"Well done!"
Adam stood at the center of the bridge, hands clasped behind his back, and gazed through the forward tactical display at the shattered husk of the enemy vessel.
The warship drifted in the void, broken-backed and venting atmosphere in pale streams that glittered briefly before freezing into nothing. Sections of its armored prow still glowed from internal fires. Ammunition stores continued to cook off in dull flashes beneath the torn plating, each detonation briefly illuminating the debris cloud around it.
A few minutes earlier, that same vessel had been charging toward Adam's command ship with its prow ram aimed like an executioner's blade. Now it was scrap.
A hololithic projection flickered to life before him. Static crawled across the image, then stabilized into Qin Mo's figure at the center of the tactical display.
Qin Mo's expression held calm satisfaction. His eyes moved once across the tactical readouts, the wreckage, the ship status icons, and finally Adam himself. Approval gleamed there, unmistakable and direct.
For a fleeting moment, Adam allowed himself the slightest smile. It vanished almost before it appeared. When he spoke, his voice was measured, disciplined, and carefully stripped of pride.
"I am unworthy of your praise, my lord. I allowed the situation to spiral beyond ideal parameters. The enemy warship reached ramming distance before we neutralized it."
"That is to be expected," Qin Mo said. His voice carried no irritation, no hidden rebuke. Only genuine, unforced admiration. "This was your first real engagement. Your first time commanding during actual void warfare. Even I have never participated in a true fleet battle. Your discipline and poise were exemplary."
His gaze lingered on Adam through the flickering hololith, unwavering and almost paternal.
"Your opponent was a seasoned void commander. Using his prow ram at close range was not desperation. It was a classic maneuver. Brutal, simple, and effective when the enemy hesitates. He had experience. You did not." Qin Mo's mouth curved faintly. "That difference can be corrected."
Adam lowered his eyes in acknowledgment. He had replayed the engagement already, though the last fragments of the enemy vessel still burned outside. He saw the errors clearly: the slight delay in adjusting lateral thrust, the second wasted salvo against the enemy's armored prow, the moment when his escorts had almost opened a gap in the wrong direction. Victory did not erase those details. If anything, victory made them sharper.
Qin Mo continued, not as a superior offering comfort, but as a commander stating what he believed to be true.
"You will learn. You will grow. Experience is accumulated through survival, and today you survived while destroying the enemy."
His expectations had been far more modest. These voidmen had trained for less than a year. As long as they could fire their weapons properly, maintain formation, and avoid destroying their own ships through panic or incompetence, that would have been enough for a first engagement.
Instead, they had functioned under pressure. They had adapted. They had triumphed.
"Your leniency is appreciated," Adam said, bowing his head slightly.
Qin Mo nodded once.
"Maintain your composure. Continue the orbital bombardment."
"By your will."
Then, as if remembering something only after the immediate matter of war had been settled, Qin Mo added, "None of our ships have been named."
Adam looked up. His eyebrows twitched in mild surprise before discipline smoothed his expression again.
Qin Mo glanced toward the surrounding tactical icons, where nameless vessels were represented only by hull numbers, displacement markers, and weapon status runes. "I had planned to assign names myself, but given your outstanding performance, you and your fellow captains shall have the honor of naming them."
For the first time since the engagement began, Adam did not answer immediately.
A ship's name mattered. Not in the superstitious way some void crews believed, though Adam knew enough about sailors to understand they would absolutely treat it that way. A name shaped identity. It turned a hull into a banner, a crew into a lineage, and a battle record into something men would invoke before charging into fire.
"We will require some time to deliberate," Adam said.
"No rush," Qin Mo replied. "Choose well."
The hololith dimmed and vanished, leaving only the soft hum of bridge machinery and the distant vibration of weapons systems cycling for another bombardment pass.
For several seconds, Adam remained motionless, staring at the empty space where Qin Mo's projection had been.
Then, despite himself, his lips curled into an uncontrollable smile.
He knew, as a devoted servant of the Angel, that he was not supposed to indulge in emotion. Pride was dangerous. Joy was distracting. Personal satisfaction was supposed to be ground down into obedience and offered back as service.
