After Grey and the other soldier left to scout ahead, the remaining troops split their attention between two forms of survival. A few continued to watch Qin Mo work with the wary fascination men usually reserved for unexploded ordnance. The rest moved back across the battlefield, kicking through ash, bodies, broken weapons, and half-buried equipment for anything that might keep them alive another hour.
Their first sweep had been too shallow. No one blamed them for it. They had been deafened, starving, exhausted, and still waiting for the next thing to leap out of the smoke. But now that the immediate killing had stopped, the battlefield began to surrender what panic had hidden. Ammunition packs lay beneath collapsed barricades. Functional bayonets jutted from mud. Power cells glimmered under bodies. More valuable finds waited beneath wreckage, corpses, and drifts of spent shell casings.
One such find was the power armor worn by Captain Burr's bodyguards.
At first glance, the suits had looked less like armor and more like scrap dragged from a manufactorum grinder. Twisted ceramite plates, scorched reinforcement ribs, ruptured actuator bundles, and dangling fiber-cables gave the remains the shape of men only by accident. The decorative edging and embossed heraldry had been bent into jagged metal petals. Heat had blackened the paint. Blood had cooked into the joints. It was easy to understand why the soldiers had passed over them before. Nothing about the wreckage suggested it could ever protect a human body again.
Two soldiers hauled the least-ruined suit toward Qin Mo by the shoulders and hips, their boots scraping through mud as broken ceramite clanked against rubble. One of them was breathing hard by the time they dropped it at his feet.
"Captain Burr is still missing," the soldier reported, wiping sweat and soot from his face with the back of his glove. "But all of his guards are dead. This was the only suit that looked like it still had enough pieces attached to call it armor."
Another trooper glanced toward the smoke-choked battlefield. "Should we look for Burr?"
Qin Mo shook his head and patted the chainsword strapped to his waist. Dried blood clung between the weapon's teeth, and the old grime Burr had never fully cleaned from the housing still marked the casing. "No need. I have his weapon. If he isn't dead, he's doing an excellent job pretending to be one. More likely he's another shredded corpse out there, and only the Emperor knows which pile he landed in."
No one argued. Burr had been feared, obeyed, and hated in roughly equal measure. In the Imperium, that was often enough to qualify a man as a competent officer. It was not enough to make exhausted survivors waste daylight searching for him.
Qin Mo crouched beside the ruined armor. The moment his eyes settled on it, the world narrowed.
Lines of function unfolded in his mind. Plate geometry. Joint tolerances. Power-routing paths. Servo placement. Weight distribution. The thickness and composition of the chest protection. The way ornamental reinforcement had been added where actual battlefield reinforcement should have gone. The suit's machine logic was crude, stubborn, and proud in the way Imperial wargear often was, but its secrets were not secrets to him.
Rikarn-1 pattern power armor. One of the few notable exports of the Talon Sector, aside from raw population, prison labor, and psy-suppression collars.
Handcrafted by the artisan clans of the hive spires, the suit was expensive enough to bankrupt a minor noble house and flawed enough to prove that price and battlefield value were not always related. It had been made for wealthy human officers, elite guards, and bodyguards who needed to look invincible in front of people too poor to know better. The armor had real strength, real servos, and real protective value, but every elegant curve and engraved flourish cost weight, maintenance time, and combat efficiency.
It was still power armor.
That mattered.
"Can you replicate it?" one of the soldiers asked.
He tried to sound casual. He failed. Every nearby trooper had already gone quiet, eyes fixed on Qin Mo. Even damaged, even inferior, even made for spire-born vanity, a working suit of power armor was the difference between a man and a walking bunker.
Qin Mo did not answer immediately. His attention remained on the armor, but not because the mechanism challenged him.
The so-called secret craftsmanship was laughably simple. He could replicate it. He could improve it. He could strip away the useless decorations, strengthen the load-bearing frame, simplify the actuator housings, reduce maintenance dependency, and build something far better suited to soldiers who had to fight in mud, corridors, and collapsing hab-blocks instead of parade grounds.
But the suit's design was not what held his attention.
The damage was.
The armor had not been opened by bullets, lasfire, or shrapnel. There were no neat penetrations from heavy weapons. No molten channels from sustained lasburn. No blast pattern from a shaped charge. The plates had been peeled apart. Punctured. Clawed open with a strength that should not have belonged to anything the PDF had been trained to fight.
The chest plate was the clearest evidence. It should have protected the heart behind twenty millimeters of reinforced alloy and ceramite laminate. Instead, it had been shredded inward, the metal curled like torn parchment around a hole wide enough for both hands.
Only one thing on this battlefield could do that.
A purestrain Genestealer had been here.
Qin Mo's mouth went dry.
Hybrid cultists were dangerous. Aberrants were worse. Armed insurgents with tanks, artillery, and stolen PDF equipment were already enough to turn an understrength regiment into meat. But a purestrain was something else entirely: fast, low to the ground, silent when it wanted to be, strong enough to carve through armor, and vicious with the instincts of a creature bred for ambush and slaughter.
