Qin Mo did not participate in the battle.
Not even once.
He stood beneath the broken glow of the underhive ruins, still as a statue of blackened steel, the faint thrum of his armor's servo-motors barely stirring the dust around his boots. Firelight pulsed across the shattered street ahead of him. Smoke dragged itself along the ground in dirty layers. Somewhere beyond the rubble, men screamed, weapons roared, and the last discipline of the heretic line came apart under concentrated fire.
Grot moved through them like a blunt instrument given purpose.
His integrated multi-laser tracked from target to target with pitiless efficiency, each burst cutting through cultists in hard white slashes of light. The modified scatter-shot mode turned every discharge into a corridor-clearing storm. In the cramped streets and broken hab-lanes, the weapon did not need perfect aim. It filled doorways, alleys, and rubble gaps with overlapping beams until anything flesh-made inside them stopped moving.
Walls flashed. Shadows leapt. Screams began and ended in the same breath.
Grey fought from above.
His jump pack carried him in short, controlled arcs over the ruins while his shoulder cannon barked down into the enemy formations. His HUD streamed tactical data across his visor: top-down drone feed, hostile markers, projected movement vectors, blast radii, structural weaknesses, ammunition expenditure, heat bloom, and friendly positions.
The cannon was linked directly to the recon drones. Their machine-precise calculations fed his targeting system faster than human reflex could manage. Grey only had to choose intent. The armor handled the rest.
Each shot landed where it needed to.
Explosions blossomed among the cultists, not wild or wasteful, but carefully placed. One blast collapsed a barricade onto the gun team behind it. Another cut off a retreat path. A third turned a cluster of bomb carriers into a chain of secondary detonations that sprayed burning meat and scrap across the cracked ferrocrete.
The heretics never had a real chance.
When their line finally broke, fanaticism failed them as thoroughly as courage would have. They turned to run and discovered too late that the battle had already ended. Smoke hung over the cooling bodies. The stink of scorched flesh, ruptured fuel, and hot metal sharpened the air.
Grey and Grot returned to Qin Mo's side.
The three of them walked toward the bunker together, leaving the shattered corpses of the enemy behind. Their armored footfalls rang over stone and scrap, each muted clang swallowed by the crackle of dying flames.
Inside the bunker, the Imperial survivors watched them with hollow-eyed reverence.
For several seconds, no one moved. These men had expected death. They had been counting ammunition by the shot, rationing breath between explosions, and deciding which wounded could still hold a weapon when the door finally broke. Now three armored figures had walked out of the smoke, killed the enemy with impossible ease, and returned carrying the Aquila as if the Emperor's own hand had pointed them there.
One soldier stepped forward. Then another.
Soon they were kneeling one by one, eyes fixed not on Qin Mo's face, but on the Aquila staff in his grip.
A sigil of the Imperium.
A symbol of salvation.
....
"Who is your ranking officer?" Qin Mo asked as he walked.
His voice was calm, unhurried, and clean enough to cut through the charged silence.
A man pushed himself out from among the survivors. His armor carried the same general rank markings as Klein's, though the insignia had been scraped by shrapnel and dulled by soot. His face was gaunt from exhaustion, and one side of his coat was stiff with dried blood. He knelt before Qin Mo with the careful stiffness of a man whose body wanted to collapse but whose discipline would not permit it.
"That would be me, Lord."
Qin Mo looked down at him.
"Your current force numbers 472 combat-effective survivors. That is far too few to justify holding this position. This bunker has served its purpose. Abandon it immediately and move west to regroup with the main force."
The officer's eyes flickered. Surprise, calculation, and relief passed across his face in quick succession. He had not even finished confirming his own casualty count, yet Qin Mo had spoken the number as if it had been written on the wall.
For a moment, the officer wondered what the man before him could see. Hidden auspex feeds? Drone sweeps? Some sanctioned gift of the soul?
Then training overruled awe.