But he could not help it.
This was, without question, the most significant day of his life.
He had led his forces to annihilate the enemy fleet. He had executed his orders. He had preserved the fleet under his command.
And most importantly, he had received direct praise from Him.
A muffled cough came from one of the bridge officers.
Adam's expression snapped back into neutrality so quickly it might never have changed at all. He turned toward the crew pits, his voice returning to its usual calm, even cadence.
"Resume orbital bombardment."
The bridge answered at once. Targeting runes shifted. Weapon crews confirmed charge cycles. Below the fleet, Talon II turned slowly beneath them, its continents scarred by war and fire.
The guns began to speak again.
....
The Ground War
The battle was all but decided.
What remained was the inevitable purge of the defeated.
While the Talon fleet continued scouring the planet's major cities from orbit, ground regiments advanced to cleanse remaining strongholds, supply redoubts, command shelters, and whatever pockets of organized resistance had survived the opening strikes. Orbital fire had broken the enemy's back. Infantry and armor would now cut out the pieces still twitching.
Among those forces marched the newly re-formed 44th Talon Infantry Regiment.
The regiment was young in every meaningful sense. Most of its soldiers were fresh recruits. Many had never heard artillery fall near them before this campaign. Some still checked their equipment too often, their hands betraying nerves their faces tried to hide. Their officers had memorized doctrine, drilled formations, and reviewed Qin Mo's reforms until they could recite them under sleep deprivation, but theory was not the same as war.
Yet they carried themselves with fierce, almost superstitious determination.
They believed in their designation.
The legendary Lord Commander Qin Mo had once served in the 44th. Every soldier in the regiment knew that story. Some repeated it as inspiration. Others repeated it like a charm before battle. To them, the number was more than an administrative assignment. It was a sign of fortune, a thread tying them to victory, survival, and the impossible rise of the man they now followed.
Their objective was a fortified city set in a valley along the planet's equator. The city had been built into the terrain rather than upon it. Sheer cliffs guarded two sides. Ravines cut the approaches into narrow channels. Bulwark-style walls rose from stone foundations reinforced with plasteel, rockcrete, and old defense emplacements whose machine spirits had not yet learned the war was lost.
From above, the stronghold looked wounded but stubborn. Orbital bombardment had crushed its outer districts, shattered several power stations, and collapsed sections of its industrial quarter, but the main defenses still stood. Gun towers tracked movement across the valley. Lascannon nests watched the roads. Macro-cannon housings were buried into the slopes like iron teeth.
The 44th had already launched a direct assault against what auspex scans marked as the weakest quadrant. Hundreds of tanks and thousands of infantrymen had advanced beneath smoke cover and preparatory fire. For twenty-seven minutes, the valley had become a furnace.
Then the assault had broken.
The ground before the walls still smoked. Wrecked tanks lay at odd angles, some burning from within, others split open by direct hits. Bodies were scattered across the approach in lines that traced the failed advance more honestly than any map. Medicae teams had recovered who they could. The rest remained where they had fallen, charred by lasfire, torn by shrapnel, or crushed beneath retreating armor when panic briefly overtook formation discipline.
At that moment, the regiment's only truly experienced soldier stepped forward.
Grot.
He was older than most of the men around him, not in years alone but in the way war had settled into his movements. He carried himself with the loose readiness of someone who knew exactly how quickly a battlefield could punish carelessness. His scarred Praetorian-pattern power armor had been polished, repaired, and maintained with almost devotional care. Every gouge on it had a history. Every replacement plate had been fitted by hands that understood survival was often an engineering problem before it became a matter of courage.
"I'll go in alone," Grot said.
The officers turned toward him. Some looked relieved. Some looked ashamed of their relief.
His plan was simple, at least in the way dangerous plans often sounded simple when spoken aloud. He would infiltrate the city's outskirts, contact an old friend among the Thunderborn, and coordinate a precision strike against the wall defenses from within the enemy's blind spots.
As de facto leader, his word carried weight far beyond his rank. The formal command staff had authority on paper. Grot had experience, reputation, and the uncomfortable habit of being right when everyone else was guessing.
