Though New Kato had been firmly established, and most of its citizens had finally found work, shelter, ration lines, and a place inside Qin Mo's new order, one truth remained unchanged.
The Underhive would never be free of bounty hunters.
Not because Qin Mo lacked the strength to forbid them. Not because the new authorities had failed to extend patrols into the ruins. The reason was simpler and older than any law written after the war: the Underhive was too vast, too broken, and too full of things people wanted badly enough to risk dying for.
The bounty hunter guilds had served during the war. They had guided soldiers through forgotten transit veins, tracked heretics through sump-fog, dragged wounded men out of collapsed habs, and occasionally sold information instead of bullets when that proved more profitable. For that service, they had earned Qin Mo's favor.
He granted them a privilege almost unheard of in the Imperium.
They could continue operating as free agents. They could roam the labyrinthine ruins, dead manufactoria, collapsed gang territories, and forgotten transit networks as they always had, so long as anything they recovered was declared and surrendered to the proper authorities.
In return, the spoils were assessed, catalogued, and converted into Throne Gelt or local credit. The guilds could purchase food, ammunition, medical supplies, replacement augmetics, better weapons, and legal access to equipment that previously would have required bribery, theft, or murder.
For the bounty hunters, it was a fair trade.
They still got to hunt. They still got to boast. They still got to vanish into tunnels where sane men refused to go.
For Qin Mo, it was a calculated investment.
Every relic brought back was one less unknown hazard buried beneath New Kato. Every map fragment, mutant nest, corrupted shrine, collapsed passage, or functioning machine reported by the guilds became another piece of intelligence. The bounty hunters thought they were being paid for salvage. In truth, they were also feeding the city's eyes.
And sometimes, those eyes saw something terrible.
....
700 Kilometers Below New Kato
A seven-man bounty hunter squad fought in the choking gloom of a ruined transit corridor, their gunfire swallowed by the depth around them.
The corridor had once been part of a mass transit artery, wide enough for freight crawlers and civilian carriers to pass in both directions. Now it was a long wound through the hive's buried bones. The rails had buckled. The overhead guide-lines hung in rusted loops. Warning sigils from dead administrations peeled from the walls beneath layers of soot, fungus, chemical residue, and older stains no one wanted to identify.
The air was thick with promethium smoke, hot metal, old blood, and the sour damp reek of things that had grown without sunlight for too many generations. Their boots splashed through ankle-deep runoff that hissed wherever spent casings fell into it.
The walls were ancient ferrocrete, pitted and cracked by time, plated in places with rusted reinforcement sheets and carved in others with blasphemous symbols from cults long dead or not dead enough. Some had been scratched by knives. Some by claws. Some by tools too precise for underhive hands.
Each muzzle flash showed the enemy for only a heartbeat.
Grotesque figures surged from the darkness.
The bounty hunters huddled behind a shimmering portable energy shield, its field projector whining under strain as it drank power from a backpack cell already running hot. Lasfire and solid-shot snapped out from behind the barrier in disciplined bursts, cutting into the tide of heretic mutants that slithered, crawled, limped, and hurled themselves forward with no regard for pain.
Beyond them, half-hidden in the smoke and darkness, a rogue psyker skulked among the broken support pillars. Its presence made the air feel greasy. Heat rippled where there was no fire. Shadows bent a fraction late when the muzzle flashes died. The squad's auspex kept returning nonsense readings, then correcting itself, then screaming warning tones until someone kicked it quiet.
The team leader slammed a fresh charge pack into his lasgun and shouted over the gunfire.
"Is the bolt cannon warmed up yet?!"
A stocky hunter crouched beside the heavy weapon snapped back without looking up. "She's not called bolt cannon. She's called Reina."
"Fine! Is Reina warmed up yet?"
The gunner slapped the activation rune. "Ready."
Two hunters dragged the weapon forward between them. Reina was a massive, multi-barreled monstrosity, too large for ordinary corridor fighting and far too beloved by her owner to be called impractical within stabbing distance.
Her oily frame was smeared with maintenance grease, prayer marks, and kill tally runes scratched by hand into the casing. Ammunition belts fed into her from a reinforced crate on a wheeled sled, each shell fat, ugly, and expensive.
Hydraulic stabilizers unfolded with a hiss and bit into the pitted ferrocrete floor. The barrels began to turn. Slowly at first. Then faster. The rising mechanical whine cut through the screams, the gunfire, and the wet scrape of approaching limbs.
Then Reina spoke.
A torrent of high-explosive shells ripped into the oncoming swarm. Warp-tainted heretics burst apart mid-charge, their chitinous growths and swollen bodies rupturing under the impacts. Bone fragments hammered the walls. Black ichor sprayed across the corridor. A mutant with three arms and a jaw split down the middle vanished from the waist up before its legs realized they were dead.
The tunnel became a charnel house.
Limb, sinew, and rotten armor were shredded. Skulls split. Spines snapped. Flesh sloughed from bodies already too diseased to hold together. The recoil beat through the floor in brutal rhythm, each burst driving smoke and gore backward in waves.
