"Where's the psyker?!"
Qin Mo's gaze cut across the battlefield with frightening precision. Smoke, muzzle-flashes, heat shimmer, fleeing shadows, blood on broken ferrocrete, he ignored all of it and searched for the one thing that mattered. The enemy psyker. The hidden mind that had whispered warning into the Hybrid commander's thoughts.
He found nothing.
No lingering psychic resonance. No ripple in the Warp. No oily aftertaste of daemonic influence clinging to the air.
Nothing.
His brow tightened. A psyker had warned the enemy. That much was certain. Qin Mo had felt the shape of that interference, had seen the commander react before any mundane signal could have reached him. But whoever had done it had vanished so cleanly that the battlefield felt almost sterile where they should have left a mark.
That made no sense.
He turned back toward the damaged hab-block. The structure had once housed workers, families, and the usual misery of lower-hive life. Now it was a burned-out defensive nest, its windows punched open for firing slits, its walls scarred by autogun bursts and lasfire. Smoke pooled beneath the ceiling. Dust drifted through shafts of harsh light. The PDF soldiers inside stared at Qin Mo as if they could not decide whether they had been rescued by a saint or doomed by a witch.
They had fought rebels for hours. Some had lost squads, officers, brothers, and names they had not yet had time to mourn. But today they had seen only one psyker.
Him.
"Get out of the open!" A PDF officer rushed down from the second floor, boots skidding on broken masonry. His face was streaked with sweat and soot, one eye bloodshot from a near miss that had split the wall beside him. "We need to hold this position together!"
Qin Mo did not answer.
He stood unshielded in the open, framed by smoke and tracer fire, then adjusted the humming gravity shield pack mounted across his back. The device answered with a low vibration that settled into his bones. Around him, bullets flattened, lost momentum, or dropped into the ash at his feet.
His eyes moved over the defenders.
They were nearly spent. Flak armor scorched. Hands trembling from exhaustion. Las-cells low enough that men kept checking them by instinct, hoping the indicators had somehow lied. Some soldiers were bleeding through field dressings. Others stood only because the wall behind them gave their spines somewhere to lean. Fear had hollowed out their faces, leaving only duty, shock, and the animal need to survive.
Qin Mo understood the problem at once.
They did not need another order to hold. They had been ordered to hold all day. They needed a reason to believe holding still meant something.
His gaze met Grey's.
Grey looked back from among the battered remnants of the 44th Regiment. His face was blackened with smoke, his jaw tight, his eyes still clear despite everything he had seen. After a heartbeat, he nodded.
Without another word, Grey turned to the four remaining soldiers of the 44th. They stepped forward and formed behind Qin Mo, each man spacing himself three meters from the next so their gravity shield fields would not overlap and interfere. The motion was quiet, practiced, and deliberate. It was not fearlessness. It was discipline doing the work fear could not.
"The best defense is a good offense," Qin Mo said. Then he turned toward the next rebel wave.
They were charging through the smoke with banners raised high, shrieking praises to their stolen gods and false saviors. Their weapons were crude but numerous, autoguns, stubbers, scavenged lasguns, trench blades, bayonets welded to pipe. Their faith made them fast. Their numbers made them dangerous.
Qin Mo walked forward.
Grey and the others advanced with him, firing in controlled bursts. Their weapons kicked against their shoulders. Their shields hummed under the impact of incoming rounds. They moved like men crossing a storm because turning back would be worse than walking through it.
Grey still felt doubt crawl up his spine. The gravity shields could stop bullets. They could turn a hail of autogun fire into harmless metal rain. But not every rebel carried a stubber or an autogun.
Then he saw them.
A knot of rebels pushed through the smoke, lasguns lifted, barrels already glowing. Their aim was fixed on Qin Mo. Grey's mouth opened to shout a warning.
He stopped when he realized Qin Mo had already accounted for it. Within a five-hundred-meter radius, certainty quietly died.
The battlefield did not twist into madness. No impossible colors bloomed. No ritual circle opened beneath Qin Mo's boots. The change was colder than that, cleaner and more terrifying. Probability itself shifted under his attention. The expected path of every incoming lasbolt was recalculated, corrected, and denied.
Under Qin Mo's selective reality manipulation, the chance of those shots striking him became mathematically zero.
Lasfire screamed toward him, then veered. Red beams shaved past his coat, struck the ground, sparked from ruined wall sections, or cut useless lines through smoke at angles no trained marksman would have fired. One bolt curved just enough to melt the edge of a rebel's own banner pole. Another punched into a drainage pipe and filled the street with hissing steam.
Qin Mo took ten more steps. Then he raised his staff and slammed its base into the broken ground.
Fire erupted forward in a wide fan, low and hungry, rolling across the street like liquid promethium given purpose. Metal softened. Ammunition cooked off. Cloth, flesh, hair, and bone vanished into the roar.