Shredding human power armor was one thing. A purestrain Genestealer could threaten even Terminator plate if it got close enough, and Terminator armor was holy, ancient, and thick enough to make ordinary men mistake its wearer for a walking shrine.
They were not just fighting rebels. They were fighting a Genestealer Cult with mature brood assets.
Qin Mo exhaled sharply and stood. His expression must have changed, because the soldiers straightened before he spoke.
"Listen carefully," he said. "If you see an enemy crawling on all fours, moving too fast, or charging without a visible weapon, you activate your gravity shields immediately and call for me. Don't try to be brave. Don't try to get a clean shot first. Shield, shout, survive. In that order."
The soldiers exchanged uneasy glances. A few looked down at the gravity shield devices as if realizing for the first time that Qin Mo had not built them merely to stop bullets.
"How close is too close?" one trooper asked.
"If you can ask that question, it is already too close," Qin Mo replied. "Purestrains do not fight like men. They do not posture, suppress, or hesitate. They cross open ground faster than your fear can explain it. If one reaches you, armor will not save you. Distance might. The shield might. I definitely will, if you warn me in time."
That last sentence steadied them more than the warning frightened them. None of them fully understood what had made Qin Mo shift from discussing power armor to enemy behavior, but they had seen enough of his abilities to accept that when he spoke with that tone, the universe had already become more dangerous than they realized.
"Understood," the nearest soldier said.
The others nodded. Not eagerly, but with the grim obedience of men who had learned that survival sometimes meant listening before pride could get them killed.
Qin Mo looked down at the ruined suit again. "I can replicate this armor. I can make something better than this armor. But this wreckage is beyond repair, and I'll need raw material, power systems, and time."
It was not just about armor.
In his mind, the decision had already been made. He would arm this squad to the teeth. Cost, elegance, and standard Imperial procurement logic could go to hell.
The PDF were barely a step above civilians in combat effectiveness, not because they lacked courage, but because courage without equipment merely determined how loudly a man died. Reinforcements were unlikely. Command structure had collapsed. Enemy numbers were obscene. Survival would depend on superior equipment, rapid adaptation, and refusing to fight the war according to whatever rulebook had gotten the 44th Regiment massacred.
He intended to provide what the Imperium had failed to.
"Found friendlies!" Grey's voice cut through the haze.
The young trooper sprinted toward them from the direction of the scout route, one hand raised so no nervous ally shot him by reflex. Smoke and dust turned his silhouette into a ghost until he broke through the drifting curtain of ash. His face was flushed, his breath ragged, but his eyes were clear.
Qin Mo slung his gravity shield over his back and moved without hesitation.
"How many?" he asked.
"Hard to tell," Grey said, falling into step beside him. "A lot more than us. They're pinned inside a hab-block about a kilometer north. Rebels have armor."
"Then we run," Qin Mo said.
No one wasted breath questioning him.
....
One kilometer north of the 44th Regiment's last known position, the war had not paused to let anyone understand it.
A local PDF force had dug into a ten-story hab-block and turned it into an ugly fortress. The building had once housed manufactorum shift workers, their families, and whatever passed for domestic life in the lower hive. Now its lower floors were choked with barricades, ammunition crates, overturned furniture, sandbags, broken doors, and bodies dragged aside only far enough to clear firing lanes.
Most of the defenders held the front and rear entrances. Others fired from shattered windows above, their muzzle flashes blinking through smoke like angry insects. Las-beams stitched red lines into the dusk. Autogun fire rattled from room to room. Every few seconds, dust shook loose from the ceiling as something heavy struck the outer walls.
According to their scouts, the rebels numbered over twenty thousand. Twenty times the defenders' strength.
Had most of the enemy force not abruptly and inexplicably pulled back earlier, the assault might have been three or four times larger. No one inside the hab-block knew why the withdrawal had happened, and none of them had enough ammunition to be grateful for long.
What unnerved them most was not the numbers. It was the shape of the enemy.
Among the insurgents marched grotesque humanoids that wore stolen uniforms over bodies that no longer fit them. Chitinous limbs punched through sleeves. Eyeless faces turned toward muzzle flashes with insectile certainty. Mouths full of fangs opened around human battle cries. Some had too many arms. Others had too much muscle packed under stretched skin, their bones bent by generations of polluted inheritance.
And yet they were not mindless.
Their infantry advanced with discipline. They used tanks as mobile cover, spread by squad, shifted when fire lanes changed, and closed distance with the patience of soldiers who had drilled the assault more than once. Every ten meters, the tanks halted. Turrets rotated. Cannons roared. Shells slammed into the hab-block with enough force to make entire floors jump.
Some rounds ricocheted from reinforced sections of wall. Others found windows, weak corners, or old structural wounds and blew rooms apart in bursts of pulverized ferrocrete, furniture, and men.
The enemy armor closed to seventy meters from the front entrance.