"Understood, Lord."
The order was carried out at once.
The survivors gathered their weapons, ammunition, field kits, wounded comrades, and whatever supplies could be moved quickly. Men dragged crates out from beneath collapsed firing platforms. Others stripped charge packs from the dead with murmured apologies. Stretcher teams formed without needing to be told.
There were fewer than five hundred of them. Nearly half were wounded.
Some lay on improvised stretchers made from rifle slings and broken paneling. Others leaned on comrades, armor cracked, faces gray, bodies held upright by pain, faith, or stubbornness. A few walked with the empty stare of men whose minds were still back inside the bunker, waiting for the next grenade to land.
Expecting them to march seventy kilometers through the underhive was impossible.
Qin Mo summoned the transport drones.
The black machines descended through the smoke in silent formation, their anti-grav engines giving off a low pressure that made dust crawl away from them in rippling circles. Cargo clamps unfolded. Side hatches opened. Internal restraint frames extended for the wounded.
"Wounded first," Qin Mo ordered. "Then ammunition. Then personnel who cannot maintain pace."
The officer watched as the drones accepted stretcher after stretcher with unexpected care. Their manipulator arms locked wounded men into place without crushing damaged limbs, adjusted restraints around broken armor, and sealed compartments against smoke and dust.
It was machine work. It was also mercy.
The officer hesitated, then finally asked the question pressing on every survivor around him.
"Are you the Lord Marshal?" His voice tightened. "Does our defensive line still hold?"
Qin Mo had not intended to answer. Strategic truth was dangerous when men had so little strength left to carry it. But the soldiers were watching him now, faces pale, eyes bright with desperate hope. They had knelt because they needed a miracle. They were asking because they needed to know whether the miracle had arrived too late.
He relented.
"I do not know if the old defenses still stand."
The words struck them hard. Several men lowered their eyes. One wounded trooper gripped the edge of his stretcher until his fingers shook. Qin Mo continued before despair could settle fully.
"But I am establishing a new defensive line." That brought their attention back. "We currently have two fortified positions."
The silence that followed was worse than any shout.
"Two?" someone whispered.
That was not enough. Everyone there knew it. Two fortresses in the underhive meant two islands in a sea of enemies, two torches burning in a city-sized grave.
Qin Mo saw morale dip and prepared to force it back into shape. He lifted the Aquila staff slightly.
"Brothers. Loyal sons of the Emperor, we—"
A deep droning noise rolled through the air.
Every head turned upward.
Five black spheres descended from the smoke. They halted half a meter above the ground, their smooth armored shells reflecting firelight in dull curves. Mechanical arms unfolded from hidden seams. Cutting tools, clamps, intake ports, and sensor clusters extended with cold precision.
Then the drones began scavenging the battlefield.
They collected broken weapons, spent power cells, damaged armor plates, vehicle fragments, cabling, ammunition crates, salvageable optics, and anything else their internal systems deemed useful. One lifted a bent heavy stubber from beneath a dead cultist, scanned it, rejected the barrel, and kept the firing mechanism. Another carved usable plating from a wrecked barricade with a tool that hissed white-hot through metal.
Recognizing them as logistics drones, Qin Mo paid them little attention.
He turned back to the soldiers.
"Brothers. Loyal sons of the Emperor, we—"
"Grrrhh… RRRHHH!"
A wet, gurgling growl dragged itself out of a nearby pile of bodies.
Qin Mo stopped speaking.
A mutant abomination staggered upright, one arm hanging by strips of meat, its chest riddled with smoking holes. It should have been dead several times over. Instead, it dragged a rusted pickaxe through the mud, its small corrupted eyes fixed on Qin Mo with mindless hate.
One of the logistics drones detected the threat.
It retracted its salvaging limbs.
A pause.
Then the same limbs extended again, now holding a blade.
One swift stroke removed the mutant's head.
