Qin Mo's lips curled into a faint smile as he stared at Kalon.
"Unlock a psyker's collar?" he mused. "Are you sure about that?"
He wasn't mocking the old man.
He was genuinely asking.
Psykers were dangerous abominations.
Not because of ignorant superstition, but because the danger was real, measurable, and horrifyingly consistent.
They were walking catastrophes, living breaches between reality and the Warp, ticking bombs wrapped in flesh and nerves.
The Imperium feared them for good reason.
An untrained psyker losing control could annihilate an entire defensive position in seconds.
But raw destruction was never the true horror.
The real threat lurked beyond reality.
And a desperate psyker trapped in a battlefield filled with death, fear, and Warp-tainted cultists was exactly the kind of situation that ended with this horror scenario.
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, a flicker of temptation, or a moment of weakness could turn them into puppets of Chaos, vessels through which the nightmares of the Immaterium spilled into realspace.
To remove a suppression collar?
That was suicide.
And yet, Kalon said it so casually.
"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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bullets would lose velocity instantly and collapse under extreme gravitational pressure.
Artillery fragments would deform before impact.
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.
"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.
The liquid reflected his face perfectly.
Qin Mo stared at himself for a moment before sighing dramatically.
"Qin Mo, you're a damn genius."
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∼!"
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.
....
Every soldier, laborer, prisoner, and officer in the sector snapped their heads towards the explosion.
The frontline trench had vanished.
For one brief moment, nobody reacted.
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.
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 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 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.
"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.
Burr's blood ran cold.
A retreat now would become a massacre.
And in the Underhive, a routed force was as good as dead.
"That psyker," Burr hissed suddenly. "That prisoner. Find Qin Mo. Unlock his collar. Let him take the hit first."
Kalon hesitated.
Then slowly nodded.
"It… may be our only option."
The old psyker closed his eyes as his psychic senses spread across the shattered trenches.
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.
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.
Burned tissue regenerated.
Embedded metal fragments slowly pushed outward from healing muscle.
But Qin Mo himself remained half-conscious, his mind still rattled by the blast.
Caught between wakefulness and dreams.
Qin Mo saw a vision.