At the center of the battle line, towering above smoke, wreckage, and screaming infantry, Sir Lannis Aelann drove his heavily refitted Errant-pattern Knight, Roaring Tempest, forward with reckless abandon.
He did not notice that his army's frontline was beginning to fold.
Around him, rebel infantry were being pushed back by disciplined counterfire. Armored carriers burned in the streets. Vox channels choked with warnings, pleas for support, and shouted corrections as units lost contact with one another. But inside the Throne Mechanicum, all of that distant disorder became background noise beneath the thunder of his own guns.
Twin Avenger Gatling Cannons spun to full speed.
The barrels became blurring circles of fire, discharging a continuous storm of high-velocity shells into the fortified buildings ahead. Ferrocrete walls that could have endured hours of conventional tank fire buckled in seconds. Armor plating peeled away from hab-block facades. Sandbagged firing points vanished beneath dust, flame, and shredded metal.
In three seconds, entire structures came apart.
Floors pancaked downward. Reinforcement beams snapped. Dozens of First Legion defenders disappeared beneath collapsing rubble, their last vox-clicks swallowed by the roar of falling stone and twisted steel.
A Knight was not merely a war machine. It was a walking disaster given armor, heraldry, and a reactor core. Standing over 12 meters (forty feet) tall, clad in layers of ceramite and adamantium, and powered by an ancient plasma heart, it could go toe-to-toe with entire armored columns and survive what would reduce lesser engines to burning wreckage.
In raw destructive output, a single Knight could rival a battle group of Leman Russ tanks. It could outpace them, outmaneuver them, and bring its weapons to bear with the terrifying precision of a noble warrior whose entire bloodline had been shaped around war.
Aelann relished the raw firepower at his disposal.
So did Roaring Tempest.
The Knight's machine-spirit pulsed through the Throne Mechanicum like a second heartbeat. Faster. Heavier. Beneath Aelann's seat, sacred circuits hummed in time with his rage, feeding it back into him through nerve-ports, command links, and old machine instincts that no tech-priest truly understood.
It was not a tool.
It was a presence. Cold, hungry, ancient, and horribly pleased.
Most Knights of House Lannis had machine-spirits that yearned for the old dance of close combat. They urged their pilots toward blade-work, lance charges, and honorable duels beneath banners stiff with incense and blood. Their spirits wanted the crush of melee, the scrape of chainblades, the shock of a titan's fist meeting another engine's armor.
Roaring Tempest was different.
It did not hunger for honor.
It hungered for annihilation.
It existed to erase.
"Burn! Die! All of you, die!"
Aelann roared as his cannons tracked a squad of enemy soldiers scrambling from a collapsing hab-block. The men moved with trained urgency, dragging a wounded comrade through smoke while their armor's gravitic projectors flickered under strain.
The majority of his rounds detonated around them. Shrapnel ripped through walls, tore chunks from the street, and filled the air with fragments hot enough to cut flesh from bone.
Yet not one soldier fell.
Aelann's blood boiled.
Above the squad hovered an unmanned combat drone, its underside shimmering with a faint distortion. The rounds had not missed. They had struck an invisible gravitic barrier, spent their force against it, and fallen away as flattened scraps of metal.
The defiance enraged him.
〈"Curse you!"〉
Aelann snarled through clenched teeth. Few things infuriated him more than enemies who refused to die properly.
Roaring Tempest agreed.
The Knight's vox-grille emitted a shriek that had not been commanded by any system, a warped echo of Aelann's fury dragged through machine-static and reactor-song. The sound rolled across the battlefield, making nearby infantry flinch even before the next volley began.
They would not tolerate this insult.
A deep resonant hum vibrated through the street as Roaring Tempest halted its advance. The Knight's legs locked into a braced firing posture, stabilizer claws biting through cracked ferrocrete. Armor plates shifted. Targeting cogitators aligned. The missile pod on its carapace rose into firing position.
One missile launched.
Then a second.
Then a third.
The warheads climbed in sharp arcs before curving downward toward their marked targets. Their guidance spirits corrected in flight, ignoring smoke, debris, and desperate countermeasures.
The impacts were not simple explosions. Each warhead struck like a localized artillery barrage, flattening dozens of meters in every direction. Fire spread outward in overlapping rings. Pressure waves smashed weakened walls inward. Loose armor plates, bodies, and broken weapons were hurled through the air.
The drone vanished inside the first blast.
When the smoke tore open, only fragments remained. Broken limbs, shattered power armor, and burning scraps of equipment rained across the street.
Aelann laughed.
He could feel Roaring Tempest laughing with him. Not in words. Not in sound. In pressure behind the eyes. In a surge through the throne-link. In the ecstatic purr of systems running hot and hungry.
The rhythmic spin of the Avenger Gatling Cannons, the tremor of missile impacts, the sight of fortifications collapsing before him, it was intoxicating.
