"FIGHT!"
Heavy Hammer roared the word as if it were a prayer.
His war axe slammed into the blood-slick stone hard enough to make the floor jump. A shockwave rippled through the ruined transit hall, cracking the paving slabs beneath him and sending splinters of rock, rust, and old bone skittering across the ground. The impact point fractured outward in jagged lines like a shattered mirror.
"FOR THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"
"FOR THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"
His heretic mob answered him in one voice. Their cries filled the slum district, rolling through rusted hab-units, broken shrine alcoves, and sagging service bridges like the howls of beasts trapped in iron cages.
Their bodies were twisted by mutation and battlefield grafts, swollen muscles bulging beneath torn skin, metal hooks jutting from forearms, eyes glowing with feverish devotion under the hive's flickering crimson emergency lights. Sweat, grime, old blood, and corrupted warp-ichor ran across them in dark streaks.
They charged the Thunderborn with the maddened confidence of men who believed death was only another offering.
Heavy Hammer barely noticed them.
In his mind, there was only Grey.
The leader of the Thunderborn stood ahead of him in gold and matte-black warplate, unmoving amid the ruin, a figure of disciplined violence wrapped in humming machinery. To Heavy Hammer's warped senses, Grey was not merely an enemy commander. He was the rival champion, the skull that had to be taken, the proof that the Champion of Blood favored him above all lesser butchers.
His own body should have failed him. Half of his cybernetic torso had been torn open. Cables dragged from his ribs. One side of his armor had melted into blackened slag. A normal man would have collapsed into twitching ruin. A sane one would have begged for a medicae or a quick death.
Heavy Hammer did neither.
Something unseen filled the gaps in his broken flesh. Warp-born strength pulsed through torn muscle, dead nerve, and exposed augmetic bundles. Each heartbeat felt like a drum struck inside his skull. Pain became rhythm. Damage became proof. Rage became clarity.
He moved faster. Sharper. Stronger.
Unstoppable.
Invincible.
A thousand battle plans flashed through his thoughts like whispers shouted from behind his eyes.
〈Slide under Grey's guard. Cleave the knee. Cripple him. Smash the chestplate. Break his stance. Hook the axe behind the neck seal. Tear the head free. Raise it high. Let them see. Let them scream.〉
But all those plans reduced to one image.
Grey's severed head mounted on his banner.
Heavy Hammer lunged.
His war axe howled through the air, the edge descending toward Grey's helmet with enough force to split a lesser warrior from crown to groin. The weapon came close enough for Grey's visor to reflect the notched blade.
Then the air between them bent.
A faint distortion shimmered around Grey's armor as the gravitic shield activated. For the smallest fraction of a second, Heavy Hammer saw the world twist inward around him. His charge did not stop. It was compressed.
The axe, his arms, his armored chest, his reinforced spine, the ruined machinery grafted into his body, everything folded at once beneath sudden, impossible pressure.
The impact made no heroic sound. No final scream. No last curse.
Heavy Hammer and his war axe were crushed into a grotesque smear of bone, metal, armor fragments, and superheated flesh, flattened across the stone in a molten red streak that twitched once before going still.
Grey did not flinch.
A few drops of blood hissed against his active shield field and slid away.
Over the vox, he spoke with the dry irritation of a man commenting on a minor equipment flaw.
"Why can't we activate the gravitic shield a second earlier, right after teleportation? I could have squashed him the moment I arrived."
Qin Mo's voice crackled back through the command channel.
"Do you understand how much interference teleportation causes? Be grateful your armor did not shut down completely and leave you standing there like a decorated corpse."
"Understood."
Grey stepped over what remained of Heavy Hammer. His boot came down on a ridge of fused ceramite and bone with a wet crunch. He did not look back.
Then he joined the others in the slaughter.
The remaining cultists knew they were dead. There were barely thirty of them left, clustered amid burning barricades, broken hab-walls, and the steaming remnants of their champion. The sight should have broken them. Instead, it stripped away the last traces of restraint.
"FOR THE CHAMPION!"
They charged anyway.
The four Thunderborn warriors stood shoulder to shoulder, a wall of reinforced armor, glowing weapon housings, and disciplined hatred. Their silhouettes were haloed by plasma glare and drifting ash. Arm-mounted scatter-lasers unfolded from braced housings. Shoulder-mounted plasma cannons rotated into position with smooth mechanical precision. Targeting lenses flashed, locked, and confirmed.
Then they fired.
The corridor vanished beneath controlled devastation.
Scatter-lasers poured out streams of hard light at a combined cyclic rate that turned the charging mass into shredded silhouettes. Plasma bolts followed in slower, heavier pulses, each impact vaporizing flesh, scrap armor, and mutation in bursts of white-blue fire. The first rank disappeared. The second rank exploded. The third tried to leap over the bodies and was cut apart before its feet touched the ground.
