The rebels concentrated their fire on Grey.
Heavy stubber rounds, lasgun beams, solid-shot shells, scavenged autogun bursts, everything they had left was hurled at him in one desperate storm. Muzzle flashes strobed through the smoke. Tracer fire clawed red lines across the ruined ground. Lasfire hissed and snapped in the poisoned air.
None of it reached him.
Kinetic rounds disintegrated before impact, shredded by the gravity shield into clouds of molten fragments and flattened metal dust. Solid shells struck the distortion field and lost all momentum at once, dropping uselessly into the mud around his armored boots. Las-bolts, too fast and too coherent for the grav-shield to fully smother, slammed into the energy plating over his power armor instead, scattering away in bright, harmless arcs that spat sparks across the rubble.
"For the Emperor!"
Qin Mo raised his force staff and chainsword high. Firelight from the burning wreckage outlined his armored silhouette in gold and black as he charged straight into the heart of the mutant horde.
"Engage! For the Emperor!"
A Planetary Defense Force officer vaulted out of the trench after him, mud flying from his boots. His voice was hoarse from smoke and shouting, but it still cracked across the line with enough force to drag men back from fear. "Forward! On them! On them now!"
The brief paralysis caused by Qin Mo's arrival shattered.
The melee resumed with full violence.
The battlefield became a grinding whirl of mud, smoke, sparks, bodies, and the thick stink of scorched flesh. Shell craters steamed. Broken rebar jutted from the ground like rusted spears. Men screamed prayers, orders, and curses while mutants hurled themselves over barricades already slick with blood. It was a perfect environment for Qin Mo, Grey, and anyone else protected by powered armor and gravitic shielding.
Subtle tactics were unnecessary here.
This was not a duel of maneuver. It was a breach action. Advance. Shield forward. Kill anything in front of the line. Keep walking until the enemy broke.
Grey understood that instinctively. The twin-linked lascannon arrays mounted along his armored forearms swept across the battlefield in disciplined arcs, each burst carving through bodies, barricades, and heavy weapon teams with brutal efficiency.
Heretics charged with rusted bayonets, pipe bombs, mining charges, and devotional icons made from bone and scrap metal. It did not matter. The grav-shield stopped the physical threats cold before they could reach him.
Energy weapons were the greater concern. A strong enough las or plasma weapon could slip past what the grav-shield did best. But Qin Mo had accounted for that weakness in the armor's design. Reinforced shield generators embedded around the joints and major plates projected a thin layer of energy plating across the suit's surface, tuned specifically to disperse las-weapon impact with minimal drain.
The real weakness of the armor was not penetration. It was endurance.
In full combat mode, with the grav-shield active, energy plating engaged, weapon systems firing at maximum output, and servos compensating for battlefield movement, the suit could sustain roughly one hour of continuous battle before power reserves became a problem.
The heretics did not know that.
Even if they had, it would not have saved them. In a fight where the numbers were not overwhelmingly stacked against the armored troops, very few enemies survived long enough to see that hour pass.
"Disable energy plating. Divert power to weapon systems. Full firepower."
Grey sprinted to Qin Mo's side, covering his advance while issuing orders to the armor's control system. His voice came through the vox with a hard edge, but there was excitement beneath it, sharp and dangerous.
The moment his HUD confirmed the energy plating had shut down, the weapon systems surged. Capacitors whined. Heat warnings bloomed and were dismissed. The forearm lascannons brightened from controlled fire to sustained execution.
Qin Mo's armor had been designed with fully customizable energy distribution.
Power could be poured into the grav-shield to widen its protective range, shifted into the servos for strength and speed, fed into the energy plating for defense against lasfire, or dumped into the weapons for overwhelming short-term output.
Now Grey's grav-shield overlapped with Qin Mo's, forming a moving bulwark through the enemy line.
Grey focused on infantry. He cut down charging cultists, mutants, and explosives carriers before they could close. Qin Mo reserved his attention for the abominations, burning them out with fire, tearing them apart with invisible force, and crushing the worst of them before their bodies could break the friendly line.
"For the Emperor! For the Emperor!"
Grey kept his gaze locked forward. Helmet optics flared with targeting data. His armor tagged every hostile shape in his field of vision, prioritizing weapons, explosives, heavy mutations, and anything moving too quickly to be human.
