The moment Creed uttered his name, the interrogation ended.
Suspicion vanished. Questions died unsaid. The armored man facing him snapped an order into his vox with a speed that told Creed this procedure had been prepared long before his arrival.
Before Creed could demand an explanation, rough hands locked a teleport harness around him. The frame clamped against his back and ribs, heavy and inelegant, like a crude imitation of a jump pack built by someone who cared more about function than comfort.
"What in the Emperor's name—"
Blue light swallowed him before the sentence could finish.
Pressure folded around his body. The air thickened, then dropped away. For one instant Creed felt weightless, blind, and squeezed through a space too narrow for flesh. The world became cold light, static, and the taste of copper.
Then the sensation ended.
He was gone.
....
Deep in the Underhive
Creed's boots struck solid ground.
His knees flexed on instinct, absorbing the sudden transition. His hand went halfway toward his laspistol before discipline stopped it.
Assess first. Act second.
The air hit him next. Hot metal, stale smoke, sump-water, burned oil, and the dry electrical bite of overworked machinery. He was no longer in the lower hive. The pressure in his ears, the stale darkness above, and the distant groan of ancient structural supports told him he was far deeper.
Then he saw the fortress.
It was not a spire bastion. It was not a governor's palace or a Munitorum stronghold built from clean plans and sanctioned budgets. It was a fortification carved into the bones of the Underhive, raised from scavenged ferrocrete, black alloy plating, repurposed hab-block foundations, and machinery that had no business existing this far below the surface.
Crude, yes. Ugly, certainly. But effective.
Its walls rose in hard, unfriendly lines, reinforced by dark armor plates that drank the weak lumen-light instead of reflecting it. Autocannon emplacements crouched along the parapets like iron gargoyles, their barrels moving with slow, predatory patience.
Vox-masts jutted from the upper platforms in crooked clusters, their antennae cutting through the smoke-stained air. Static hummed through the ground beneath Creed's boots, steady enough that it felt less like background noise and more like the fortress breathing.
Then he noticed the shield generator.
Creed's eyes narrowed.
A planetary defense force should not have possessed anything like it. Not here. Not on a world this remote. The generator sat behind reinforced shielding near the central bastion, its core pulsing with restrained power. Every few seconds the air around the fortress shimmered, bending light into faint translucent ripples before settling again.
A void shield. Or something close enough to make no practical difference.
Whoever had built this place possessed serious resources, serious intelligence, and an alarming disregard for what the Imperium considered normal.
Creed quickly estimated the visible garrison at over a thousand men. Most wore some form of power armor. Human-scale, not Astartes plate, but still power armor: sealed, reinforced, mass-produced, and issued in numbers that made no logistical sense.
And yet, something was off.
Some soldiers leaned against the ramparts smoking lho-sticks. Others had opened sections of their armor to cool themselves while playing cards on an ammunition crate. Two men argued over ration tins near a heavy weapon mount that had not been cleaned properly. No drill sergeants barked corrections. No officers stalked the line. No enginseers or servitors moved between the guns with incense, tools, and irritated binharic prayers.
To an outsider, they might have looked formidable.
To a Cadian, they looked disgraceful.
Creed's thoughts turned, unwillingly, to Cadia.
Cadia. The Gatekeeper of the Imperium. The fortress world that stood at the mouth of the Eye of Terror and stared into hell without blinking.
A world where war was not a profession, it was life. Children learned weapon discipline before they learned politics. Civilians drilled with lasguns because there were no true civilians, only soldiers waiting for orders. Every street, hab-block, and field had been shaped by ten thousand years of standing between mankind and the horrors of the Warp. The planet didn't breed men and women, it forged warriors.
And Ursarkar E. Creed was one of Cadia's finest.
He had not been born into noble comfort or raised in some polished academy far from danger. As a boy, Creed had been found among the ruins of Kasr Gallan by the Cadian 8th and taken into the regiment's youth corps. There, amid drills, punishment, hunger, and the brutal expectations of Cadian military life, he learned the first lessons that would define him: watch everything, waste nothing, and never give an enemy the battle he wants
He had risen through the ranks of the Cadian 8th with unusual speed, not through bloodline or patronage, but through discipline, endurance, and a mind built for war. Even as a young officer, Creed had earned a reputation for seeing battlefields differently from the men around him. He became the youngest commissioned officer to serve in the Cadian 8th Regiment, one of the most respected formations among Cadia's famed Shock Troopers.
Even among the rigid ranks of the Astra Militarum, Creed's tactical brilliance had begun to attract attention. His victories were sometimes dismissed as "impossibly lucky" by men who did not understand that luck could be manufactured by planning ten moves ahead.
And now, he stood in a den of slack-jawed PDF troops playing cards on duty.
"If the 8th had power armor like this," he muttered, "we'd roll through a Black Legion battalion before breakfast."