Shattered bone fragments, broken teeth, and ragged strips of meat whipped toward the hunters, but the energy shield held. Impacts flashed across the barrier in bright ripples before disintegrating into ash and dust.
Yet the enemy kept coming.
Not because they were strong.
Because most of them were already dying.
The mutants crawling toward them were not healthy specimens of heresy. Bulbous tumors pushed beneath hardened carapaces. Cysts pulsed under translucent skin, leaking thick necrotic sludge with every movement. Some staggered as if their bones had softened. Others dragged useless limbs behind them, propelled forward by hatred, infection, or a psychic command too deep in their ruined minds to disobey.
They reeked of stagnation. Of flesh far past the mercy of the grave. Of rot sealed beneath armor until pressure forced it out through cracks.
The bounty hunters were not killing them.
They were only accelerating the inevitable.
Then the voice came.
It did not simply travel through the air. It crawled through the corridor, through the vox static, through the teeth and skulls of every living man present.
"D̵̡̥̜̹̿̏͛̅͘į̸̞͙̼̈͂͋̄̚͠e̸̛̦͖̘̰̿̈́̈… d̷̘͈̒́̈́̕į̵͍̞̜̹̖̓̑̊̏͝͠ĕ̴̜̖̦̂̚̚…"
The rogue psyker shambled into clearer view, its body riddled with necrotic boils, warp-burn scars, and old restraint wounds. Its blistered fingers clawed at empty air, weaving patterns no eye could follow for long.
Something gathered around it, not visible so much as felt: pressure behind the eyes, nausea in the gut, a wrongness that made the shield projector's machine-spirit shriek.
It was summoning or opening. Either was bad enough.
"Yoan!" the team leader bellowed.
At the rear of the formation, a lean, ragged-looking young man jerked upright. Yoan looked too thin for his armor and too young for the number of scars on his hands. His weapon hung unused at his side. He had been kept back for a reason.
No further order was needed.
He knew his role.
Yoan sprinted forward through the smoke. The others shifted instinctively, opening a gap in the shield line and covering him with everything they had. Lasrifles burned holes through the writhing tide. Reina's barrels dipped just enough to carve a path without cutting Yoan in half.
The closer Yoan came, the more the psyker faltered.
The pressure in the air stuttered. The warp-light gathering around the creature's hands flickered like a dying lumen. Its chant broke into a wet gag.
The psyker tried to retreat.
Too late.
Its arms split open from wrist to elbow, spraying black ichor across the floor. Veins bulged beneath its skin, then collapsed. The thing's ribcage caved inward with a crunching, liquid sound, and its entire body folded into itself, imploding into a steaming mass of unnatural flesh.
The moment it died, the mutants screamed.
Not in pain. In release.
Then they melted into bubbling sludge.
For one second, no one moved. The corridor hissed around them. Reina's barrels slowed, ticking as heat bled from the metal. Smoke rolled over piles of liquefying bodies.
Then the team leader found his voice.
"RUN!"
Another hunter grabbed the ammo sled. "Move! We've wasted enough time fighting this filth!"
No one stopped to loot the dead.
No one stopped to rest.
No one even looked too closely at the sludge spreading across the floor.
They ran as if something far worse than heretics had heard the gunfire.
....
Ten Minutes Later.
Yoan made a mistake.
He looked back.
"Don't fething turn around!"
The captain's roar cracked through the corridor, filled with rage, fear, and the bitter knowledge that fear usually arrived too late to be useful.
But Yoan had already seen it.
A spider filled the tunnel behind them.
It was not the small sump-spider children crushed under boots or the palm-sized venomous things that nested inside heat vents. This was a grotesquely swollen chitinous monstrosity, more than ten meters tall, its body wedged between the corridor walls yet still moving with horrible speed. Iron-hard bristles covered its abdomen. Hooked limbs punched into ferrocrete and pulled its bulk forward in short, violent lunges. Its mandibles clicked fast enough to sound like a malfunctioning cogitator.
Yoan's mind emptied.
His body stopped obeying him.
Because in the deepest Underhive, heretics were not always the true enemy.
The mutants born from millennia of toxic runoff, forgotten bio-waste, radiation leaks, gene-spliced vermin, and industrial neglect were older than most gangs, older than most maps, and far less interested in bargains.
"Leave him!" the squad leader shouted, forcing himself forward. "Keep running! Move!"
The others obeyed because stopping meant all of them died.
Ahead, light appeared at the end of the corridor. Pale. Sickly. Beautiful.
For half a heartbeat, it looked like salvation.
Then the light vanished.
The exit went dark as if a door had slammed shut.
A moment later, it opened again.
But what filled the end of the corridor was not the outside world.
It was an eye.
A vast, wet, sickly green eye stared into the tunnel, its surface filmed with mucus and threaded with veins as thick as cables. It blinked once. The eyelids scraped against the corridor mouth like slabs of meat dragged over metal.
