After thorough deliberation, the Cadian 8th made its choice.
They would descend into the underhive of Tyrone.
It was not a decision made out of trust. Creed trusted very little about this world, and even less about the strange army rising beneath it. But he had weighed the alternatives with the cold discipline Cadia had beaten into him since childhood.
The surface authorities were compromised, incompetent, or both. The lower hive had already become a battlefield. If the reports were accurate, then whatever real strength remained on Tyrone was no longer sitting in the spires beneath gilded ceilings and devotional frescoes.
It was below.
If the world above had rotted, then the true battle would begin in the dark.
The merchant captain, predictably, decided to accompany them. Not out of duty. Not out of honor. Certainly not out of piety, though he made a point of touching the Aquila at his throat whenever anyone important looked his way. He came because battlefields produced salvage, and salvage meant thrones.
To a man who measured war in trade goods, broken machinery, promissory rights, and whatever could be pried loose before the Munitorum noticed, the underhive was not merely a war zone. It was opportunity wrapped in ash and blood.
Once more, the Cadians entered the hive through the gaping wound their transport had torn into its armored exterior.
The breach had not been repaired. Its edges remained jagged, layers of plasteel, ceramite, and structural bracing peeled outward where the shuttle's forced entry had bitten through the hull. Heat leaked from exposed conduits. Warning runes flickered uselessly across cracked panels. Emergency seals had tried and failed to close around the damage, leaving the entrance like a cauterized wound in the hive's skin.
Armed sentries halted them immediately.
No one shouted. No one pointed weapons in panic. The guards moved with the brisk, practiced efficiency of men who had repeated this process too many times to waste breath on theater. Each Cadian was inspected, logged, and strapped into a teleportation stabilizer by soldiers whose armor bore fresh scratches, old burns, and unit markings Creed did not recognize.
The devices locked around their torsos and limbs with cold clamps. Rune-lights flickered from red to amber, then steady green.
Creed disliked it at once.
Teleportation was never something a sane infantry officer took lightly. Even sanctioned teleportarium systems carried risks. This field kit looked too new, too clean, and far too casually handled by men who should have been treating such technology with incense, prayers, and Mechanicus oversight.
Before he could ask who had authorized its use, the world vanished.
For a fraction of a second, Creed felt his stomach drop, his bones hum, and the air around him fold inward. Then sound returned in a rush.
He stood within New Kato.
Creed had expected the same young commander from yesterday to greet them. Instead, a different figure waited at the receiving platform.
The man wore power armor that had clearly seen battle, but he carried himself with the alert restraint of someone who expected violence at any moment and would be disappointed only if it arrived from the wrong direction. His eyes moved over the Cadians, counted them, assessed their weapons, and dismissed the merchant captain in the same glance.
He wasted no time.
"Grey," he said, voice clipped and efficient. "No need for introductions on your end. I already know who you are. The Legion Commander briefed me."
Without offering his hand, waiting for questions, or giving the merchant captain a chance to ingratiate himself, Grey turned on his heel and led them deeper into the city.
The Cadians followed.
They expected the underhive.
Every soldier of the Cadian 8th had heard enough stories to form an image: collapsed hab-blocks leaning over filth-choked alleys, sump pools bubbling with chemical waste, mutants picking over corpses, gangers watching from broken windows, and starving families huddled beneath pipework that dripped poison instead of water. That was the underhive most Imperial soldiers knew. A place abandoned by law, reason, sanitation, and hope.
New Kato was nothing like that.
The city was clean. Efficient. Alive.
Not clean in the decadent manner of a spire district, where servants polished marble floors beneath golden saints while nobles complained about the smell of humanity rising from below.
New Kato was clean in the way a fortress was clean: functional, maintained, and stripped of anything that did not serve survival. Streets had been cleared of rubble and reinforced against collapse. Drainage channels ran beneath metal grates instead of spilling into the open. Power cables were bundled overhead in organized lines. Every intersection had sightlines. Every major avenue could become a kill zone within seconds.