The lascannons roared until one cluster of markers vanished. Only then did Grey shift to the next.
Unsurprisingly, the two of them became the center of the enemy's hatred.
Every gun that could see them fired. Every fanatic with a bomb tried to run at them. Every mutant with enough mind left to understand threat turned toward the armored pair cutting a road through the horde.
The grav-shields intercepted solid projectiles with contemptuous ease.
The occasional las-shot that struck Qin Mo or Grey left scorch marks on the armor, nothing more. Whenever that happened, Grey immediately pivoted and saturated the source of fire until the incoming beam stopped forever.
Some heretics dragged heavy multi-lasers into position. Others, half-mad with zealotry and battlefield stimulants, hauled rusted anti-armor guns across the bloodied ground on chains and broken wheels. It made no difference. The moment they fired, they revealed themselves. The moment they revealed themselves, Grey killed them.
"I am the Emperor's wrath!" Grey roared, voice distorted by his helm speakers until it boomed across the battlefield. "Die, you heretical scum!"
He felt unstoppable.
Not brave. Not merely confident. Unstoppable.
The men before him, men who would have terrified him days ago if he had faced them in a trench with only a lasgun and a prayer, now broke against the invisible wall around him like insects against a furnace door. Their bullets fell. Their blades never touched him. Their bombs detonated too far away to matter.
Their screams vanished beneath the roar of his lascannons and the thunder of his armored boots.
....
Qin Mo reduced another mutant to a charred husk, then glanced toward Grey.
He could not see the expression behind the helmet. He did not need to.
He already knew.
It was not just Grey. Every soldier wearing Qin Mo's power armor was experiencing the same intoxicating realization. Men who had spent their lives crouching in trenches, whispering prayers that the next bullet would choose someone else, now stood in the open and carved through enemy ranks like a force of nature.
They had gone from prey to executioners in the span of a few battles. That kind of change was dangerous. Useful, but dangerous.
Grey and the others needed time to adjust. They needed to learn that invulnerability was a system, not a miracle. Systems had limits. Power cells drained. Shields could be overloaded. Armor joints could be struck. Confidence could become stupidity faster than any enemy bullet.
Qin Mo, the creator of the armor, felt no exhilaration.
No pride. No triumph. Only assessment.
Still not enough. Not precise enough. Not efficient enough. Too much waste heat. Too much energy draw. Shield projection overlap could be cleaner. Weapon cycling still produced brief thermal spikes under sustained fire. The joint plating held, but the response lag was unacceptable at full sprint.
His goal had never been one suit of armor, one weapon, or one dramatic victory.
His goal was a principle.
When soldiers entered the battlefield, they should kill the greatest number of enemies in the shortest possible time while suffering the fewest possible losses. Everything else, glory, ceremony, doctrinal purity, noble speeches, was secondary.
Qin Mo split his attention. Most of his mind continued analyzing, refining, and filing away improvements for later. A smaller, colder portion continued killing enemies with mechanical focus.
The last mutant died in flame.
The remaining heretics held for a few more seconds, screaming and firing at shapes they could not stop. Then morale broke. One group turned. Another followed. Within moments the enemy line collapsed into a fleeing mass, cult banners dipping and vanishing into smoke as the survivors abandoned the field.
"The Emperor protects! Victory is ours!"
Grey lifted both arms in triumph. His forearm lascannons still crackled from continuous discharge, barrels glowing dull red beneath heat shimmer.
"Yeah," Qin Mo said flatly. "We won."
He turned away from the retreating enemy and examined the friendly survivors.
Two officers came forward through the mud. Both were bloodied, filthy, and barely standing, but their posture marked them as regimental commanders even before their insignia did. One had a bandage tied around his head beneath a cracked helmet. The other walked with a limp and held his side with one hand.
They stopped at the sight of Qin Mo's Aquila-topped staff and power armor. Whatever uncertainty they felt vanished behind disciplined awe. Noble-born commander, sanctioned warrior, sainted agent of the Throne—it did not matter which explanation they chose. Every version outranked them.
"Honor to you, Lord."
Both officers snapped to attention and formed the Aquila salute. The surviving soldiers followed in a ragged wave, chests heaving, faces pale beneath grime, eyes wide with exhaustion and reverence.
"The Emperor guided me here to reinforce you," Qin Mo said.