The nearest rebels did not die dramatically. They simply ceased to be anything that could keep fighting. Men became silhouettes, then ash. Weapons slumped into slag. Screams were swallowed by the blast of heat and the violent rush of displaced air.
From the shattered windows above, PDF soldiers watched an entire wave of rebels disappear in seconds. Awe struck them harder than fear. Men who had been moments from breaking found themselves gripping their weapons tighter.
Qin Mo raised his staff again.
With his other hand, he thumbed the ignition switch of his chainsword. The weapon came alive with a savage, mechanical snarl, its teeth blurring into a hungry line of motion.
"For the Golden Throne!"
His voice carried through gunfire, smoke, and the crackle of burning bodies.
He stood in the middle of the street while bullets died around him and shells burst harmlessly too far away. The air around his body shimmered with distortion, and the golden Aquila mounted atop his staff caught the firelight. For an instant, through smoke and flame, its wings seemed to spread over the defenders like a judgment.
The soldiers inside the hab-block felt something ignite in their chests.
Not comfort. Not safety.
Expectation.
The Emperor watched from the Golden Throne. The dead watched from the floor. The enemy still came. The living had no excuse left.
"For the Emperor," one soldier whispered.
Another voice answered, louder.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!"
The cry spread through the hab-block like a spark through promethium vapor. Exhausted men surged from cover with bayonets fixed, voices raw, faces twisted by fear transformed into fury.
The counterattack began.
....
Qin Mo led the charge with his gravity shield deactivated.
He needed the power elsewhere. Every reserve of strength he possessed was being spent faster than he wanted to admit, and the shield pack's steady draw had become one burden too many. Instead, he trusted his own control and drove forward with the chainsword in hand.
The weapon tore through rebels at close range. Its teeth bit through arms, rifles, crude armor plates, and ribs. Each impact jarred his shoulder. Each burst of blood steamed in the heat surrounding him.
His fearless assault fed the PDF's momentum. Men followed him because he looked untouchable. They fought not merely to survive, but because for the first time in hours survival seemed linked to action rather than waiting to be killed behind a wall.
But in truth, Qin Mo was barely standing.
His body felt like lead poured into human shape. His limbs responded half a beat too slowly. His eyelids dragged downward as if someone had hung weights from them. Even turning his head required conscious effort.
He was exhausted.
Bending battlefield probabilities across hundreds of meters, forcing lasfire to fail, and holding the logic of his own altered reality in place had drained him almost dry. Every second of control demanded attention. Every incoming shot became a problem to solve. Every problem cost him something.
Then he saw the enemy he feared most. Not a hulking aberrant. Not a Purestrain Genestealer rushing through the smoke. Not a tank.
A small, wretched, purple-skinned creature crawled over a mound of corpses with twitching limbs and a hunched back of chitin. Its movements were too quick, too jerky, like a grotesque parody of Gollum given claws and a tyranid spine.
A Neurogaunt.
Or something close enough that the distinction did not matter in the middle of a battlefield. The cult had bred or acquired a living synaptic parasite, a creature shaped to carry interference through the psychic medium like a knife dragged across a signal cable. Against psykers, it was a nightmare.
Warp disruption.
"Chitter∼... Chitter∼..."
The creature scuttled onto the back of a rebel cultist, digging claws into his shoulders. The cultist barely reacted. His eyes were already rolled back, mouth open in devotional ecstasy as the thing rode him like a throne of meat.
Its beady eyes glowed with sickly purple light. It locked onto Qin Mo from a hundred meters away.
Qin Mo felt the moment it tried to act. The creature's focus narrowed. The air between them seemed to tighten. Instinct told him to brace for backlash, for the sudden severing of power, for pain, blindness, collapse, or the psychic equivalent of having a hook ripped through his skull.
He prepared for the worst.
Nothing happened.
The Neurogaunt stared.
Qin Mo stared back.
For a few absurd seconds, the battle around them seemed to recede, not because it stopped, but because both participants in this tiny exchange had discovered that the expected rule had failed.
"…?" the Neurogaunt seemed to say without words.
"…?" Qin Mo replied with his face.
The alien creature's expression shifted. Its bulbous eyes narrowed. Its mandibles clicked faster, not in triumph, but in confusion.
Qin Mo raised his staff.
Lightning exploded from the Aquila's wings and struck the creature dead-center. The blast swallowed the Neurogaunt, its host, and everything within thirty meters. The cultist's body disintegrated mid-scream, and the creature vanished in a flash of purple chitin, steam, and black ash.
....
Qin Mo scanned the battlefield again.
The rebel forces were beginning to collapse. Their commander was gone. Their psychic trick had failed. Their assault had broken against a counterattack they had not expected from men they had nearly crushed.