There were no vagrants. No idle crowds. No half-starved mobs waiting for a ration distribution to turn violent. Every person Creed saw was working. Some hauled armor plating toward newly raised barricades.
Others repaired weapons at mobile benches. Squads drilled in formation under the hard eyes of instructors. Children carried crates of sealed filters under the supervision of adults armed with lascarbines. Even the civilians moved with the quick, purposeful habits of people who had learned that wasted motion could become wasted lives.
A war machine was being built here.
No, Creed corrected himself as he watched a column of armored laborers march past with synchronized precision.
A war machine had already been built. Now it was learning how to move faster.
A mechanical whirring cut through the air.
The Cadians reacted as one. Hands shifted toward lasguns. Boots adjusted stance. Shoulders turned by instinct, creating overlapping arcs of fire before anyone gave an order.
A hovering drone drifted from between two reinforced buildings. It was compact, armored, and ugly in the way good weapons often were. Its central chassis rotated soundlessly while optical sensors swept over the group. Heavy bolters folded out from recessed housings and tracked the Cadians with calm mechanical precision.
Creed's eyes narrowed.
Every instinct screamed at him to take cover, identify weak points, and prepare to destroy the machine before it opened fire. He did none of those things. Cadia had taught him that discipline mattered most when every nerve wanted speed.
He held position.
The drone scanned them. A thin fan of pale light passed over armor seals, weapons, packs, faces, and identification tags. The machine lingered briefly on the merchant captain, who went very still and tried to look less profitable.
Then the bolters withdrew.
The drone turned away and resumed its patrol as if the Cadians had already ceased to matter.
Creed exhaled slowly through his nose.
Security measures were necessary. Any Imperial commander worth his salt knew how quickly an underhive could rot from within. Mutants, cultists, infiltrators, saboteurs, and men with more greed than fear all thrived in darkness. But what troubled him was not the existence of the machine. It was the method.
How had it scanned them? What had it searched for? Who controlled it? Was there a gunner somewhere watching through a pict-feed, or was the drone deciding friend from foe on its own?
That question sat in Creed's mind like a live grenade.
His superior officer caught his eye and gave the smallest possible nod.
Ignore it. Focus on the mission.
Creed obeyed. Suspicion could wait. Discipline could not.
Grey spoke without turning.
"The Legion Commander has assigned you quarters. Fresh water is freely available. Food will be delivered by logistics servitors."
Creed raised an eyebrow.
Fresh water freely available was already strange enough to make several Cadians exchange doubtful glances. Servitors delivering meals was stranger still. The Imperium used servitors for labor, maintenance, punishment, and tasks that required obedience without judgment. They did not usually hover around soldiers like attentive mess staff.
Grey continued in the same unchanging tone.
"No matter where you are, if a logistics servitor detects that your stomach is empty, it will provide you with a meal."
That statement was so absurdly specific that Creed almost stopped walking.
At that moment, a black sphere descended from above and hovered in front of them.
Creed's hand twitched toward his laspistol.
"By the Emperor," one of the Cadians muttered. "What is that thing?"
The servitor was unlike any Creed had ever seen. It had no exposed human skull, no lobotomized face, no dangling flesh, no visible augmetic spine bolted into a crude labor frame. It was a sleek black sphere, smooth as polished obsidian, with spindly cable-like appendages folded neatly around its body. Sensors opened across its shell in narrow slits. Each movement was precise, economical, and completely devoid of the clumsy twitching common to servitor wetware.
For one uneasy moment, several Cadians thought of Tyranids. Not because the machine resembled a living bioform directly, but because something about its smooth efficiency and insectile appendages brushed too close to memories of xenos organisms built for a single purpose.
Then they saw the Aquila.
The twin-headed eagle of the Imperium had been stamped across the sphere's shell in clean white metal, unmistakable and reassuring to any loyal servant of the Throne.
Tension eased at once.
A few men straightened. One made the sign of the Aquila. The merchant captain visibly relaxed.
Only Grey knew the truth.
The Aquila had been added recently. It had not been part of the original design.