The corpse dropped. The drone caught it before it hit the ground, lifted it with the same practical indifference it had shown a broken weapon, and drew it toward an intake port.
Several soldiers recoiled. A few made the sign of the Aquila. Others raised their weapons by instinct before remembering the machine had just saved them.
Qin Mo turned back to them.
"No need for alarm. These are our machines."
The troops nodded with visible uncertainty. They did not look reassured, exactly, but they accepted the explanation because panic had too many competing demands already. Slowly, their attention returned to him.
Qin Mo drew breath.
"Now, my brothers. The Emperor—"
Wait, a thought struck him hard enough to derail the speech entirely.
Why had the drone collected the mutant corpse?
He opened a direct channel to the AI core.
"Why are you salvaging mutant corpses?" Qin Mo asked silently through the link. "And before you answer, do not tell me this is for food."
The response came immediately.
[Based on current resource analysis, heretic corpses possess recyclable biological material.]
Qin Mo's expression went blank.
The AI continued.
[After undergoing sterilization, chemical separation, toxin removal, genetic contamination screening, and multiple purification processes, the remaining biomass can be rendered completely non-toxic.]
A pause.
[It can then be converted into nutritional supplements without detectable side effects.]
Qin Mo stared at the battlefield for several seconds.
"…I…"
He closed his mouth. Opened it again. Then decided, for once, that silence might be the strongest possible argument.
"You know what? Never mind."
Resources were scarce. Starving soldiers did not win wars. If a mutant abomination eventually became nutrient paste after enough purification cycles to satisfy even his paranoia, then the underhive had simply found a new way to be disgusting and practical at the same time.
He still shuddered slightly.
Pragmatism did not make the thought taste any better.
....
The drones did not collect only enemy dead.
They retrieved fallen Imperial soldiers as well.
A logistics drone paused before the ranking officer. Its black shell rotated slightly, lenses adjusting as it scanned him. The officer stiffened.
"I'm still alive," he said quickly.
For one terrible second, he looked as if he expected the machine to decide otherwise.
The drone gave no verbal response. Instead, a small hatch opened along its outer shell. A square object slid free and dropped neatly into the officer's hands.
It was warm. Heavy for its size. Smooth on one side, engraved on the other.
The face of a fallen soldier had been etched into the surface with unnerving precision. Beneath it was an inscription:
Memorial Ash Block — Fallen Hero of the Underhive.
The officer stared down at it. His throat worked once. No sound came out.
Qin Mo heard the AI through the command link.
[Humans possess traditions for honoring the dead.]
The drones continued their work.
Where Imperial bodies could be identified, their remains were gathered, reduced, sanctified according to the limited rites stored in the AI's cultural database, and compressed into small memorial blocks. Each was marked with name, unit, rank, and face when enough data remained. Where names were unknown, the inscription read simply: Loyal Servant of the Emperor.
When the drones finished, they lifted off in formation and vanished into the smoke, already moving toward their next objective.
A quiet reverence settled over the survivors. Some clutched the memorial blocks against their chests. Others held them in both hands as if afraid the dead might vanish a second time. A wounded soldier began to cry without making a sound.
....
"We will follow your orders, Lord."
The ranking officer secured the memorial blocks inside his coat with careful hands, then rose and saluted. This time the gesture carried more than obedience.
"We will move west and regroup with our allies."
"Good."
Qin Mo handed him a compact vox device. The casing was reinforced, the controls simplified, and warning glyphs had been carved around a small activation rune.
"Use this if you encounter trouble. The channel is already set to reach me."
The officer accepted it with both hands.
Qin Mo added, "If you encounter psykers, throw it at them."
The officer blinked.
"Lord?"
"It has a built-in nullification field," Qin Mo said. "Get it close, activate the marked control, and keep your distance."
The officer looked down at the device as if it had suddenly become both a relic and a grenade.
"Understood. Thank you, Lord."
