"You are not needed for now," Qin Mo ordered.
Grey, who had been closing in with his squad to provide immediate support, acknowledged without argument. His armor dipped once in confirmation before he disengaged and redirected toward the collapsing enemy flank.
Qin Mo had prepared for the worst-case scenario. He had expected the fallen Knight to retain enough motive power for one last act of spite, or for its corrupted machine spirit to lash out through damaged systems after the pilot was no longer capable of command.
It was no longer necessary.
The battlefield had already turned decisively in their favor.
With the immediate threat contained, Qin Mo strode toward the ruined husk of the fallen Knight. The war engine had been magnificent once, a towering relic of Mechanicum craft and noble vanity, built to stride across battlefields like a walking fortress. Now it lay broken across the churned earth, one leg twisted beneath its body, armor plates split open, hydraulics bleeding pressure in steaming bursts.
Smoke curled from the shattered helm. Warning lights flickered beneath cracked vision slits. Somewhere inside the machine, damaged systems kept trying to complete orders that no longer made sense.
Then the Knight moved.
A dented arm twitched. Servo-bundles screamed as failing hydraulics forced the colossal limb upward for a final, desperate strike. The motion was slow by the standards of battle, but the mass behind it was enough to flatten a tank.
Qin Mo stopped walking and raised one hand.
The air around the limb distorted. Not with theatrical light or mystic symbols, but with force applied so precisely that the Knight's arm froze mid-swing as if caught inside invisible machinery. Pistons strained. Armor buckled around the shoulder joint. The entire frame shuddered as the machine fought against a grip it could neither identify nor break.
Qin Mo flicked his fingers.
Metal screamed. The arm tore free from the Knight's torso in a shower of sparks, severed cabling, and gouting hydraulic fluid. The detached limb crashed into the ground hard enough to throw mud, ash, and fragments of armor in every direction.
The Knight lurched violently, its gyroscopic stabilizers trying and failing to compensate for the sudden loss of mass. Before it could collapse completely, Qin Mo reached deeper. His will slid through armor, support struts, actuator housings, and the dense internal skeleton beneath.
The alloys answered.
Skeletal braces twisted. Joints locked. Cracked plating folded inward around key mechanisms, pinning them in place. The crippled war machine settled with a groan, no longer restrained by chains, clamps, or battlefield wreckage, but by the simple fact that Qin Mo had decided it would not move again.
Only then did he climb.
He ascended the wreckage with steady, unhurried steps, using torn armor seams and buckled plates as footholds. The Knight's surface was hot beneath his boots. Coolant dripped in greasy streams from ruptured conduits. The stink of burned insulation, scorched flesh, and machine oil thickened as he reached the ruined helm.
The cockpit was barely intact. Its armored shell had been crushed inward, leaving the command throne surrounded by sparking cables, broken display panels, and leaking fluid lines. What had once been a sacred throne of war now resembled a butchered shrine.
Inside, strapped into the command cradle, was the pilot.
Impaled.
A jagged shard of internal plating had driven through his abdomen and pinned him against the harness. Blood ran down the reinforced flight suit in dark sheets, gathering beneath the throne before dripping into the machine's lower systems. His breaths came in ragged pulls, wet and shallow, each one scraping at the edge of death.
"Kill… me…" the pilot gasped. His voice emerged through cracked lips and a damaged vox-bead. "Let me die… with it…"
Qin Mo ignored the plea.
His gaze moved over the man's armor instead. The flight suit was reinforced with ceramite plates, cobalt-blue beneath the blood and grime. A stylized avian marked the pauldrons. Real feathers, artificial plumes, and ritual scraps decorated the helm and limbs, the kind of heraldry that would have looked noble in a parade and obscene in a cockpit full of gore.
A Scion of the Order of the Omniscient Mind.
So his suspicion had been correct. The Knight House had not merely broken ranks. It had been touched by corruption.
Even now, Qin Mo could feel something foul lingering in the machine. Not a soul, not in the human sense, but a polluted pattern of command-impulses, ancestral imprints, oath-rituals, combat memories, and machine instinct twisted into hatred. The Throne Mechanicum bound knight and engine together in ways the Imperium treated as sacred tradition. In a fallen House, that bond could become a channel for madness.
Some corrupted Knights continued fighting after their pilots died. Some learned to hate through the echo of dead nobles, broken oaths, and whatever poison had seeped into their machine spirits. Given enough time, a war engine could become less a tool than a corpse that refused to stop killing.
Qin Mo had no intention of leaving this one intact.
His voice remained calm. "Talon II is a Forge World, isn't it? Is your House based there? How many Knights do you still have?"