The slum district itself suffered with them. Rusted wall panels peeled away under heat. Ferrocrete burst into craters. Old sewage pipes ruptured and flashed into clouds of filthy steam. Shrine banners, gang markings, and blood-painted icons burned together until no one could tell which blasphemy had belonged to whom.
When the barrage ceased, nothing living remained in the open.
Grey lowered his cannon and let out a quiet chuckle.
"Perhaps they should have worshipped the Champion of Firepower instead."
Anruida gave a sharp scoff over the squad vox.
"Hah. No kidding. For a god of war, the Champion of Blood is remarkably stingy. He did not even give them proper weapons."
The laughter that followed was brief, harsh, and very human. It cut through the smoke like a pressure valve opening after too much violence.
Then Grey's auspex pinged.
In the shell of a half-collapsed hab-unit, behind a slope of broken plastek and scorched furniture, a trembling man crouched in the dust. He clutched a second idol of the Champion of Blood, smaller than the first, carved from blackened bone and wrapped in strips of flayed leather. His lips moved in frantic whispers. His eyes had rolled back until only thin crescents of white showed beneath fluttering lids.
Grey's humor vanished.
"Standard sweep protocol."
Anruida was already moving. His armor's sensors cut through heat haze, smoke, and rubble. The cultist's body heat flared in his display. The idol registered as dense organic material threaded with traces of unknown residue.
His plasma cannon swiveled.
A lance of searing white-blue energy punched through the rubble and erased the man, the idol, and the wall behind him in one clean flash.
Ash drifted where he had knelt.
"Target eliminated," Anruida reported. "Mission complete."
....
Meanwhile…
Qin Mo turned his attention away from the cleansed slum district and shifted his focus to the Grand Cathedral of Tyrone Hive.
His drone network passed him a dozen angles at once: smoke crawling along the lower skyline, stained glass windows crusted with centuries of soot, devotional statues looming over shattered plazas, and the vast cathedral rising above the surrounding ruins like a corpse refusing to fall.
Its upper spires vanished into polluted haze. Its lower walls were fortified with gun nests, armored shutters, and Ecclesiarchal purity seals large enough to wrap a man like a burial cloth.
Through the feed, he watched Yoan's approach.
The Pariah had teleported outside the structure and stood almost motionless beneath the shadow of a ruined buttress. In his dull coat and soot-stained gear, he blended into the Lower Hive's smog-choked gloom with the practiced invisibility of a man everyone preferred not to notice.
"Find the breach point," Qin Mo instructed. "Enter undetected."
Yoan's eyes moved across the cathedral's towering outer wall. His retinal display highlighted stress fractures, moisture lines, repair seams, and ancient mortar weakened by millennia of neglect. Then one section glowed amber.
A cracked stretch of stone beneath a half-eroded saint's relief. Thin enough to alter. Thick enough that no guard would expect entry there.
"Breach point confirmed," Yoan whispered.
Qin Mo's voice remained steady.
"Good. Proceed quietly."
Qin Mo activated the pendant he had given Yoan. The little device warmed against the Pariah's chest, its inner mechanisms answering a command from far away.
Then Qin Mo twisted the wall.
Stone did not explode. It did not crack or grind open like a door. It softened. The ancient material lost its certainty and flowed aside in a silent, waxlike ripple. Carved saints blurred. Mortar lines bent. Dust lifted in a thin gray veil.
Yoan stepped through the shifting wall and emerged inside the shadows of a confessional booth.
Behind him, the stone sealed itself seamlessly. The saint's relief reformed with the same pitted nose, the same cracked halo, the same stains of old incense smoke. No mark remained.
For a moment, Yoan knelt.
He bowed his head in the dark booth and whispered a silent prayer of gratitude to the power that had carried him through solid stone without sound, without pain, and without leaving a wound behind.
Then he broke a small fragment from the inside edge of the wall and slipped it into his pack.
"For my wife," he murmured.
Qin Mo's voice cut in before the tenderness could linger.
"Wait. Now is not the time to strike."
Yoan froze at once.
Through his cloaked drones, Qin Mo observed the congregation inside the cathedral.
Hundreds of faithful filled the nave, packed shoulder to shoulder beneath vaulted ceilings blackened by incense and age.
They wore work robes, militia coats, stained uniforms, devotional chains, and poverty polished into obedience. Candles burned in iron racks. Servo-skulls drifted overhead with censers dangling beneath them. Mind-wiped servitors moved between the columns, replacing spent candles, collecting offerings, and chanting broken fragments of hymns through damaged vox-grilles.
At the pulpit stood Deacon-Primaris David.
He was old, richly robed, and too carefully preserved. Augmetic braces supported his spine beneath embroidered vestments. A cluster of life-sustaining implants pulsed at his throat. His face had the waxy stillness of rejuvenat treatments stretched past dignity. Beside the pulpit, his personal guards stood in ceremonial armor with hands near their weapons.