The survivors departed soon after. The wounded were loaded first, the walkers formed around the transports, and the strongest soldiers took rear guard without being ordered. As they moved west, more than a few turned back to look at Qin Mo, Grey, and Grot standing among the smoke and corpses.
Once they were gone, Qin Mo opened another channel to the AI.
"Prioritize intelligence gathering on other Imperial positions."
[Acknowledged. Recon drones are already under construction.]
"Good. I need locations, strength estimates, casualty projections, supply status, and signs of enemy psyker activity."
[Parameters updated.]
Qin Mo looked toward the ruined bunker, then toward the dark maze of the underhive beyond it.
"And flag any Imperial units close to collapse."
[Understood.]
....
Nightfall — 47th Regiment Fortress
The logistics drones returned after dark, emerging from the smoke like silent moons. They descended through the fortress's upper access shafts and deposited sealed crates of food, purified water, charge packs, replacement parts, and processed medical supplies before lifting away again.
For several seconds, the fortress did not understand what had happened.
Then someone opened one of the food crates.
The cheers were deafening.
They rolled through the battered halls, down the reinforced corridors, into the lower bunkers, and through the workshop levels where men had grown used to the sounds of machinery, distant shelling, and restrained fear. This noise was different. It had laughter in it. Disbelieving laughter. Hungry laughter. The laughter of soldiers who had expected another ration block and found actual food instead.
Qin Mo, who had been assembling the fourth suit of power armor in his underground workshop, looked up from a half-fused actuator frame.
The cheering did not stop.
He set down the component, wiped one gauntleted hand across his brow out of habit rather than need, and stepped into the corridor.
"What's all the noise about?"
Klein was waiting near the main supply alcove, grinning like a man who had just discovered a forgotten STC for happiness. He held a food container in one hand and a fork in the other. A chunk of synthetic meat steamed on the tines.
"This stuff is amazing," Klein said.
Qin Mo glanced at the meal.
Solid synthetic meat. Browned exterior. Fibrous interior. Actual texture. Actual smell. It looked like something a human being might willingly eat instead of something issued as punishment by the Departmento Munitorum.
He immediately thought of the mutant corpse. That had better not be the mutant. He narrowed his eyes slightly.
"…Does it taste good?"
Klein nodded vigorously. Then suspicion crossed his face. He drew the food container closer to his chest as if Qin Mo might lunge for it.
"Grey already brought you a portion. You're not getting mine."
Qin Mo stared at him for a second, then chuckled.
It was a soft sound, low and brief, but several nearby soldiers noticed. They looked away quickly, as if catching a commanding officer laughing was somehow more dangerous than watching him melt ferrocrete with his hands.
"Relax," Qin Mo said. "I don't want it."
As they spoke, Grey entered the corridor carrying two additional food containers. His armor was off, leaving him in a sweat-dark undersuit, though the posture of command still clung to him. He handed one container to Qin Mo.
Then, without a word, he placed his own portion in Klein's hands.
Klein stared down at the second container.
"…Are you insane?"
Grey said nothing. His expression remained unreadable, but his eyes moved briefly to the men around them: soldiers eating too fast, wounded men receiving bowls from medics, exhausted workers sitting against walls with food balanced in shaking hands. Then he turned and walked away.
Qin Mo watched him go.
A small smile touched his face.
Then he looked at the untouched container in his own hands and placed it on top of Klein's growing stack.
"Enjoy your feast."
Klein's mouth opened. No words came out.
Qin Mo turned back toward the workshop.
Behind him, the fortress continued to cheer, eat, laugh, and breathe as if life had briefly returned to a place built only for siege and burial. The war had not ended. The underhive still waited beyond the walls. Men would die tomorrow, and perhaps before dawn.
But tonight, they had food.
Tonight, they had walls.
Tonight, they had something close enough to hope that no one wanted to name it too loudly.
Klein remained where he stood, silent, staring at the three rations in his hands.