The bounty hunters froze. Even the captain, who had been trying to drag the others forward by voice alone, lost his words.
Something far larger than the spider had blocked the exit.
Then a beam of searing energy tore through the obstruction.
The eye burst. The flesh behind it cooked, split, and peeled apart in smoking layers. Superheated fluid splashed across the tunnel mouth, hissing where it struck ferrocrete. The beam punched through meat, bone, and corrupted hide, carving a path from the outside inward.
Through the smoldering wound, two armored figures emerged.
Both wore Thunderborn-pattern power armor. Their silhouettes were broad, heavy, and unmistakably human, yet too precise and too clean for any underhive relic. Their armor plates bore the hard, functional lines of Qin Mo's wargear: reinforced joints, integrated shield nodes, sealed helmets, and weapons folded into the gauntlets and shoulders rather than carried like common guns.
As they advanced, their built-in las-shotguns fired in short, brutal bursts. Anything blocking their path, teeth, tendons, exposed bone, twitching flesh, was shredded into blackened scraps.
Their boots struck metal with measured weight.
Some of the bounty hunters had fought in the war. They had seen those insignias before. They knew the names painted into rumor, reports, and barracks stories.
Grey.
Anruida.
The hunters scrambled toward Grey with no dignity at all, hiding behind his armor like frightened children ducking behind a shrine statue. None of them cared how it looked. Pride was for men not being hunted by giant spiders and tunnel-sized things with eyes like plague lanterns.
Grey did not react to their panic. He walked past them, impassive behind his helmet, and continued toward Yoan.
The young man still stood frozen in the corridor, eyes wide, mouth half-open, body locked by terror.
Ten meters beyond him, Grey raised one hand and activated his gravity shield.
The air tightened.
Dust, shell casings, and droplets of sludge lifted from the floor, then snapped toward the center of the field. The spider lunged, and folded. Its limbs bent inward at impossible angles. Chitin cracked. The abdomen compressed with a wet detonation. Mandibles shattered against each other as invisible pressure crushed the creature into a quivering paste of broken exoskeleton and rancid fluid.
The field faded. The remains dropped with a heavy, obscene slap.
Grey turned toward the bounty hunters.
"Why the feth are there spiders that big in the Underhive?"
One hunter lifted both hands, palms shaking. "W-we don't know!"
Another spoke too fast, words tumbling over one another. "The ruins, the old tech, the sump pits, it's all twisted down here! We saw a mutant thing with a woman's face once! A xeno, I swear it! Female-looking! Emperor burn me if I'm lying!"
The others were close to breaking. Their voices shook. Their breathing came too quick. One kept glancing at the liquefied spider as if expecting it to reassemble itself.
Anruida looked at Grey and smirked inside his helm. "Grey."
Grey turned slightly.
"Welcome to the Underhive."
Grey said nothing for a moment. He had grown up hearing bounty hunter stories: wild tales told in hab-corners, barracks bunks, ration lines, and drinking holes where men who had never gone below claimed to know exactly what lurked there. The Underhive, in those stories, was always a place of treasure and terror, full of ancient machines, lost vaults, mutant kings, forgotten shrines, and men too stubborn or stupid to die quietly.
Seeing it firsthand made the old stories feel less exaggerated.
It also explained why so few of the storytellers had ever gone back for a second expedition.
Grey pointed toward the exit. "Don't come back next time."
The warning was flat, not cruel. That made it worse.
Then he turned and hauled Yoan to his feet.
The moment Grey's gauntlet touched him, he recoiled.
Yoan stank of death, rot, old sweat, wet rags, fear, and whatever chemical filth he had been crawling through for the last several hours. Grey's helmet filters compensated immediately, but not before the first full breath reached him.
"Throne," Grey muttered.
Disgusted, he pinched the front of his helm as if that could help and yanked Yoan upright anyway.
Yoan stared at him with shining eyes. "Are you angels sent by the Emperor?"
"No." Grey shoved him toward the others. "Your wife sent us."
Yoan blinked.
Grey jabbed a thumb toward the waiting transport. "Go home. Buy her something nice. If she hadn't reported where your guild went, you'd be paste on the floor."
Yoan looked back at the tunnel, then at Grey, then at the armor as if trying to reconcile domestic concern with divine intervention. "It doesn't matter." His voice dropped into reverence. "To me, you're still messengers."
"I'm not being worshiped by a man who smells like a corpse-cart," Grey said. "Move."
Yoan obeyed.
The transport waited beyond the torn-open mass of the dead thing that had blocked the corridor, its engines idling low and steady. Bounty hunters climbed aboard with trembling hands, clutching weapons, ammo boxes, and one another. No one argued about seating. No one demanded payment.
As Grey boarded last, he cast one final glance at the colossal spider's liquefied remains.
The question lingered despite himself.
How much waste did something have to eat to grow that large?
Below, Yoan stood near the tunnel entrance until Anruida shoved him up the ramp. Even then, he kept looking back at Grey.
His eyes remained filled with awe.