.
A dark shape.
Small at first.
Rapidly growing larger.
His expression froze.
"What the hell is that?"
His hand moved instinctively toward the puddle.
The moment his fingers brushed the surface, the reflected object shifted violently.
His eyes widened.
It was not inside the puddle.
It was above him.
"BOOM—!"
The world snapped white.
A massive explosion erupted overhead.
Metal shards tore through the trench, ripping apart bodies and ferrocrete alike. The shockwave slammed through the position a fraction of a second before the thunderous roar of the blast rolled across the battlefield.
The air became pressure. The ground kicked upward. Qin Mo felt the crate vanish beneath him, then felt nothing but heat, impact, and the hard taste of metal in his mouth.
For a moment, the trench had no shape. There was only force.
....
Every soldier, laborer, prisoner, and officer in the sector snapped their heads toward the explosion.
The frontline trench had vanished.
For one brief moment, nobody reacted.
Men stared because the mind needed time to accept absence. There had been a firing step there. Sandbags. A line of convicts moving scrap plate. Two ammunition crates. A corporal with a devotional strip tied around his helmet. Now there was smoke, falling mud, and a crater rimmed with burning fragments.
Until the second shell landed, right in the middle of their position.
The detonation was instantaneous.
Ten soldiers who had been eating, resting, speaking, simply existing, disappeared in an explosion of fire, metal, and shredded flesh.
Their bodies did not fall so much as scatter. Lasguns spun through the air. A helmet struck a support beam hard enough to dent it. Someone's ration packet burst open and sprayed white nutrient paste across the inside of a trench wall.
A jagged metal fragment spun through the air before burying itself in the mud beside Burr's boot.
"ARTILLERY!" Burr roared as he threw himself into the trench.
Kalon, standing beside him, did not flinch.
Instead, the old psyker raised his staff and slammed it into the ground.
A purple energy barrier erupted around them, shimmering violently as debris and shockwaves hammered against it.
The barrier was not smooth. It shivered like stretched glass under strain, its surface crawling with violet sparks wherever fragments struck and tumbled away. Burr landed hard behind it, one shoulder slamming into the trench wall. Kalon remained upright, both hands wrapped around his staff, lips moving in a harsh prayer that sounded more like a command than a plea.
The first two shells had only been ranging shots.
Now the real bombardment began.
The sky screamed as dozens, then hundreds, of artillery shells rained downward.
Blinding flashes.
Deafening explosions.
Agonized screams.
The trenches disintegrated beneath the barrage.
The unfinished defenses never had the chance to fail properly. They simply came apart. Scrap plating buckled. Sandbags burst and spilled ash-silt into the air. Razorwire snapped loose and whipped across the mud. A vox-mast folded in half, showering sparks, and the operator beneath it vanished under a sheet of collapsing metal.
The Underhive amplified every blast. Shockwaves rolled along the tunnel walls and came back wrong, overlapping until no one could tell where one explosion ended and another began. Dust fell from high gantries. Rust flakes poured from overhead pipes. Warning sirens began shrieking somewhere deeper in the hive, too late to help anyone.
The PDF soldiers were completely unprepared. Many had not even reached proper cover positions.
Not that it would have mattered. The defenses were unfinished. And now they never would be.
Huddled within Kalon's psychic barrier, Burr could only watch as his men were torn apart.
"How the hell are they shelling us?!" he demanded.
This was supposed to be the rear lines. The PDF assault force had been advancing downward, pushing deeper into the hive. For the Evolution Cultists to be able to hit them here, they must already be positioned behind the main force.
Burr shivered.
Whether they had punched through the front or somehow flanked them, the result was the same.
Half the garrison was dead and the rest were losing the line.
Burr had seen bad positions before. He had ordered retreats through burning corridors and counterattacks into machine-gun nests because some officer above him needed a red line on a hololithic map to stay red for another hour. This was worse. This was a defensive position being erased before the defenders could even understand where the killing was coming from.
"We have to fall back!" Burr shouted. "Use your psyker powers! Signal command! Order a retreat!"
"No." Kalon's voice was cold.
