Qin Mo drifted through the void.
There was no trench, no smoke, no screaming. No weight around his throat. No body fragile enough to bleed.
Beyond the material universe, beyond the constraints of time, he existed as something vast and formless.
He siphoned energy from dying suns, drawing streams of plasma and stellar debris into his essence. Solar winds bent toward him in luminous ribbons. Oceans of fire peeled away from collapsing stars and vanished into the hunger at his core. He devoured the sentient life that worshiped them, their prayers fading to whispers as they were consumed, and drifted endlessly through the void.
Civilizations rose beneath him like sparks in a furnace. They built temples, screamed hymns into the dark, crowned him with names he did not understand, and died all the same. Their fleets burned. Their worlds cooled. Their gods were silent.
For eternity, this was his existence, until he reached the fringes of a distant galactic sector.
And there, he saw the light.
A blinding radiance tore through reality, warping the fabric of space, collapsing entire star systems into a singularity. It was not fire. Fire obeyed matter. This was a wound forced through creation itself, a detonation born from the Warp and driven into realspace with enough violence to make physics buckle. The sheer force of the warp-born detonation shattered him, crushing his consciousness like brittle glass.
A pain beyond death consumed him.
He screamed, and then, he woke.
....
Tyrone Hive Primus
Qin Mo's eyes snapped open, the vision dissolving into grim reality.
The battlefield surrounded him.
The stench of promethium and cordite hung heavy in the air, mingling with the sickly sweet scent of charred flesh. His ears rang from the bombardment. Dirt filled his mouth. The trench wall beside him had been blown inward, leaving twisted rebar, shattered armor plate, and steaming mud where men had been standing moments before.
The smoke of battle was beginning to thin, revealing the enemy's approaching ranks.
The Genestealers.
Not purestrain Genestealers alone, but their corrupted brood, hybrids, cult soldiers, and surgically altered fanatics of the so-called Evolution Cult. Heretical Tyranid-human hybrids, an unholy fusion of stolen genetics and hive fleet monstrosity.
They came in a swarm, chittering in their corrupted tongue, their twisted, malformed faces barely recognizable as once-human. Their skin stretched too tightly over alien musculature, their extra limbs twitching with hungry anticipation.
Some still wore scraps of PDF uniforms beneath their devotional scars. Others had mining gear welded into their bodies, autoguns clutched in three-fingered hands, or chitinous blades unfolding from sleeves where human arms should have ended. Their eyes shone with the fevered certainty of people who had mistaken infection for salvation.
Behind them, the thunder of armored treads rumbled through the trenches. The cultists had brought tanks.
But Qin Mo barely noticed them.
His hands instinctively searched his pockets. Only to find nothing.
His pockets were gone.
His entire uniform had been shredded by the explosion.
Cold panic cut through the heat and pain. Not fear of the enemy. Not fear of death. Something smaller, sharper, and far more personal.
Lying prone in the trench, he desperately sifted through the debris, pushing aside molten metal shards and ruined ceramite plates. His fingers burned against hot metal. Regenerating skin split again as he dug through ash, mud, and pieces of equipment he refused to identify too closely.
He whispered a silent prayer to the God-Emperor, a plea to the Master of Mankind.
Let me find it. Let me find my journal.
And by some divine providence, he did.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The once-thick tome was obliterated. Only a single, tattered page remained, half of it reduced to scorched cinders.
Qin Mo stared at the fragment in his hand. Ink had bled into black stains. The repaired binding was gone. The thread, wire, and scraps of tape he had used to keep it alive had vanished into ash. Years of memory had become powder on his fingertips.
"No… no… NO!" Qin Mo's grief was absolute.
The words could be rewritten. The knowledge could be preserved.
But the journal itself, the final relic of his past life, was irreplaceable. It had been a gift from his mother when he was seven years old. A fragment of home, a tether to a life long lost.
Now, it was ash.
"Advance! Advance!"
"For the Master of Evolution!"
"For our Savior!"
The heretics' battle cries echoed across the trenches.
The ground trembled beneath the march of tanks.
Qin Mo clenched his fists.