["Data input complete."]
The drone's voice was cold, synthetic, and toneless. It did not bow. It did not ask for permission. It simply logged whatever information it had collected, rotated in place, and drifted away into the disciplined motion of the city.
Creed said nothing.
He merely followed Grey deeper into New Kato and added another item to the growing list of things he would not mention until he understood whether mentioning them would get his regiment killed.
Eventually, they reached a large reinforced structure near the city's heart.
Their assigned quarters.
Calling it a barracks would have been too generous and too narrow at the same time. The building had once been some kind of underhive manufactorum or communal hab-block, but it had been gutted and rebuilt into a hardened military shelter. Internal walls had been removed to create open sleeping halls. Support columns were wrapped in fresh alloy. Weapon racks lined one side. Water stations stood along the other. Ventilation ducts hummed with clean filtered airflow that lacked the usual underhive stink of rot, mold, and chemical runoff.
The Cadians were assigned space without separation by rank, gender, or seniority.
That might have offended soldiers from softer worlds. It did not offend Cadia. Cadians lived, trained, slept, bled, and died together. Privacy was a luxury. Readiness was not.
As Grey turned to leave, Creed called after him.
"Trooper."
Grey stopped.
Creed studied the armor with professional interest. The suit was similar to the standard pattern worn by several New Kato soldiers, but not identical. The plating was cleaner in its lines, the joints more compact, and a shoulder-mounted cannon rested over one pauldron like a predator waiting to wake.
"Your power armor," Creed said, "aside from the additional shoulder-mounted cannon, how does it differ from the others? Is it stronger?"
Grey paused, helmet angled slightly toward him.
"This armor was hand-forged by the Legion Commander himself. It is superior to the mass-produced variants."
Creed frowned.
"Is he a Tech-Priest?" he asked. "Why would his craftsmanship make it better?"
Grey did not answer. He simply turned and walked away.
Creed watched him leave, expression unreadable.
This place is strange, he thought. Every part of it is strange.
Clean underhive streets. Autonomous gun platforms. Logistics machines wearing fresh Aquilas. Power armor issued as if it were flak plating. A commander who apparently forged wargear by hand and inspired men to speak of him with the restrained certainty others reserved for saints, generals, or loaded artillery.
Creed kept his suspicions to himself.
Suspicion was useful only when paired with patience.
He pulled a worn data-slate from his belt, sat on the edge of an assigned bunk, and began drafting a formal training regimen.
His superior officer watched him for several minutes before speaking.
"You are taking this far too seriously."
Creed did not look up. His stylus continued moving across the slate.
"I have to take this seriously," he said. "The lack of discipline here makes my skin crawl."
The other officer glanced toward the open doorway, where another squad of New Kato soldiers marched past in power armor that would have been priceless by most Guard standards.
"They seem disciplined enough to me."
"They are motivated," Creed replied. "They are brave. They are well equipped. That is not the same as discipline."
He tapped the slate once, bringing up a rough outline of drills.
"Their spacing varies by squad. Their sentries watch obvious approaches and ignore secondary sightlines. Their officers tolerate too much informal chatter around command points. Their troops trust their equipment to save them. That last habit will kill men faster than enemy fire."
His superior's mouth twitched. "You have been here less than an hour."
"Yes," Creed said. "And I already have enough work for a month."
For the next several days, Creed refined his training protocols.
He did not begin with speeches. Speeches were for morale, and morale was not the immediate problem. He observed first. He toured the underhive garrisons, watched patrol rotations, inspected barricades, studied ammunition distribution, and spoke with squad leaders who were either too proud to admit weaknesses or too exhausted to hide them.
New Kato's soldiers were not cowards. That became clear quickly. Many were survivors of sieges, massacres, and underhive battles that would have broken less stubborn men. They obeyed Qin Mo's officers with fierce loyalty. They maintained their weapons. They adapted quickly to new equipment. They understood the terrain because they had bled across it.
But they had not been raised in a fortress-world culture where discipline began before memory.