He accepted their reverence without hesitation. Not because he believed the lie, but because the lie had tactical value.
For men barely surviving in the Underhive, belief could be ammunition. Faith could hold a line for five more minutes, make a wounded man reload instead of crawl away, make a squad stand together when instinct screamed for flight. If these soldiers believed the Emperor had personally watched over them, they would endure more than fear alone should allow.
And they had no way to disprove it.
After all, what other explanation would they prefer? That six warriors had descended from the smoke in impossible armor and slaughtered the enemy with technology no local forge could explain? That a man with a staff and chainsword had turned the battlefield around because physics had briefly decided to cooperate with him personally?
No, a miracle was cleaner. Safer. Easier to repeat in prayer.
"The Emperor watches over us…" someone whispered.
"Glory to the Emperor!" another soldier shouted, voice breaking. "Glory to the Master of Mankind!"
The cry spread. Men raised weapons, helmets, empty hands. Some looked upward as if the pipe-choked darkness above them were an open sky filled with stars and golden light. Others wept silently, not from joy alone, but from the delayed shock of realizing they were still alive.
Grey watched them, then scratched the side of his helmet with one armored finger. He turned toward Qin Mo.
Qin Mo sensed the look and glanced back. He gave a small shrug. "Desperate times. You understand."
Grey was silent for a moment. Then he gave a slow nod.
"Ahem." Qin Mo cleared his throat, and the scattered cheers faded. Every face turned toward him again.
Reaching into the storage module built into his jump pack, he removed a compact communications device. Its casing was reinforced, its control surface marked with warning glyphs, and faint anti-psyker circuitry glowed beneath the outer plate.
"This is an integrated comms unit with a psyker-suppression function," he said. "Use it to stay in contact with me. If you encounter an enemy psyker, get this as close to them as possible before activating the suppression field."
One officer stepped forward and received the device with both hands, as if Qin Mo had passed him a relic from a shrine. "Your generosity is boundless, my lord. What are your orders?"
"Hold the line."
The officer's expression tightened. "With all due respect, Lord, if we remain here and the heretics attack again while you are elsewhere, we will be doomed."
"Hold the line," Qin Mo repeated. His tone left no room for negotiation.
The officer swallowed whatever argument remained. "Understood."
"I don't expect you to stand here like idiots and get annihilated."
Qin Mo stepped past him and surveyed the battlefield. He chose a relatively intact section of ground near the ruined trench line, where collapsed ferrocrete, scrap metal, and broken support beams formed a usable base. Then he raised his staff.
The air around him shimmered. Dust lifted from the ground in a widening ring. Loose shell fragments rattled against one another. Soldiers stepped back instinctively as the battlefield began to move.
"Watch." With one controlled motion, Qin Mo activated his greatest ability.
Before the stunned soldiers, a fortress grew from the wreckage at impossible speed.
The ground split and rose. Broken plates fused into thickened walls. Ferrocrete flowed like wet clay, hardened, then locked around reinforcing lattices of reworked steel. Hex-steel ribs pushed upward through the mud like the bones of some buried giant. Firing slits opened with surgical precision. Buttresses formed where shell impacts would strike hardest. Narrow galleries shaped themselves behind the walls, already angled for crossfire.
It did not appear from nothing. Qin Mo hated wasteful miracles. He used what was there, scrap, ruin, metal, stone, debris and forced it into a better configuration.
Within minutes, the position was no longer a cratered line of trenches. It was a compact bastion: ugly, functional, and brutally suited to the Underhive.
His mastery over his Power had sharpened again. The effective range of his material manipulation had quadrupled since his first crude efforts, and the construction accelerated accordingly. What had once required long concentration now unfolded with terrifying speed.
The soldiers stared. Some made the Aquila. Others simply forgot to breathe.
"Hold this position," Qin Mo said. "If the situation becomes dire, use the comm unit and call for me. I will arrive within a day. If I do not, continue holding. This ground must not fall, no matter the cost."
He let the words settle, then spoke each final word with deliberate force.
"Hold. The. Line."
The officer who held the comm unit straightened. Exhaustion remained on his face, but fear had hardened into purpose. His hand tightened around the hilt of his chainsword.
"You will hear of this position's fall only when every last man of the 87th and 31st has returned to the Golden Throne."