His thoughts drifted backward, carried by the fury.
Back to Talon II.
Back to his childhood, when he had been a boy dueling with wooden sticks beneath faded banners, pretending to be an Imperial hero while his tutors spoke endlessly of honor, lineage, sacrifice, and blade-work.
He had never liked melee combat.
He had despised it.
Why charge with a chainblade when an enemy could be annihilated from a distance? Why risk damage to sacred armor by trading blows like a barbarian when superior firepower could reduce opposition to ash before they ever came within reach?
His family had disagreed.
They had called him a disgrace to House Lannis. They had mocked his preference for ranged war, shamed him for refusing the traditions of their Knightly line, and recited old oaths at him as though repetition could make stupidity noble.
House Lannis, like many Knight Houses, was steeped in codes older than the current masters who repeated them. To them, close combat was not merely a tactic. It was ceremony. Proof of courage. A sacred inheritance passed from pilot to pilot through blood, marriage, ritual, and the cold judgment of the Throne Mechanicum.
A true noble, they said, met his enemy blade to blade.
Aelann had wanted twin Avenger Gatling Cannons.
His relatives laughed until the day he bonded with Roaring Tempest.
That changed everything.
Unlike the other engines of his House, Roaring Tempest had not scorned him. It had not resisted his preferences or filled his dreams with visions of lances and chainswords.
It welcomed him.
Not with words. Not with sound. With pulses of emotion, flashes of vision, and the cold certainty of recognition. He remembered standing before the Throne Mechanicum while sacristans chanted litanies of activation, feeling something vast and old turn its attention upon him.
For the first time in his life, he felt seen.
As if the war machine had whispered directly into the buried places of his mind.
〈Yes. You will do.〉
In Roaring Tempest, Aelann found acceptance. Purpose. Freedom from household politics and dead traditions.
No rituals. No cowardly negotiations wrapped in noble language.
Just destruction, pure and uncompromising.
Together, they would carve their own path through the galaxy.
"My family talks of honor?"
Aelann scoffed as his Gatling Cannons unleashed another stream of fire.
"A craven lineage. Exiled from our homeworld because they lost a political struggle. And they dare speak of honor?"
House Lannis had once ruled a world. Then politics, betrayal, and pride had torn it from them. Other Houses had schemed better, fought dirtier, and survived with cleaner records. Now Lannis was reduced to another displaced noble house on a forgotten world in the galactic margins, exiles in all but name, clinging to ritual because ritual was cheaper than power.
His rage fed the Knight.
With every shot, they mocked the legacy of his bloodline.
With every demolished barricade, they rejected the ideals that had caged him.
"I AM THE BLADE OF FEAR!" Aelann bellowed. "FOR THE ARCHITECT OF FATE!"
Roaring Tempest surged forward. Each titanic step drove cracks through the street. Infantry scattered, some diving behind rubble, others simply running because instinct had overruled discipline.
A Leman Russ battle tank failed to reverse in time.
Roaring Tempest's foot came down on its hull. The tank collapsed with a tortured shriek of metal. Its turret snapped sideways. Internal munitions cooked off a heartbeat later, venting fire through every hatch.
Nearby soldiers screamed warnings.
Too late.
The Knight's next step came down among them. Men vanished beneath adamantium weight, pulverized before their bodies could finish falling.
Lasfire and shells struck Roaring Tempest's armor from every side. Most shots scorched paint, chipped heraldry, or sparked harmlessly against shielded plating. Aelann barely noticed. He had gone too deep into the slaughter, too far into the shared fury of pilot and machine.
He did not see the final obstacle until it was already in his path.
A shimmering tear opened in the smoke-choked street ahead. Space folded inward around it, edges flickering with controlled distortion rather than warp-light. The wound was precise, almost surgical, a breach forced through distance rather than a portal clawed open by sorcery.
From within it stepped a man.
Black and gold armor. An Aquila staff in one hand.
Qin Mo emerged onto the battlefield and looked directly at the rampaging Knight.
Roaring Tempest continued its slaughter behind the drifting curtain of smoke, but Qin Mo did not move. He watched the Knight's silhouette advance through fire and dust, saw weakened structures collapse from the force of its steps, saw squads vanish in seconds beneath shells, crushing weight, and concussive force.
The air stank of burning promethium, scorched insulation, and cooked meat.
The devastation was staggering.
Qin Mo's expression tightened.
"I should have planned for this," he muttered.
A Knight. Here. On this wretched backwater hellhole.
He had anticipated infantry hordes. Armored columns. Heretic artillery. Corrupted psykers. Even improvised super-heavy assets if the enemy grew desperate enough. But he had not specifically designed countermeasures for an Imperial Knight.
And why would he have?
Knight Houses were rare, politically tangled relics of feudal power, scattered through the Imperium like old war myths that still happened to own plasma reactors. Their engines required noble bloodlines, sacristan support crews, ritual infrastructure, replacement parts, oaths of allegiance, and a family legacy measured in steel and corpses.