The officers, new to war and privately terrified of ordering another frontal assault, granted his request without hesitation.
Grot moved swiftly through the rocky terrain. Power-assisted servos carried him across broken stone, crater lips, and scorched scrubland with a speed that would have exhausted an unarmored man in minutes. Enemy fire still cracked across the valley in sporadic bursts, but he used the terrain well, slipping through folds in the rock and dead ground between firing arcs.
Within moments, he reached a large boulder overlooking the city's damaged outer wall. The position gave him a clear view of several gun emplacements and the approach road below. It was also far too exposed if the defenders noticed him.
He did not activate his communicator.
Instead, he stepped out into the open.
The city noticed immediately.
Targeting lamps snapped toward him. Alarm klaxons wailed behind the walls. Heavy stubbers opened first, their fire stitching sparks across the rocks around his boots. Then came the lascannons, bright and precise, followed by the deeper thunder of macro-cannons adjusting from anti-armor positions to erase a single figure who had made himself impossible to ignore.
The air filled with lethal light and metal.
Grot closed his eyes.
"Let me die," he murmured.
The words were not theatrical. They were barely audible even inside his own helmet. They carried no rage, no performance, no plea for witnesses. Only exhaustion. A private sentence spoken by a man who had survived too much and found survival harder to bear than fire.
The impact never came.
A golden figure descended from above with a thunderclap of displaced air and light.
The Thunderborn hit the ground between Grot and the wall, gravitic field flaring outward in a translucent distortion that swallowed the first storm of incoming fire. Bullets flattened. Las-beams bent and bled heat into the air. Shell fragments slowed as if they had plunged into deep water, then dropped harmlessly into the dirt.
The warrior raised his weapon with practiced ease. His shoulder-mounted cannons reconfigured in a rapid sequence of clicks, rotating lenses, extending emitter vanes, and locking stabilizers.
Three plasma spheres launched. Three las-beams followed.
Each shot struck with the force of an artillery barrage delivered by a surgeon's hand.
The fortress walls shattered. Not collapsed all at once, but failed in precise, catastrophic stages. A gun tower vanished in white fire. A reinforced parapet split from top to base, spilling defenders into open air before the follow-up beam cut through them. A macro-cannon housing detonated from within, its ammunition store erupting in a plume of flame and pulverized masonry.
Enemy soldiers were torn apart by the precision fire. Towers crumbled as though the materials holding them together had simply changed their minds. Defensive lines that had repelled a regiment minutes earlier became ruin in seconds.
Then the Thunderborn deactivated his gravity shield, turned, grabbed Grot by the head, and flung him back behind the boulder.
Grot hit the ground hard enough to crack stone. His armor absorbed most of it. His pride absorbed the rest.
The Thunderborn followed, stepping into cover with heavy, controlled strides before removing his helmet.
"Are you insane?" the warrior snarled. "If I hadn't been assigned nearby, you'd be a corpse right now!"
Grot's eyes widened.
He recognized the voice.
Grey.
For a moment, the battlefield seemed distant. The guns, the burning wall, the advancing regiment behind them—all of it receded beneath the shock of seeing an old comrade standing before him in golden warplate, alive, furious, and close enough to strike him again.
"You don't understand what I've been through," Grot muttered. His voice came out strained, scraped raw by something deeper than embarrassment.
Grey shoved him hard against the boulder. "You were discharged. You think I don't know that?"
"No, that's not—"
Grot stopped.
He wanted to explain. He wanted to say that Adam, a devoted Servant of the Angel, had tried to help him. That Adam had assessed him, guided him, corrected him, and finally judged him unsalvageable.
But Grey did not know that.
If Grey knew, he would report it to Qin Mo immediately. And Qin Mo would know.
Grot did not know whether he feared punishment, pity, or forgiveness more.
"Save it for after the battle," Grey said. He slammed his helmet back into place. The seals locked with a hiss.
He stepped forward, preparing to engage the remaining defenders within the city.
Then something changed.
