"So, half of the rebel forces attacking your position just… disappeared?"
"Not half," Grey said. "All of them."
For a few seconds, no one around the fire spoke.
The rooftop of the battered hab-block had become the closest thing to safety anyone in the building possessed. It was not safe in any meaningful sense. The parapet was cracked, one corner of the roof had slumped inward from shell damage, and every few minutes dust sifted down from the broken antenna masts overhead. But it was high, defensible, and far enough from the lower floors that the survivors could pretend the war had loosened its grip.
They huddled around a small fire built inside a dented ration crate, feeding it broken chair legs, splintered plastek paneling, and strips of promethium-soaked cloth. The flames were low and ugly, more smoke than warmth, but the soldiers leaned toward them anyway. Their faces emerged and vanished in the flicker: hollow cheeks, split lips, eyes reddened by exhaustion and powder burn.
Spent lasgun power packs lay in neat rows near the crate, angled toward the heat. It was an old Underhive trick, unreliable and dangerous, but desperation had refined many techniques the Munitorum would never approve. A few packs blinked faint green as their charge indicators struggled back to life. Others remained dark, their machine spirits silent or simply dead.
The air tasted of soot, sweat, blood, burnt insulation, and the sour chemical tang of a hab-block whose ventilation had failed days ago. Below them, somewhere inside the maze of stairwells and collapsed floors, wounded men groaned in their sleep. Farther away, gunfire still rolled through the Underhive in uneven waves. The war had not ended. It had only moved its teeth elsewhere for the moment.
Grey recounted how he and Qin Mo had reached the hab-block, how the 44th had been broken, how the enemy had pressed them, and how the impossible had happened. He spoke carefully. He described the fire and lightning. He described the cultists dying. He described the tanks being crushed or turned aside.
He did not mention the gravity shield. He did not explain how Qin Mo had survived what should have killed any ordinary man. Most importantly, he did not say that Qin Mo had once been Prisoner No. 444, an unsanctioned psyker wearing a suppression collar.
The other survivors of the 44th understood without being told. Their silence was not loyalty. Not yet. It was not even trust. It was the grim arithmetic of men who had watched command collapse, watched officers die, and watched a condemned prisoner keep them alive when doctrine and rank had all failed to arrive on time.
Qin Mo was useful.
In the Imperium, that was often the closest thing a man could get to mercy.
As far as anyone outside the 44th knew, Prisoner No. 444 had died with the rest of the penal laborers during the bombardment. If the rebels were crushed, records could be adjusted. A corpse could be invented. A line could be added to a casualty roll no clerk would ever read. Qin Mo could vanish into the Underhive, where even the Administratum's reach grew thin and tired.
And if the rebels were not crushed, then every man on that rooftop would be dead before any report mattered.
A figure stepped closer to the fire. He was an officer of the 47th Infantry Regiment, though his uniform had suffered enough abuse that only posture, insignia, and habit preserved the distinction. His coat was frayed at the cuffs and stiff with grime. One silver epaulette had been blackened by smoke, and the pauldron beneath it bore a deep dent from a glancing shell fragment. Even so, he moved with the rigid discipline of a lifelong soldier who had survived too much to let exhaustion bend his spine in front of his men.
He removed his cap. The gesture was simple, but the men around him straightened as if a command had been given.
"As the commander of the 47th, I salute you. I grieve for the loss of your comrades."
A silence followed. No one had ordered it. That made it heavier.
Every soldier present bowed his head. Some did it quickly, like men afraid grief might catch up if they lingered. Others held the posture with clenched jaws and eyes shut tight. The fire cracked and spat between them. In the distance, a heavy bolter began barking again, each deep report echoing through the hive's metal bones. Lasguns answered in thinner, sharper cracks. Even mourning had to share space with war.
Three minutes passed before the commander lifted his head. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. More careful.