They leaned on personal bonds. They improvised well, but sometimes too readily. Their officers trusted initiative more than procedure. Their squads fought like packs of veterans bound by shared suffering, not like regiments drilled to move as one body under fire. That made them dangerous, but also uneven.
Eventually, Creed himself was issued a suit of standard power armor.
The process was handled with the same unsettling efficiency as everything else in New Kato. A logistics drone delivered the armor frame, scanned him, adjusted the internal harness, and provided a clipped instructional summary before drifting away to correct some other deficiency in the city.
The suit fit.
That disturbed him almost as much as the fact that it existed.
It was not Astartes armor, nor Sororitas plate, nor any sacred relic pattern Creed had seen depicted in Munitorum archives. It was human-scale power armor built for mass issue: practical, sealed, reinforced, and brutally effective. The joints responded smoothly. The weight vanished once the servo-muscles engaged. His visor displayed squad position, ammunition count, local air toxicity, structural integrity warnings, and enough battlefield information to make a junior officer believe himself omniscient if he lacked sense.
Creed spent three hours learning its limits before he trusted it enough to walk normally.
Despite his efforts, the higher-ranking officers of New Kato remained skeptical of his proposed training reforms.
Most had heard of the Cadians. Even in the underhive, the reputation of Cadia carried weight. The Cadian Shock Troops were the Astra Militarum's iron standard, soldiers raised beneath the shadow of the Eye of Terror, trained from childhood to hold the line against horrors that would send lesser regiments into prayer or madness.
But respect did not equal obedience.
New Kato's officers had their own war doctrine now. Their soldiers wore power armor. Their supply lines were managed by tireless machines. Their commander could reshape metal and deploy technologies that made conventional Imperial doctrine look painfully slow. To many of them, Creed's insistence on formations, discipline, spacing, field procedure, and repetitive drills seemed outdated. Useful, perhaps, for lasgun infantry in flak armor. Less obviously useful for soldiers who could survive hits that would vaporize ordinary Guardsmen.
Creed found that attitude intolerable.
Power armor did not make a soldier immortal. It merely made his mistakes louder and more expensive.
It was not until Creed visited the 47th Regiment that he encountered a senior officer willing to argue honestly instead of politely ignoring him.
Klein met him in the regiment's camp, standing near a row of armored firing positions while soldiers lounged, repaired weapons, traded insults, and carried crates with the relaxed disorder of men who believed the worst had already passed.
Creed walked through the camp in his newly issued armor and did not bother softening his assessment.
"With all due respect," he said, "your troops are undisciplined. Severely so."
Klein, commander of the 47th, arched an eyebrow. He was not a polished parade officer. The underhive had filed off anything decorative long ago. His uniform was practical, his armor scarred, and his expression carried the weary patience of a man who had survived enough disasters to know that offense was a luxury.
"The 47th is no longer a frontline assault unit," Klein replied. "We serve primarily as advisors and fortress troops now. I admit standards have slipped. That fault belongs to my men and to me."
He gestured around the camp.
"Our duty is to garrison the Legion Commander's fortress. For that role, strict parade-ground discipline is not essential."
Creed stopped walking.
"By the Emperor," he said, turning to face Klein fully. "How do you expect to protect him with this level of discipline? More importantly, how does he trust you to?"
Klein's mouth curved into a tired smirk.
"He does not actually need protection."
Creed stared at him.
Klein shrugged. "He is stronger than all of us combined."
Creed almost scoffed.
He had heard variations of that nonsense before. Every world had its hero. Every regiment had its beloved commander. Every survivor spoke of the person who had dragged them through hell as if the Emperor had personally issued him a halo. Gratitude distorted judgment. Fear did the same.
No commander was invulnerable.
No leader was above the need for guards, discipline, and layered security.
Before Creed could reply, something caught his attention.
A soldier stood near a weapons rack, laughing with two others. The face was familiar. So was the arrogant tilt of his chin.
The same man who had insulted him days earlier.
Creed strode over.
The conversation died before he arrived.