Grey's helm lenses narrowed as his autosenses caught movement behind the shattered battlements. The defenders were not reinforcing the walls. They were not turning weapons against the advancing Talon forces. They were not even trying to seal the breach.
They were firing into their own city.
From behind the broken defenses, something immense stirred.
A colossal golden war machine stepped into view behind the walls. Its reactor glow burned through the smoke like a captive sun. Heraldic plates, scorched and defaced by battle, still bore noble lines beneath fresh damage. Its massive chainblade came down in a screaming arc and cleaved through an entire squadron of enemy troops, reducing men and barricade alike to pulped wreckage.
Another Knight-class war engine burst through a section of the wall moments later, sending debris flying as it crashed through the enemy defenses from the inside. Its battle cannon rotated, fired once, and erased a fortified courtyard in a blooming sphere of dust and fire.
Grey had seen Knights before.
During the Hive War of Talon I, a traitor Knight had fought for the opposition. He remembered the weight of that machine's footsteps, the terror it created in ordinary men, and the obscene confidence of a noble war engine turned against the Imperium.
But these machines were not firing on the First Legion.
They were attacking the defenders of Talon II.
"Throne of Terra, those are Knights!"
The commander of the 44th Regiment leaned out of his command tank as it rumbled past Grot and Grey, shouting in disbelief over the vox-amplified roar of engines and artillery. His face was pale, his eyes wide, but he had enough sense to seize the moment.
"Forward! Into the breach! Support those Knights!"
Seeing the walls broken from within, the 44th surged forward.
Infantry squads charged across the smoke-choked approach, stepping over the wreckage of their failed assault. Tanks rolled behind them, cannons elevated to fire over advancing troops. Officers screamed orders until their throats cracked. Medicae teams dragged the wounded aside as fresh formations rushed past.
The two Knights acknowledged their presence with brief flashes of identification lamps and machine-code bursts, but did not turn to attack. Instead, they focused on eradicating the remaining enemy strongholds, driving deeper into the city with the methodical fury of noble war engines that had been fighting alone for too long.
Moments later, a battered transport vehicle emerged from the ruins.
Its armor was scored by lasfire. One wheel assembly dragged slightly, throwing sparks with every rotation. A figure stood atop the vehicle, scanning the battlefield through smoke and drifting ash. Upon spotting Grey, he slammed one hand against the vehicle's frame and shouted down to the driver.
The transport lurched forward, ground over rubble, and came to a halt before Grey.
Two figures disembarked.
The first was a middle-aged soldier clad in a ragged, dirt-caked uniform bearing the faded insignia of a regiment long dissolved. His face was haggard. His eyes were hollow with hunger and too many sleepless nights. Yet his posture still held discipline, stubborn and threadbare, clinging to him long after comfort, certainty, and proper command had abandoned him.
The second was not human.
The figure was tall and slender, with elongated pointed ears, faintly luminous skin, and eyes like polished green crystal shards catching firelight. Every movement was too controlled, too graceful, too aware of surrounding danger. A long cloak hung from narrow shoulders, stained by ash but not enough to hide its alien weave.
Grey stiffened.
His weapons shifted by reflex. The shoulder cannon tracked the xenos before conscious thought had fully formed. Around him, nearby soldiers raised lasguns and then hesitated, uncertain whether they were witnessing treachery, salvation, or both.
He did not recognize this xenos. Perhaps some mutant strain. Perhaps an abhuman aberration. Perhaps something far worse?
The alien wasted no time. Its Low Gothic was accented, clipped, and impatient.
"No time to explain. Take me to your commander. Now."
Grey's first instinct was to snap the intruder's neck.
That instinct was not difficult to justify. The Imperium did not survive by offering trust to elegant strangers who stepped from burning cities and demanded audiences with commanders.
But Grey paused.
The Knights were fighting the same enemy. The middle-aged soldier beside the alien looked desperate, not enthralled. The city had clearly been broken from within before the 44th could enter. Something had happened here, and shooting the only person who seemed to understand it might be satisfying but strategically stupid.
Grey activated his vox-link to Qin Mo.
The response came immediately.
"Let the Aeldari wait. I am sending a transport."