"That psyker…" He hesitated, then gave a tired grimace. "Forgive me. I struggle to find a more respectful title. Has he been trained and sanctioned by the Imperium?"
"Of course," Grey answered without hesitation. "Otherwise, how do you think he got the Aquila emblem on his staff?"
The lie came out cleanly. Too cleanly. Grey felt several of the 44th glance toward him, but none contradicted him.
The commander exhaled slowly. Some of the tension left his shoulders. Not all of it. No soldier who had served in the Underhive let go of suspicion completely. But relief crossed his weathered face, and for the first time that night he looked less like a man preparing to give an execution order.
"That's good to hear. An unsanctioned psyker…" He shook his head once. "We both know what would happen if he lost control."
The words were spoken quietly, almost as a passing remark. Grey still felt them slide under his skin like a knife.
A memory rose before he could stop it.
He had been eight standard years old when a psyker in the Lower Hive lost control.
It had begun with grief. That was what the survivors said afterward. The man had killed his own wife and daughter by accident, a burst of raw psychic force tearing through their hab-cell so completely that the bodies did not remain long enough to fall. He had collapsed beside the empty place where they had been and screamed.
The sound traveled through bulkheads, ventilation shafts, and kilometers of rusted corridors. People blocks away heard it in their teeth. Lights burst. Pipes split. Machine spirits shrieked warnings through vox-grilles until their speakers melted.
Then reality around the sector began to twist.
Not in the dramatic way priests described during sermons about witchcraft, but in practical, physical horrors men could touch and die from. Steel softened and bent without heat. Doors sealed themselves around people trying to flee. Gravity shifted sideways in one transit hall, throwing hundreds against the wall hard enough to pulp them. Men in armor were pressed flat against the floor by invisible weight. Others were lifted, broken, and left hanging from the ceiling like meat on hooks.
By the time the screaming stopped, eighty thousand men and women were dead, along with an entire forward division of the Planetary Defense Force.
Some had been fused into walls, their faces still visible beneath rippled metal. Others remained only as blackened silhouettes burned into ferrocrete. Entire hab-stacks had collapsed as if their support columns had become ash. An Arbites precinct-fortress, built to withstand riots and siege charges, had been reduced to slag and cracked foundation pillars.
That single catastrophe had shattered the PDF's strength in the lower districts and given the rebels space to grow.
And Qin Mo…
Grey had seen Qin Mo's power with his own eyes. He had watched fire obey him, watched artillery fail above him, watched metal bend as if the world itself had decided his anger mattered.
If Qin Mo ever lost control, Grey did not know whether there would be enough of the Underhive left to record the disaster.
He clenched his fists and forced the thought down. Fear was useful only if it made a man act. Staring into it too long only froze the hands.
"You know," the commander said, studying Grey over the fire, "he doesn't seem the type to break. His emotions are unnaturally stable. Did he ever show signs of… instability?"
"Never," Grey admitted. That, at least, required no lie. "Even in the middle of battle, he was calmer than most officers I've served under."
A few soldiers of the 44th shifted at that. It was true, and because it was true, it sounded dangerous.
"What's his name?"
Grey hesitated. Not long enough to seem suspicious. Long enough to decide how much of a truth could be safely given.
"A strange name. Qin Mo."
The commander's brow furrowed. The firelight caught in the creases around his eyes.
"That sounds familiar…" He looked into the flames, searching some old family story rather than official doctrine. "My grandfather once told me of an angel named Qin Xia. He fought alongside one of my ancestors during the assault on the Kalium Gate. Later, he perished aboard the Lance of Heaven, his soul returning to the Golden Throne."
One of the 47th's soldiers lifted his head. "Sir, I remember reading about that in an old chronicle. Wasn't the angel part of the White… something Chapter?"
"No," the commander said firmly. "My grandfather was clear. It wasn't a Chapter."
He paused, then looked around the circle.
"It was a Legion."
The word settled over them with a different weight.