His breath slowed. The noise of battle did not fade, but it lost meaning. For one heartbeat there was only the ruined page, the weight of the collar at his throat, and the knowledge that even here, even in a universe built from cruelty, something small and human had been taken from him.
He carefully rolled the last surviving page into the remains of his trousers, then rose to his feet.
He did not feel fear.
Only rage.
The Genestealers had taken everything from this world. They had stolen the bodies of its people, twisted them into monstrosities, defiled the sanctity of the human form.
Now, they had taken his journal.
They would burn for it.
....
A figure moved toward him.
Kalon. The old psyker strode across the battlefield with unnatural speed, his power warping the air around him.
Incoming lasfire and autogun rounds veered away from him at the last second, deflected by invisible force. His long robes flared with every step, embroidered with warding sigils that pulsed faintly in the dark.
The sanctioned psyker looked smaller amid the wreckage than he had in the trench, but not weaker. His staff struck the ground with measured force. Purple sparks crawled over the Aquila at its head. Every step cost him effort, and every step was taken anyway.
His eyes locked onto Qin Mo, and with a flick of his wrist, something glinted through the smoke.
A key, flying toward him.
"Hurry!" Kalon shouted. "Unlock your psy-dampening collar!"
But he was too late.
Before the key could reach him, the heretics were upon him.
A dozen hybrid soldiers charged at once, screeching in frenzy, their claws and chitin-bladed weapons raised to strike.
Qin Mo looked at them.
And then, the world erupted in flame.
A pillar of fire exploded outward from where Qin Mo stood, incinerating everything within a thirty-meter radius. The Genestealers never had the chance to scream. Their bodies turned to cinders in an instant.
The shockwave pushed smoke flat against the trench walls. Mud flashed into steam. Loose ammunition cooked off in stuttering bursts. The nearest hybrids became silhouettes for less than a second before heat stripped them down to bone, then ash, then nothing.
The psy-dampening collar around his neck, marked with the sigil of Prisoner 444, began to burn. Cracks formed along its surface.
The suppression wards flared one after another, trying to bite into the force rising through him. They failed. Silver pins melted. Hexagrammic etchings glowed red, then white. The collar did not open. It simply endured until endurance became impossible.
Qin Mo floated above the battlefield, two meters off the ground.
His eyes blazed like twin suns. Lightning crawled across his skin, arcing from his fingertips. His body radiated heat, fire licking at his tattered clothes.
The heretics saw him. They opened fire.
Their tanks halted, turret servos whining as they adjusted their aim.
Qin Mo did not move. He did not dodge.
Rounds struck the air around him and slowed as if they had hit invisible sludge. Some flattened into molten discs. Others spun away, their paths bent by forces the gunners could neither see nor understand. Las-beams wavered, shedding heat into the air before they reached his skin.
He raised his hands, one wreathed in fire, the other crackling with lightning.
With a mere thought, he unleashed hell.
Where the flames touched, the enemy was reduced to ash.
Where the lightning struck, bodies exploded, mutant flesh bursting apart as the sheer voltage cooked them from within.
He did not cast like a sanctioned psyker. There were no litanies, no focus gestures, no disciplined channeling through the Warp. The fire moved because he wanted matter to burn. The lightning fell because he demanded charge, path, and discharge, and the battlefield obeyed.
A Leman Russ battle tank attempted to fire.
But its turret warped before the shot could leave the barrel, the metal twisting and screaming as if crushed by an invisible hand. The ammunition stored within was ripped from its housing, yanked into the air, then he struck it with lightning.
The detonation was cataclysmic.
The tank exploded from within, its turret blown skyward, a column of fire spewing into the heavens. Chunks of burning debris rained down, shattering trench walls and crushing screaming cultists beneath twisted metal.
Another tank slewed sideways as its treads fused into one molten mass. A third tried to reverse, only for its engine block to implode with a wet metallic crunch. The cultists around the vehicles kept charging until the pressure wave hit them and scattered their bodies across the mud.
....
From the trenches, Burr watched in horror.
Kalon, beside him, could only stare in shock.
A psyker, still wearing a suppression collar, was ripping apart an entire battlefield with raw, unchecked power.
Even the crude anti-psyker collars used in the Talon System had some effect on Beta Grade psykers.