The pilot's eyes fluttered open. Pain had stripped most of the pride from him, but not all of it. With the last strength left in his ruined body, Aelann spat at Qin Mo's feet.
The gesture was weak. The blood-tinged saliva struck the cockpit floor well short of its target.
Qin Mo raised his hand.
A deep metallic groan rolled through the Knight's frame. The cockpit walls bent inward by a hand's breadth. Outside, the immobilized chassis compressed around its core systems, the internal scaffolding twisting under pressure. Warning runes flashed across cracked panels. The vox-feed emitted a distorted shriek as the damaged machine spirit fought uselessly against its own body being folded around it.
Aelann's defiance broke at once.
"Fi-five Knights!" he gasped, eyes wide with animal terror. "Please… don't… don't torture us. Just make it quick…"
"I can grant you that," Qin Mo said. "But first, one more answer."
He leaned closer, and the ruined cockpit seemed to shrink around the dying pilot.
"How long before the rest of your House arrives?"
"They won't." Aelann swallowed blood. "They will never come… I was the only one in my family who followed… the Lord of Wisdom…"
The Lord of Wisdom.
The title settled into the air like a contaminant. A treasonous whisper dressed as revelation. A name that belonged to the kind of power that offered knowledge, ambition, and control while charging the soul afterward.
Qin Mo had heard enough.
He stepped back from the cockpit and climbed down from the wreckage. Behind him, Aelann tried to say something more, perhaps a prayer, perhaps another plea, perhaps the beginning of a confession. Qin Mo did not wait to hear it.
He raised his hand toward the polluted sky.
Lightning struck.
A single white bolt dropped from the clouds and hit the Knight dead center. The ruined war engine vanished inside a column of incandescent force. Armor boiled. Internal ammunition flashed. The command throne, the pilot, the corrupted machine spirit, and the last remnants of its defiled systems were consumed together.
When the glare faded, only molten slag remained.
Qin Mo descended from the smoking mound and turned his attention back to the wider battlefield. Enemy formations were breaking apart across the front, their icons flickering and vanishing on his tactical feed. He was ready to begin the next stage of slaughter when Klein's transmission reached him.
"The enemy is collapsing on all fronts."
Qin Mo looked toward the retreating traitors, then toward the direction of the Underhive fortress. "Initiate teleportation in one minute."
He turned away from the battlefield and vanished, returning to the fortress to power the teleportation arrays.
The First Legion did not need to win ground in the conventional way. It did not need to spend hours advancing through fire, securing roads, clearing minefields, establishing forward depots, and dragging ammunition through mud behind exhausted men. Qin Mo's army still needed supplies, discipline, and planning, but movement itself had become a weapon.
They did not march to victory. They placed themselves where victory would be decided.
The battle had already reached its conclusion. The Knight had fallen. The enemy's morale had shattered. What remained was not an army, not even a retreating force in proper order, but scattered groups of terrified men running through smoke, wreckage, and broken command channels in the hope of finding a gap that no longer existed.
Across the battlefield, panic consumed the traitors. Squads abandoned heavy weapons. Officers screamed contradictory orders into dead vox-channels. Mutants fled beside cult infantry, trampling their own wounded in the mud. The shared instinct that remained was simple.
Flight.
But there was no escape.
The First Legion's regiments materialized ahead of the retreating forces in successive waves of white light. Armored infantry appeared across roads, trenches, collapsed transit causeways, and open kill lanes. Heavy weapons locked into position before the traitors understood what had happened. Drones rose overhead, marking targets with cold precision.
The enemy ran directly into disciplined fire.
There was no battle after that.
Only execution.
....
Within the command chamber, Ursarkar E. Creed watched in silence.
His fingers tapped once against the edge of the console, then stilled. Around him, the hololithic display rendered the battlefield in layers of light: retreat paths, enemy casualty estimates, First Legion teleportation points, drone movements, ammunition expenditure, and projected collapse times. The data was clean, ruthless, and absurd.
Mass-scale teleportation.
The capability should not have existed in this form. Not here. Not in the hands of a force born from an abandoned hive world's survivors. Not with this speed, this reliability, and this operational confidence.
Destroying an enemy army outright was never easy. Creed knew that better than most living men. A true annihilation battle required preparation so extensive that lesser commanders mistook it for hesitation: strategic encirclement, layered reserves, secure supply routes, transport capacity, artillery positioning, air superiority, and enough discipline to hold every unit in place until the trap closed.
Warfare, as Creed understood it, was not won by courage alone. It was won by logistics, timing, terrain, morale, and the ability to make the enemy's choices worse than one's own.
The First Legion had changed the shape of that equation.