"A Legion?" one soldier muttered. He tried to laugh and failed. "That would mean… what? Thousands of years ago?"
"Thousands?" The commander gave a quiet, humorless chuckle. "Try tens of thousands."
The men of the 47th drew closer despite themselves. The old war tale gave them something safer to fear than the present. They argued softly over names, dates, and half-remembered legends passed down through families, barracks, and chapel sermons. Some sounded skeptical. Others wanted to believe. In the Imperium, history and myth often wore the same uniform.
The survivors of the 44th did not join in.
Their thoughts remained on Qin Mo. On what he had done. On what he might do next.
Grey wanted to check on him. The urge kept returning, sharp and practical. Qin Mo had pushed himself too far. Qin Mo had been wounded. Qin Mo had dreamed and muttered things no one understood after the battle. But Grey also knew better than to disturb a man like that while he slept. Rest might be the only thing keeping Qin Mo human enough to speak to.
So Grey stayed by the fire and watched the flames crawl over broken wood. In their shifting light, the line between survival and annihilation looked very thin indeed.
....
Inside a room on the hab-block's uppermost floor, Qin Mo slept on a mattress made from scavenged blankets, torn insulation, and a door pulled from its hinges.
Sleep did not bring peace. He dreamed of the void.
He drifted between stars without armor, breath, or body. Distance meant nothing. Suns turned beneath him like coins in a black sea. Planets circled in patient silence. He reached out and felt their mass, their heat, their fragile crusts, their oceans, their atmospheres. With a thought, he could tilt their axes, pull tides across continents, crack moons open, or nudge asteroids into paths that would end civilizations.
He dreamed of shaping worlds as if they were clay.
Impossible dreams.
Worse, familiar dreams. They had followed him long before he had awakened in this cursed universe. Back then, they had been strange images dismissed after waking. Now they felt less like imagination and more like memories belonging to something too large to fit inside a human skull.
Then the dream shifted.
The void peeled away. Qin Mo opened his eyes and found himself in a vast gilded chamber.
Marble columns rose into darkness far above him, too tall for any practical building. Gold leaf covered the vaulted ceiling in layered frescoes: armies marching under unfamiliar banners, fleets burning over worlds he did not recognize, crowned figures kneeling before shapes that had been deliberately scratched away. Incense hung in the air, thick and sweet, but beneath it lingered the cold mineral smell of ancient stone.
The bed beneath him was impossibly soft. Too soft. The kind of comfort that made a prison mattress seem more honest.
A quiet sob drew his attention.
In the far corner of the chamber sat a girl, weeping into her hands. She looked small at first, thin shoulders shaking beneath a dress of pale silk. Then her outline slipped. Fur rippled over her skin and she became a cat with human eyes. The cat stretched into an old man with shaking hands. The old man folded inward, metal plates sliding across bone until he resembled a battle tank in miniature. A heartbeat later, the tank became a lumber saw, its teeth rotating silently, then a girl again.
"Shapeshifter…"
The girl lifted her head.
Her eyes were wrong, not because they were monstrous, but because they carried too much memory. Anger burned there, old and focused, sharpened by grief that had survived longer than nations.
Qin Mo frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"I… I don't know." She clutched at herself as her fingers became claws, then wheels, then fingers again. Panic fought with fury across her shifting face. "I've forgotten so much… but I know one thing."
Her voice hardened.
"I must call you a traitor."
Her body snapped into the shape of a nobleman in robes lined with the sigils of an empire Qin Mo did not know. The movement was too fast to follow. One instant she was in the corner. The next, hands closed around his throat.
"You devoured my friend."
The nobleman's face twisted, becoming a child's, then an old soldier's, then something made of polished metal and starlight.
"Give them back!"
....
Qin Mo jolted upright, sucking in air so violently his throat hurt.
For one disoriented second, the chamber remained overlaid on reality. Gold columns became cracked hab-walls. Incense became smoke. Silk sheets became a dirty blanket beneath his clenched fingers.