But prisoner 444 stood defiant, obliterating his enemies as if the collar had never been there. There was no measured restraint, no channeling through sanctioned rituals; it was raw domination.
Burr had spent his life around weapons. He knew the difference between a lasgun, a cannon, and an artillery battery by the sound each made when it killed men. What stood above the trench now did not fit any category he trusted. It looked like a prisoner. It fought like a disaster.
"Fall back!" Burr bellowed.
Kalon hesitated. "We must hold the line!"
"The line is already gone!" Burr roared back. "We need to—"
He never finished his sentence. A deafening blast cut him off. For an instant, Kalon was there. The next, he was gone, reduced to a mist of blood and charred flesh.
A heretic suicide bomber, unnoticed in the chaos, had crept too close. Struck by a stray bolt of 444's lightning, its body had detonated in a chain reaction of explosives.
The blast punched through the trench with brutal efficiency. The psychic barrier Kalon had maintained flickered once and collapsed into violet sparks. His staff spun end over end, struck a sandbag, and disappeared beneath falling debris. The key he had thrown vanished into smoke and mud.
As Kalon's remains scattered across the battlefield, Burr wasted no time.
He ran.
His personal Chimera Armored Carrier was parked nearby.
It sat half-sheltered beneath a slab of reinforced ferrocrete, engine idling, rear ramp spattered with mud and blood. Burr had kept it close because a good officer always knew where his exit was, even when doctrine called that exit a reserve command vehicle.
As he reached it, he wrenched open the hatch.
And froze.
There was someone inside or... something.
At first glance, it resembled a man. But its legs were too long and it was crouched over the pilot's corpse, feeding.
The pilot's hands were still locked around the controls. His throat had been opened from ear to ear, and something pale and jointed had pushed its face into the wound. The creature looked up slowly, mouth glossy with blood, its skull too narrow beneath stretched human skin.
For a single, agonizing moment, their eyes met.
Then, it screamed. "RAAHHH∼!!"
And lunged.
Burr barely had time to react before the nightmare was upon him.
....
And in that moment, as the battlefield descended into total chaos, Qin Mo knew one thing.
He couldn't hold out alone.
Power filled him until every nerve felt like a wire carrying too much current. Rage gave it direction, but rage was not a battle plan. The enemy was still coming through the smoke. The trench line had been gutted. Kalon was dead. Burr was gone. The PDF survivors were scattered in pockets, firing at shapes they could barely see while cultists climbed over the bodies of their own dead.
"The central bunker!" he roared. "Regroup at the bunker!"
His voice was drowned by gunfire and artillery.
A shell struck somewhere behind the line, throwing dust and sparks across the trench. A squad of PDF soldiers broke from cover, saw Qin Mo burning above the field, and hesitated between terror and obedience. Qin Mo pointed toward the half-built bunker with a hand wrapped in lightning.
"The bunker!" he shouted again, forcing the words through the roar. "Move, or die here!"
So he acted. He cut a path through the enemy, rallying the survivors.
He did not waste power on spectacle. Fire swept low across the trench lip to clear charging hybrids. Lightning struck weapons teams, ammunition carriers, and anything carrying explosives. When a cultist heavy stubber opened up from behind a collapsed barricade, Qin Mo folded the gun barrel shut, then sent the weapon spinning back through its crew.
The PDF soldiers followed because the alternative was being overrun. A sergeant with half his face bandaged dragged two stunned troopers to their feet. A vox-operator clutched a sparking handset to his chest and stumbled after them. Convicts, logistics men, wounded riflemen, and terrified overseers all ran in the same direction because rank had ceased to matter more than survival.
Qin Mo moved ahead of them like a living breach charge. Each time the swarm tried to close, flame opened a corridor. Each time the tanks tried to draw a bead on the retreating men, their mechanisms twisted, jammed, or detonated. He could not be everywhere. Men still died. A soldier vanished beneath three hybrids before Qin Mo could turn. A convict carrying an ammunition box tripped, and the blast that followed erased half a squad. Their deaths registered, sharp and immediate, but he forced himself onward. Stopping to grieve would only add more bodies.
Until at last, over two hundred PDF soldiers stood behind him.
And together, they charged toward the half-built bunker.
Their final refuge in the storm of war.