In the rear, some cultists were already faltering. Others still fought with desperate frenzy, screaming doctrine through broken teeth while PDF bayonets drove them back step by step. A few tried to rally around banners. A few tried to drag weapons teams into new positions. Most were beginning to understand that the momentum had shifted.
Qin Mo decided to break them completely.
He rose into the air.
Energy crackled around him, crawling across his skin and along the haft of his staff. His coat snapped in the heated wind. Every eye that could still see him turned upward.
At the center of the enemy formation, within a fifty-meter radius, the rules of matter quietly changed.
The metal ground softened beneath rebel boots. It did not melt immediately. First it sagged, yielding like wet sponge under weight. Men stumbled, cursed, and sank ankle-deep. Then the surface liquefied and swallowed them to the knees, clamping around legs before hardening in jagged waves.
Armor plating pulsed and flowed. Rivets stretched into threads. Buckles crawled across bodies like insects. The metal veins in cheap augmetics tore free and poured down arms as liquid silver.
Bullets fired at the PDF bent backward. Autogun rounds looped in tight, lethal arcs and punched through the skulls of the men who had fired them. A rebel lifted a bayonet, only for the blade to twist in his hands, coil around his wrist, and drive itself through his own throat.
There was no gore-drenched spectacle beyond what the battlefield already provided. It was worse than spectacle. It was practical, precise, and immediate.
Within seconds, every cultist inside the affected zone was dead.
The survivors saw enough. They broke.
The rout spread in all directions. Rebels threw down weapons, abandoned banners, trampled the wounded, and fled into side streets and smoke-clogged alleys. Their earlier fanaticism curdled into animal terror. Whatever faith had promised them ascension had not prepared them for a man who could make their own rifles execute them.
The PDF did not cheer. Not at first.
Many of them stopped where they stood, bayonets dripping, mouths open, eyes fixed on Qin Mo. Their earlier fervor cooled into something more brittle. They had charged behind him when he looked like a saint. Now they had seen enough to remember that saints and monsters could both save lives.
When Qin Mo descended, the nearest soldiers instinctively stepped back.
Only Grey and the four surviving soldiers of the 44th remained at his side.
Qin Mo landed heavily. His breath came out in a shaky white plume, visible in air that had turned unnaturally cold around him. Heat had gone elsewhere. Energy had been spent. His body was beginning to demand payment.
"…This… isn't the Warp."
His voice was weak enough that only those closest heard it.
No one understood what he meant.
No one knew why he had said it.
Only Qin Mo knew what had just happened. The Neurogaunt's nullifying ability had failed to affect him. Not weakened him. Not disrupted him. Not even irritated him.
Which meant his power might not be psychic in nature.
But if it was not Warp-based…
Then what the hell was it?
The soldiers and officers continued to stare. Some with awe. Some with gratitude. Some with fear sharp enough to become dangerous. Fingers tightened on lasguns without their owners realizing it. One wounded trooper made the sign of the Aquila, then froze halfway through as if unsure whether the gesture was prayer or warding.
"He just saved your damn lives!" Grey snapped, stepping forward with sudden fury. His voice cracked from smoke and shouting, but anger carried it. "You'd all be dead, torn apart by the heretic rebels, just like the rest of the 44th Infantry!"
Shame flickered across several faces. A few men looked down. One officer opened his mouth, found nothing useful to say, and closed it again.
They were grateful. They were also afraid. Both things could be true. In the Imperium, they usually were.
"I need… to rest," Qin Mo muttered.
He took one step, then another. His knees nearly gave out. The staff struck the ground harder than he intended, becoming the only thing keeping him upright.
The fight had drained him completely.
Only stubbornness kept him conscious.
Grey moved first. He rushed to Qin Mo's side and took the chainsword from his hand before the still-spinning teeth could drop into someone's boot. Then he unfastened the gravity shield pack and lifted it away, staggering slightly under its weight.
"He's right," a large PDF soldier muttered at last. He looked embarrassed by how long it had taken him to speak. "He saved us."
The man stepped forward as if to carry Qin Mo outright, but Qin Mo shook his head and handed him the staff instead. Then he leaned against one of the 44th Regiment survivors, using the man's shoulder for support. His fingers trembled despite his efforts to hide it.
The remaining medics hurried over, not quite daring to touch him until Grey barked at them to move. They checked his pulse, his breathing, his pupils, his burns, and the strange absence of wounds where wounds should have been. None of them knew what diagnosis applied to a man who had just rewritten a battlefield and nearly collapsed from it.
The others hurried back inside the hab-block and cleared a room. Broken furniture was kicked aside. Spent power packs and shattered glass were swept into a corner. Someone found a salvageable blanket. Someone else dragged over a crate to serve as a seat.
The battle's fury faded behind them, leaving only smoke, heat, blood, and the terrible quiet that followed survival.
Qin Mo allowed himself to be guided inside. Outside, the PDF held the field. Inside, no one knew whether they had just witnessed deliverance, heresy, or both.