His hollow eyes stared into the thickening smoke beyond the trenches.
Something was moving inside it.
Figures. Dozens at first. Then hundreds.
The enemy was emerging. They weren't just shelling them.
This was a full-scale assault.
Cultist soldiers emerged from the smoke in massive waves, screaming praises to their twisted faith as they charged the shattered defenses.
Many no longer looked fully human.
Some carried crude autoguns fused directly into swollen flesh. Others had pale, stretched skin covered in surgical staples and ritual scars.
One cultist sprinted forward on four elongated limbs while vox-speakers mounted inside its chest blasted distorted chanting across the battlefield.
Another dragged a heavy stubber on chains grown through its shoulders, the weapon jerking with each step as if it were an organ instead of a machine. A third wore half a PDF flak coat over a ribcage opened and reinforced with black iron struts. Its mouth had been sewn shut around a rebreather grille, but laughter still rattled out through the filter.
Behind them came men and women who might once have been hab-workers, manufactorum serfs, gangers, and militia. Now they advanced with the same fevered rhythm, eyes too wide, teeth bared, bodies marked by crude surgical "improvements" and devotional mutilation. Their banners were stitched from skin, tarp, and industrial warning cloth. Symbols of the Evolution Cult had been painted over Imperial markings in old blood and luminous chemical dye.
They were not charging like a disciplined regiment. They were flooding forward like a wound opening.
Burr's blood ran cold.
A retreat now would become a massacre. And in the Underhive, a routed force was as good as dead.
There were too many side passages, too many collapsed service tunnels, too many blind corners where a panicked squad could vanish forever. Once the line broke, the survivors would not withdraw. They would scatter. The cultists would hunt them through the dark until the last laspack went dry.
"That psyker," Burr hissed suddenly. "That prisoner. Find 444. Unlock his collar. Let him take the hit first."
Kalon hesitated.
For the first time since the bombardment began, the old man's expression shifted. Not fear. Not mercy. Calculation, burdened by something almost like regret.
Then slowly nodded.
"It… may be our only option."
The old psyker closed his eyes as his psychic senses spread across the shattered trenches.
The barrier around him dimmed for a heartbeat as his attention stretched outward. Burr saw it and swore, but Kalon ignored him. The sanctioned psyker searched through pain, terror, heat, smoke, and dying thoughts. Minds flared and guttered around him. Soldiers prayed. Convicts begged. Cultists screamed praise. The wounded called for mothers, saints, officers, water, death.
Kalon searched for the absence he had felt before.
Then his expression changed.
He found Qin Mo.
Too late. Qin Mo had taken a direct hit from the bombardment.
He wasn't dead. But his body was riddled with shrapnel.
He lay half-buried in collapsed trench fill beneath a warped sheet of armor plating. One arm was twisted under him. His prison rags had burned away in patches. Jagged metal fragments pierced his shoulder, thigh, ribs, and abdomen. A shard as long as a bayonet jutted from below his collarbone, blackened at the edges where heat had seared the wound shut.
Any ordinary human would have been dead before Kalon found him.
And if anyone nearby possessed thermal optics, they would have witnessed something impossible.
Heat from the explosion flowed into Qin Mo's body instead of dispersing naturally.
The surrounding air cooled in thin, visible streams. Glowing metal dulled where it touched him. Burning cloth went dark without smoke. Thermal energy that should have radiated into the trench bent inward, drawn through skin, blood, and bone as if his body had become a sink for the violence around it.
Burned tissue regenerated.
Embedded metal fragments slowly pushed outward from healing muscle.
The process was not clean. Flesh closed around wounds, rejected foreign matter, and forced shrapnel back along the paths it had carved. A strip of torn skin sealed with a wet twitch. Broken capillaries knitted. Charred muscle regained color beneath layers of grime and ash.
But Qin Mo himself remained half-conscious, his mind still rattled by the blast.
Caught between wakefulness and dreams.
Sound reached him from very far away. Burr shouting. Kalon chanting. Shells landing. Men screaming. Something with too many lungs laughing through a vox-speaker.
His body was repairing itself.
His mind had gone somewhere else.
Qin Mo saw a vision.