Then the room steadied around him.
He was still in the hab-block. Still in the Underhive. Still alive.
Cold sweat clung to his skin. His hands trembled, and he could not immediately tell whether the shaking came from fear, exhaustion, or the lingering drain of powers he still did not understand.
"Damn it…" He pressed the heel of one hand against his brow and forced himself to breathe evenly. "I must be more exhausted than I thought."
The explanation sounded reasonable. That did not make it convincing.
Something from the dream clung to him: not an image, not a phrase, but the feeling of being recognized by something that hated him personally.
A memory tugged at him. Qin Mo rose from the mattress and crossed the room to retrieve his staff from where it leaned in the corner. The Aquila at its head reflected the weak lumen glow from the hallway, noble and accusatory.
With a precise thread of power, he softened the metal beneath the emblem. The heat was narrow, controlled, barely more than a whisper compared to what he had unleashed in battle. Even so, pain throbbed behind his eyes as the hidden compartment opened.
Inside lay a folded parchment.
The last surviving page of his journal.
He had hidden it in the staff after the battle, sealed beneath Imperial iconography because no one in this universe questioned a holy symbol unless they wanted a priest, commissar, or firing squad involved. He had not kept the page only for sentiment. Deep down, beneath all his sarcasm and forced calm, he believed that one day science, sorcery, or whatever strange power had lodged itself inside him might allow him to reconstruct the rest.
Names. Memories. The shape of home.
He unfolded the page just enough to confirm it was intact. Charred edges. Stained ink. A few surviving lines in his own handwriting. Fragile proof that Qin Mo had existed before Prisoner No. 444, before the Underhive, before this universe had wrapped chains around him and called it order.
He concealed it again and sealed the Aquila back into place. The metal cooled beneath his fingers. The ache behind his eyes sharpened.
Even minor exertion carried a price after too many days without proper rest.
The door swung open.
A soldier stepped inside and stiffened into a crisp Aquila salute. He was young, soot-streaked, and visibly nervous about standing alone in a room with the man who had burned an army.
"Sir, the commander requests your presence at a meeting."
Qin Mo arched a brow. "A meeting?"
The soldier swallowed. "Yes, sir. The surviving officers are gathering downstairs. They said your presence is required."
Qin Mo looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. The trooper's eyes flicked toward the staff, then away. Not fear alone. Reverence, maybe. Or the terrified cousin of reverence that passed for piety in the Imperium.
"And if I'm not willing to go?" Qin Mo asked.
"Uh…" The soldier's posture tightened. "I… don't think anyone has a plan for that, sir."
For the first time since waking, Qin Mo smiled. It came out tired, but real.
"Fine, fine. I get it." He took up the staff and followed the soldier into the corridor.
The upper floors of the hab-block had been turned into a temporary refuge. Wounded soldiers lay against walls, wrapped in stained bandages. A woman from the 47th cleaned her lasgun with hands that would not stop shaking. Two men carried a corpse past them on a door panel, boots scraping over broken tile. Someone had chalked arrows on the walls to mark stable stairwells and firing positions. Someone else had scratched a prayer beneath one arrow, then crossed it out after the wall cracked.
Every trooper Qin Mo passed stepped aside.
Some lowered their heads. Others made the Aquila. A few simply stared until a comrade elbowed them back to sense. None spat at him. None recoiled in disgust. None reached for a weapon because an unsanctioned psyker prisoner had walked too close.
Grey had kept his secret.
The 44th had kept it with him.
If the others had known the truth, they would not have treated Qin Mo like a savior, officer, or battlefield miracle. They would have seen a witch in borrowed symbols and asked how quickly he could be chained, shot, or reported.
So the gravity shields had not been for nothing.
Qin Mo allowed himself a small, private smile. It lasted only a moment. Beneath the calm expression, the question from the dream remained, patient and sharp.
Who, or what, had reached into his sleep?