David raised both arms.
"The God-Emperor is the Master of Humanity!" he proclaimed. "Deny His light, and you deny salvation!"
The congregation erupted in applause. Voices rose in praise. Hands formed the Aquila. A few wept openly.
Then David lifted his arms higher, and his voice shifted.
It did not grow louder. It grew smoother. Too smooth. The warmth of sermon became the precision of a blade sliding from a sheath.
"The God-Emperor is not only the Master of Humanity," David cried. "He is the Lord of Knowledge and Wisdom! The Keeper of Secrets!"
The applause died unevenly.
A hush moved through the nave. It began near the front pews and spread backward like cold water poured across stone. Even the servitors faltered, their devotional routines stuttering as if some buried scrap of forbidden recognition had tangled their commands. One censer swung too far and struck a column with a dull chime.
Something about those words felt wrong.
Ancient. Alien.
Not a title of the Imperial Creed. Not one spoken by priests who wished to remain priests.
Even the most fanatical worshippers hesitated, trapped between obedience to the pulpit and the instinctive knowledge that a line had just been crossed.
Far away, Qin Mo grinned and saved the recording.
"Well," he murmured, "that confirms it. David is definitely a pawn of Tzeentch."
The name did not need to be spoken inside the cathedral. It existed in Qin Mo's thoughts as a category of danger: the Changer of Ways, the Architect of Fate, the god of sorcery, forbidden knowledge, lies, schemes, and damnation wrapped in revelation. A creature of the Warp that rewarded curiosity by turning it into a noose.
Near the pulpit, the guard captain reacted first.
He stepped forward sharply, armor joints clicking beneath his tabard.
"Cease your speech, Deacon."
David blinked. The strange certainty drained from his face, leaving behind confusion and sudden fear.
"I… I have been feeling unwell," he stammered. "I was not thinking clearly."
"That is no excuse." The captain leaned close enough that only those near the pulpit could hear him. Qin Mo's drone heard anyway. "Talon I is not yet ours. Choose your words carefully."
David nodded weakly. Sweat gathered along his hairline. His hands trembled against the pulpit. Whatever had ridden his voice a moment before had withdrawn, but the space it left behind did not feel empty. It felt watched.
His personal bodyguard stiffened. One hand closed around a weapon grip. Another glanced toward the rafters without knowing why.
Then David's Jarlcat bolted from beneath the pulpit.
The little creature sprang into his arms with a strangled yowl, claws digging into expensive fabric. Its fur stood on end. Its eyes were wide, black, and wet with terror. It trembled so violently that David felt the shaking through his own ribs.
David's blood ran cold.
Animals sensed things men rationalized too late.
He turned.
And ran.
He made it two steps before his legs failed.
David collapsed onto the cathedral floor with a heavy, graceless impact. The Jarlcat shrieked beneath him, crushed under the weight of his falling body and the hidden machinery beneath his robes.
The congregation screamed. Guards shouted. Servitors froze.
"M-My Lord of Wisdom…" David choked, clawing at his chest. "Save me…"
His body convulsed. His fingers bent backward. The implants at his throat flashed warning-red, then dimmed. His pupils dilated grotesquely until the whites of his eyes disappeared. The veins beneath his skin darkened, then collapsed inward as if something vital had been pulled out through the roots of his nerves.
The Jarlcat gave one final, broken cry.
Then both master and creature fell still.
Above the confessional shadows, hidden among the rafters, Yoan whispered into the link.
"Should I strike now?"
Qin Mo smirked.
"No need. Your job is done."
David had died on his own.
Or rather, David had died because Yoan was there.
As a Pariah, Yoan's null-aura had entered the cathedral like a silent absence. It did not attack the Warp. It denied it room to breathe. The thread of Tzeentchian influence wound through David's soul had frayed the moment Yoan came close enough, and without that hidden support, the old deacon's body had remembered what it truly was: ancient, failing flesh held together by archotech implants, borrowed vitality, and the gifts of a god that was no longer allowed to touch him.
Yoan's presence had snuffed the warp-flame in David's soul as cleanly as a Culexus Assassin's gaze.
"Did I just…" Yoan swallowed, one hand closing around the pendant at his chest. "Did I kill him?"
"Yes," Qin Mo said. "Now return."
Yoan pressed the recall control.
One moment he was crouched in the rafters above a cathedral beginning to panic. The next, he vanished without sound.
Below, priests shouted for medicae aid. Guards shoved worshippers back. The congregation broke into frightened prayers, accusations, and sobbing confusion. None of them looked toward the place where judgment had entered and left without being seen.
The Imperium's judgment was complete.
"Another mission completed today," Qin Mo mused.
He leaned back from the drone feed, satisfied despite himself.
"I truly am blessed by the Machine Spirits."