Out of ammunition? Teleport to resupply.
Surrounded? Teleport out before the encirclement became meaningful.
Enemy retreating? Teleport ahead and make retreat impossible.
Even though some enemy groups were still fleeing into the deeper ruins, Creed knew the outcome. Total annihilation had become a matter of time.
Mass teleportation alone would have been enough to terrify any competent commander. That was before considering the soldiers in powered armor, the automated fire support, the drone logistics, and the fact that Qin Mo seemed to treat all of it as unfinished work.
Creed turned to Klein.
"Who developed this technology?" he asked. His tone was conversational, but his eyes remained sharp. "Who manufactures your weapons? You wouldn't happen to have a Forge World supplying you, would you?"
Klein leaned against the console beside him and gave a humorless smirk.
"A Forge World? In Talon I?" He gestured broadly toward the hololithic display, toward the wounded world beneath all the glowing symbols. "You think someone just swooped in to help us? Look around, Creed. Our world is in ruins. Our war was fought in isolation. You are the first off-world visitors we have seen in millennia…"
His smirk thinned.
"And there are not many of you left either."
Creed let him talk. Klein had a habit of using words the way some men used smoke grenades. He filled the air with enough truth, bitterness, sarcasm, and local grievance that the exact answer became harder to isolate.
But Creed heard what mattered.
Klein had no intention of answering the question.
"Enough." Creed lifted one hand, cutting him off. "I understand."
He lowered his gaze back to the display, but his mind had already moved beyond the current battle.
The technology was not merely unusual. It was unregulated, unaccounted for, and strategically destabilizing. In the Imperium, any one of those qualities could invite suspicion. All three together could invite crusade.
A dull pressure formed behind Creed's eyes. He exhaled slowly.
If the High Lords of Terra learned of this in the wrong way… if the Mechanicus declared Talon a nest of techno-heresy… if an Inquisitor decided that Qin Mo's army represented an unacceptable anomaly… if the Astra Militarum were ordered to bring this world back into compliance by force…
How would that war unfold?
Against the full weight of the Imperial Guard, Qin Mo's forces would be vastly outnumbered. Even with their superior wargear, they lacked the manpower, industrial depth, void assets, and political legitimacy of the Imperium's great war machine. Standard Guardsmen from well-drilled regiments would outclass many of Qin Mo's soldiers in long-term discipline and institutional training. Elite formations such as the Cadian Shock Troopers would make every meter expensive.
But numbers alone would not decide the matter.
Teleportation would shatter conventional front lines. Powered infantry would overmatch ordinary troops in direct engagements. Drone logistics would blunt siege warfare. Qin Mo's command structure moved too quickly for standard bureaucratic attrition to grind it down cleanly.
Creed's thoughts continued with grim discipline.
The Imperium would escalate.
First the Astra Militarum. Then the Adeptus Mechanicus, demanding recovery or destruction of forbidden technologies. Skitarii legions. Knight Houses. Adeptus Astartes, if the matter became ideologically urgent enough. Titan Legions, if the war turned into a symbol that Terra could not ignore.
Each escalation would push Talon closer to extinction. Each Imperial victory would cost more than expected. Each First Legion counterstroke would deepen the fear that had justified the war in the first place.
It would become a war of attrition.
Then a war of extermination.
Despite the cold logic of his calculations, Creed found himself reluctant to imagine that day.
These were not heretics born from ambition, indulgence, or greed. They were survivors. Men and women who had been betrayed by their own governor, buried beneath their own hive, and left to die in a hopeless war. They had endured the Underhive, fought the heretics of an entire star system, and built something out of the ruin.
Dangerous, yes. Unregulated, certainly. But not damned by default.
Creed had seen enough real heresy to know the difference between corruption and desperation sharpened into strength.
He looked back to Klein.
"I must warn you," Creed said. "Your use of unregulated technology and weaponry… you know what that entails."
Klein met his gaze. For once, the sarcasm left his face.
"We know."
The answer was simple. Too simple for comfort.
Klein continued, voice steady. "But Talon I belongs to its true masters now. And from this day forward, it will thrive."
Creed narrowed his eyes.
"The true master of Talon," he said carefully. "The Emperor? Or your Lord Commander?"
Klein stared at him for half a second. Then he laughed, the sound sharp enough to cut through the tension in the chamber.
"The Emperor, of course." His grin returned, bright and mocking. "But tell me, Creed… did you have a different answer in mind?"
Creed scoffed and rolled his eyes, though the unease did not leave him. He turned back to the hololithic display, watching the last enemy formations disappear beneath the First Legion's advance.
The conversation was over.