"Funny," Creed said. "Weren't you the one who called me a 'paper-armored grunt' yesterday?"
The soldier stiffened. He was young, broad-shouldered, and still too proud of surviving the underhive to understand that survival did not make him untouchable.
"Apologies, sir," he said.
The apology was correct. The tone was not. His eyes flicked over Creed's new power armor, and a smirk formed despite his better judgment.
"But now that you've ditched the paper suit, I suppose you've earned the right to talk to me."
Several nearby soldiers went very still.
Creed's eyes narrowed.
The soldier held his gaze. Pride, resentment, and curiosity all wrestled across his face. He was not stupid enough to draw a weapon. He was stupid enough to think armor changed the balance between them.
Klein considered intervening.
Then he decided against it.
If Creed could not handle one mouthy trooper without turning the camp into a disciplinary disaster, then he had no business training anyone in New Kato. And if the soldier needed a lesson, better that he receive it from a Cadian than from Klein's temper.
Creed spoke quietly.
"Attack me."
The soldier blinked. "Sir?"
"Attack me."
A flicker of uncertainty crossed the man's face. "I don't think—"
"Attack me, coward."
The insult struck like a blade.
Every soldier in the camp had endured overwhelming odds against hordes of cultists, mutants, and worse. Many had held ground while outnumbered dozens to one. Some had watched friends torn apart and still kept firing. None of them considered themselves cowards.
The soldier's face flushed dark.
With a snarl, he lunged.
Creed moved once.
No flourish. No wasted motion. He twisted inside the attack, seized the soldier's arm, turned his own armored weight against him, and sent him over his shoulder in a clean, brutal throw.
The soldier hit the dirt hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. Dust jumped around him. His weapon clattered loose. He lay there dazed, staring up at the underhive ceiling as if surprised gravity had chosen sides.
Silence held for one heartbeat.
Then Klein sighed and hauled the man back to his feet by the back of his armor.
"Avoid that Cadian from now on," Klein said.
The soldier coughed, wheezed, and nodded with sudden sincerity.
Creed exhaled and revised his assessment of the regiment.
These men were not useless. Far from it. They had courage, camaraderie, initiative, and bonds forged by desperate battle. But those same bonds had curdled into complacency in the quieter spaces between wars. They tolerated too much from one another because each man remembered what the others had survived. They mistook shared suffering for readiness.
Creed understood that temptation.
He also knew it killed soldiers.
He returned to his quarters and began rewriting his programs from the ground up.
A single uniform regimen would not work. The regiments of New Kato differed too greatly in experience, equipment, temperament, and battlefield role. Some needed basic formation discipline. Others needed kill-zone drills. Others needed to learn how to coordinate power-armored infantry with drones, armor, and automated fire support without bunching up like idiots under artillery.
He tailored new protocols for each regiment based on observation rather than theory.
For the fortress troops: strict sentry rotations, rapid response drills, internal breach containment, and overlapping fields of fire inside corridors.
For frontline infantry: spacing discipline, suppression patterns, advance under shield cover, and squad-level coordination while wearing power armor.
For veterans grown too comfortable with improvisation: command hierarchy reinforcement, emergency fallback procedures, and punishments for treating "initiative" as an excuse to ignore orders.
For the newest recruits: weapons safety, basic movement, bayonet work, and the grim Cadian art of remaining useful while terrified.
Creed would hammer discipline into them one squad at a time if he had to. Not because he admired New Kato. Not because he trusted its machines. Not because he understood Qin Mo.
Because soldiers who lacked discipline died badly, and the enemies of mankind never stopped coming simply because men had survived yesterday.
But before he could fully implement the programs, the city changed around him.
Vox traffic sharpened. Patrol drones accelerated along their routes. Logistics servitors diverted from routine supply work to ammunition distribution. Officers who had been arguing over training schedules suddenly turned toward command channels. Somewhere deeper in New Kato, warning tones began to pulse through the reinforced streets.
Creed looked up from his data-slate.
Every Cadian in the barracks did the same.
The underhive did not panic. It armed itself.
War had come again.