He strode toward the nearest group of soldiers huddled around a makeshift table.
The soldiers noticed him too late. One looked up from his cards. Another tried to hide a lho-stick behind his gauntlet, which only made the smoke more obvious.
Creed's voice cracked across the rampart like a las-shot.
"What in the Emperor's name are you doing?"
The card players froze.
"Are you soldiers or hab-trash in borrowed armor? Get on your feet. Weapons checked. Helmets sealed. Eyes outward. Have you forgotten your duty? You pathetic swines!"
The soldiers flinched. Several straightened on instinct. Old habits, half-remembered training, and the sheer violence of Creed's tone dragged them upright before thought could interfere.
Then hesitation returned.
Creed was not wearing power armor. He carried no local command insignia. He was not one of their officers. He was an outsider in a battered Guard uniform, speaking as if the fortress already belonged to him.
One soldier sneered and tossed a card onto the crate.
"Piss off," he said. "A cheap paper-armored Guardsman doesn't get to lecture us."
Creed did not react outwardly. Inside, he was already counting the seconds it would take to drop the fool with a lasbolt and use his body as cover if the rest became hostile.
On Cadia, that insolence would have earned punishment harsh enough to be remembered for generations. If the man was lucky, he would have been sent to a penal detail. If he was unlucky, his squad would have watched the commissar make an example of him.
But this wasn't Cadia. Creed had no authority here.
A voice cut through the tension.
"Ursarkar E. Creed."
Creed turned at the sound of his name.
A young man approached with an easy stride that did not match the reaction he caused. The power-armored soldiers snapped to attention so quickly that several nearly knocked over the card crate.
Creed took note of that. He noticed the silence that followed. He noticed the way even the mouthy soldier lowered his eyes.
The young man stopped before him. His posture was casual, but his eyes were not. They were sharp, focused, and far too calm for someone standing in the Underhive amid a fortress full of barely disciplined men and impossible technology.
"Qin Mo," the young man said. "No need for introductions. I already know who you are."
Creed narrowed his eyes.
That was not normal. He was not a sector-famous lord general. Officially, he was a captain of the Cadian 8th. Unofficially, he had already begun commanding far above his rank because competence had a way of becoming visible when people were dying. But his name should not have been known on some remote world in the Talon system.
Apparently, that had changed.
Creed regarded Qin Mo carefully and decided he was overthinking things.
There was no official salute, no formal Imperial gesture but this man carried himself with the authority of a commanding officer. Out of respect, Creed gave the Aquila salute, even though he technically did not have to. The Astra Militarum and a planetary defense force (PDF) were not of equal standing.
But considering the circumstances…
....
Qin Mo studied Creed in turn.
The Cadian looked exactly as he should: hard-eyed, compact, controlled, and dangerous in the way only a true battlefield commander could be. Not yet the legendary Lord Castellan of future history. Not yet the man whose name would become inseparable from Cadia's last stand. Younger. Less scarred. No cigar yet. No weight of a dying world sitting on his shoulders.
But the spark was there.
In another future, enemies would fail to break Creed and settle for breaking the planet beneath him. Under his command, Cadia would fall, but the Guard would not. That distinction mattered. It mattered enough that Qin Mo could not look at the man before him and see only a stranded officer.
The name Creed would be etched into history: hero, tactician.
Qin Mo had never expected someone like him to crash-land into his underhive.
"Why didn't you go to the spire?" Qin Mo asked. "Were you not concerned we might be rebels?"
Creed's gaze swept across the fortress again: the weapons, the shield generator, the power armor, the soldiers trying and failing to look disciplined under his scrutiny.
"You're no more undisciplined than most planetary defense forces," Creed replied. "Compared to what I saw above, the troops in the spire looked more like traitors than you do."
Qin Mo chuckled. "A strategist's insight. Now tell me what you need."
Creed did not waste time. He explained the situation clearly and without embellishment. Elements of the Cadian 8th had been reassigned to an Emperor-forsaken backwater system for defense duty. Their warship had been damaged beyond immediate use. The planetary governor had then loaded them onto a merchant vessel and sent them away like inconvenient cargo once their presence became politically troublesome. Then a warp storm trapped them in the Talon system, leaving them stranded and in need of aid.
Qin Mo listened without interruption. By the time Creed finished, he had already taken out a vox-communicator and offered it to him.
"Use this. Contact your superiors. Tell them Talon III is an unknown factor, and Talon II is entirely in rebel hands."
Creed did not immediately take it.
His mind moved through possibilities. Qin Mo sounded certain, but certainty was not evidence. The Cadian 8th had survived worse than corrupt planetary officials and rebel-held territory. If there were enemies on Talon II, Creed still had faith that Cadians could fight through them.
But faith was not a substitute for intelligence.
"We cannot repair your ship right now," Qin Mo continued. "In five or six days, that changes."
Creed looked at him.