Then the shelling changed.
No longer aimed at windows or suppressive positions, the cannons began hammering the main doors.
The first-floor defenders huddled behind reinforced barricades, pinned under the concussive impacts. The cover protected them from most of the shrapnel, but not from the force of the blasts. Shockwaves hit through their ribs, rattled teeth, blurred vision, and made fingers spasm around triggers. Return fire faltered. Orders became coughing. Prayers became instinct.
....
Through the smoke, a Neophyte Hybrid rose from a tank's cupola. His swollen purple head turned on a corded neck, and the glyphs of the Cult of the Four-Armed Emperor gleamed across his carapace in acidic ichor. Beneath the markings, fragments of PDF command insignia had been nailed into his armor as trophies.
"Advance, blessed kin!" he screeched. Bile threaded from his distended jaws and spattered across the turret. "The Four-Armed Emperor hungers!"
At his order, the infantry broke from cover and surged toward the entrance.
The Hybrid commander dropped back inside the turret, shoving aside a gunner with one clawed hand so he could take the main weapon himself. Through the targeting optics, he watched his troops reach the shattered ground-floor barricades. For three glorious seconds, they seemed unstoppable. Then the defenders answered with concentrated autogun fire from behind the last interior wall.
Hybrids and cult soldiers came apart in the doorway. Bodies jerked, spun, collapsed, and were trampled by those behind them.
The commander's lips curled. He did not grieve. Brood deaths were offerings. Failed assaults were information.
He adjusted the cannon by a fraction.
The next shell struck exactly where the defenders had revealed themselves.
The blast annihilated the barricade. Men, sandbags, rebar, and ammunition crates vanished in a roar that shook the hab-block's foundations. Fire belched out of the doorway and then rolled back inward, dragging screams with it.
"For the Cult!" the Hybrid howled. "For Evolution!"
He began to load the next shot when a voice brushed the inside of his skull.
〈A psyker and five others have entered the battle. Your rear guard failed to stop them. They have already breached the building.〉
The Magus.
The Hybrid commander's sneer disappeared at once.
Before the assault, the command structure had been made clear. He was free to lead from the front, kill personally, and spend the faithful as required, but the moment the Magus contacted him directly, he was to withdraw. The brood did not waste valuable minds on pride.
"I will fall back at once," he acknowledged.
He struck the driver's shoulder with the flat of his claw. "Reverse. Now."
The tank lurched backward. Its engine growled as the driver threw it into retreat. Around them, infantry continued advancing, either unaware of the order or too consumed by devotion to care.
The Hybrid kept his targeting optics fixed on the entrance, one finger resting on the firing trigger. He would withdraw, as commanded. He would also kill the psyker if the creature was foolish enough to show itself.
Then he saw them.
Six figures emerged from the wreckage of the ground-floor barricades and sprinted into the open. They were too few to be an assault force and too deliberate to be refugees. At their head ran a man with a chainsword in his right hand and a staff in his left. His posture was not that of a soldier following orders. It was the posture of someone moving toward the center of the problem because he had decided the problem belonged to him.
A psyker.
"Die!"
The Hybrid fired. The cannon shell screamed toward the six figures.
Qin Mo raised his staff.
He did not chant. He did not bargain with the Warp. He simply reached into the shell's motion and changed what motion meant. Its velocity bled away in an instant. The projectile froze in midair, hanging above the broken street with its casing still spinning faintly, smoke curling from its nose.
For half a heartbeat, everyone saw it.
Then the shell reversed direction.
It flew straight back into the tank's barrel.
The detonation happened inside the gun.
The cannon split open. The breech erupted. Pressure tore through the fighting compartment and turned the crew into wet fragments before the sound had finished expanding. The driver died with both hands locked on the controls. The loader vanished beneath a burst of shrapnel. The gunner's station folded inward like paper crushed in a fist.
The Hybrid commander survived only because a psychic barrier flared around him at the last possible instant. Purple light cracked across the interior of the tank, absorbing the worst of the blast before collapsing into sparks.
When the smoke cleared, he was the only living thing left inside.
Him, and the ammunition racks.
Qin Mo kept running. His eyes swept the battlefield, searching for the hidden psyker.
"There's a psyker among them," he said, more to himself than to the squad.
Grey heard him anyway. "Where?"
"Close enough to be annoying."
Qin Mo activated his gravity shield and stepped toward the crippled tank. Incoming autogun rounds bent away from the distortion field or flattened into warped metal discs before falling at his feet. He extended one hand toward the ruined vehicle.
The air trembled.
The tank groaned. Armor plates buckled inward. Track assemblies snapped. The turret sank as if an invisible weight had pressed down from above. Rivets popped free in metallic bursts. Internal supports folded. The ammunition racks compressed before they could cook off, explosives crushed into useless paste by force applied too evenly for fire to catch properly.
Then the entire armored vehicle collapsed inward.
With a final, horrific crunch, the tank flattened into a perfectly smooth slab of metal.