None of that should have been here. Not on a forsaken world like this.
That had been his mistake. A mistake he would now correct.
Grey's voice crackled through Qin Mo's vox-link.
"The enemy battle line is in complete disarray."
Qin Mo's eyes remained fixed on Roaring Tempest.
"Excellent." He lifted his staff slightly. "Now let's put an end to this Knight."
Grey, Anruida, and Yoan altered course at once, moving toward Roaring Tempest's position through the broken streets. Grey advanced with practiced speed, power armor absorbing the uneven ground beneath him. Anruida shifted wide, searching for firing angles and fallback routes. Yoan kept to cover, his very presence a quiet weapon against anything touched by the Warp.
Aelann finally noticed Qin Mo standing in his path.
His response was the highest form of respect he understood.
He opened fire with both Avenger Gatling Cannons.
A hail of shells descended.
None reached Qin Mo.
His gravity shield caught them before impact. The air around him thickened into a distortion field. Rounds slowed, flattened, and burst into fragments against invisible pressure. Explosions bloomed around him, throwing smoke, sparks, and pulverized street material into the air.
Aelann grinned inside the cockpit.
Then his thermal sight cut through the smoke.
Qin Mo still stood there, unharmed.
Aelann's grin vanished.
Roaring Tempest advanced, cannons roaring, and then the world betrayed him.
Without warning, the Knight's right leg sank into the street.
Aelann's eyes widened. The hive's metal roadway had not collapsed. It had not broken beneath the Knight's weight. It was still there, visibly intact, still supporting rubble, corpses, and scattered debris.
It had simply stopped supporting Roaring Tempest.
"This is... IMPOSSIBLE!" Aelann screamed. "You're a daemon!"
He fought the controls. Servo-feedback slammed through the throne-link. The right leg dragged deeper as if the solid roadway had become liquid only for him. Warning runes multiplied across his vision. The machine-spirit snarled, offended and confused, trying to force weight through a surface that no longer obeyed familiar rules.
Aelann fired again.
Physics answered Qin Mo instead.
Gravity shifted. Projectile paths bent.
Hundreds of Gatling rounds screamed through the air, twisting out of their intended trajectory. They spiraled around Qin Mo like furious insects caught in a storm, then curved backward and slammed into Roaring Tempest itself.
The first impacts struck shoulder plating. The next punched into the hip assembly. More followed, hammering into seams, damaged joints, and exposed armature where the Knight's own movement had opened gaps in its protection.
A heartbeat later, secondary explosions rippled through the war machine. Ammunition cooked off inside a feed system. Armor plates blew outward. Internal alarms howled as Roaring Tempest's right arm crumpled at the elbow, torn open by the backlash of its own fire.
One Avenger Gatling Cannon broke free and crashed into the street with a shriek of rending steel.
Fire blossomed from the right knee actuator. Black smoke poured from the rear vents, oily and choking.
Inside the cockpit, Aelann was hurled sideways against his restraints. Sparks burst from the interface node. Pain flashed through the throne-link, converted into data and then fed back into his nerves as agony.
He tasted blood.
Qin Mo had not moved.
He did not need to. Space moved for him.
He raised one hand.
Aelann felt the pressure change. It was not wind. Not impact. Not the blunt force of artillery or the bite of a power weapon. It was an unseen weight settling over Roaring Tempest, precise and inexorable, as though the Knight had been placed beneath the boot of something far larger than itself.
Servos shrieked. Hydraulics buckled. The damaged right knee cracked with a sound like a splitting support column.
The remaining Gatling Cannon began to spool up.
Before Aelann could fire, Qin Mo twisted his wrist.
The weapon folded inward.
Its barrels crushed together like soft metal under an industrial press. The feed assembly imploded. Fragments burst outward, peppering Roaring Tempest's torso and punching through already-stressed plating.
Aelann screamed.
Not in pain, but in fury.
In denial. In disbelief.
He had never lost control of Roaring Tempest, not once.
But now the Knight shuddered beneath him. Its movements lagged behind his commands. Its machine-spirit howled through the throne-link, no longer with shared rage, but with confusion sharpened into something dangerously close to fear.
Then something else answered.
A presence ancient and vast stirred at the edge of perception, watching from within the opened rift. It did not speak. It did not interfere. It merely observed, and that silent attention made the ruined cockpit feel colder than any void.
Qin Mo took one step forward.
His voice entered the Knight's vox systems without permission, calm and unyielding, cutting through alarms, static, and Aelann's ragged breathing.
"You don't understand."
Roaring Tempest tried to rise. Its damaged leg failed. Metal screamed under the weight of Qin Mo's control.
Qin Mo looked up at the wounded Knight.
"This battlefield doesn't belong to you anymore."
He tightened his hand.
"It belongs to me."