Power armor was one thing. A fortress was another. Even a void shield, impossible as it seemed, did not mean this Underhive commander could repair a void-capable vessel. Starship repair required drydock infrastructure, trained void engineers, plasma-reactor expertise, hull-grade materials, and a thousand specialized systems the average planetary force could not even name correctly.
And yet Creed could not dismiss him.
The fortress had not been built by guesswork. The weapons were not ceremonial. The logistics around him moved with quiet purpose beneath the soldiers' surface-level disorder. Supply routes were marked. Ammunition stores were secured. Drones and machine systems operated in the background with a precision Creed had rarely seen outside major Imperial war fronts.
This was more than a militia that had found a cache of relics.
"Thank you," Creed said at last. "We will not forget your generosity."
Qin Mo's expression remained unreadable.
"I will repair your ship and give your men shelter," he said. "But I need something in return."
He gestured toward the assembled troops.
The power-armored soldiers had formed up into something that resembled a line if viewed from far enough away and with enough charity. Their equipment was excellent. Their posture was not. A few stood too close together. One had forgotten to secure a side latch on his armor. Another kept glancing toward the card table as if regretting the unfinished hand.
Creed understood immediately.
Qin Mo continued. "I need military regulations drafted from scratch. Training programs. Discipline standards. Tactical doctrine. I do not expect you to turn them into Cadian Shock Troopers overnight, but I want them moving in that direction."
That explained a great deal.
Qin Mo had weapons. He had industry. He had frighteningly advanced logistics. What he lacked was the old, ugly, essential foundation of any real army: discipline so deeply drilled into soldiers that they obeyed before fear could argue.
Qin Mo could build armor. Creed could build soldiers.
"Discipline has never been their strength," Qin Mo added, as if admitting an engineering fault. "Even Albert, commander of the 31st Regiment, once tried sneaking out at night for a 'casual stroll' in the middle of wartime restrictions."
Creed's eyebrow twitched.
Qin Mo ignored it.
"Grey is a good soldier, but he was never educated as a commander. Klein has formal training, but his ideas about military management are… flexible. Too flexible. These men can fight. They have held formation under fire. They understand shock insertion tactics better than they understand parade-ground order. But if I build them better weapons without building better habits, I am only creating better-armed idiots."
Creed almost smiled. Almost.
"I need to report to my superiors first," he said.
He still did not know whether Qin Mo could repair the ship. He still did not know whether Talon II and Talon III were truly as compromised as claimed. He also had his own chain of command, and Cadian discipline did not vanish because the situation had become strange.
Qin Mo nodded, as if he had expected nothing else.
Creed opened his mouth to say more.
The teleport harness activated before he could speak.
Blue light folded around him again.
"Throne damn—"
The fortress vanished.
....
Lower Hive
Creed rematerialized beside the transport ship.
This time he landed with his hand already near his weapon and his balance properly set. The transition still made his stomach twist, but he buried the reaction before anyone saw it.
A tense standoff had formed in his absence. His Cadians had drawn weapons. Qin Mo's troops had done the same. Lasguns, hellguns, and heavier weapons remained aimed low enough to avoid immediate bloodshed, but high enough that one wrong twitch would change that.
Of course.
Any proper soldier who saw his commanding officer vanish without explanation would assume an attack, a trap, or both.
"Where did you go, sir?" one of his men asked. His lasgun remained trained on the nearest power-armored warrior.
Creed exhaled slowly. Then, to the obvious confusion of his troops, he gave a dry chuckle.
"I just had a bizarre adventure," he muttered.
The Cadians stared at him. Creed ignored them and boarded the transport.
After a moment of hesitation, his men followed one by one, still casting wary glances back at Qin Mo's forces. None of them lowered their weapons completely until the ramp began to rise
....
Aboard the Sword-class Frigate
Back aboard the ship, Creed wasted no time filing his report.
He described Tyrone in precise terms: the Underhive fortress, the shield generator, the mass-issued power armor, the strange teleportation technology, the undisciplined but heavily equipped troops, and Qin Mo's claim that he could repair a voidship within days.
He did not exaggerate. He did not soften the implications. He stated what he had seen and let the facts remain as disturbing as they were.
His superior officer listened in silence until the report ended. Only then did the man exhale.
"This is highly suspicious," the officer admitted. "But we do not have a choice. We have to go to the Underhive."
Creed frowned.
"Why?"
The officer's expression darkened.
"Because our forces on Talon II and Talon III have both been attacked."
Creed's jaw tightened.
The officer continued, voice lower now.
"And compared to Talon II, the situation on Talon III is worse. Far worse. There are signs of corruption."
A chill moved through Creed's spine.
He had heard that word before. Every Cadian had. Corruption was never just a military problem. It was rot beneath the skin of reality, a warning that the enemy might not merely be rebels, xenos, or traitors with guns.
His hands curled into fists.
"Understood," Creed said.