"What exactly are you?"
Ky'ei's piercing gaze fixed on Qin Mo.
It expected to see a soul. A psychic shadow. A place in the weave where memory, desire, fear, and possibility touched the Immaterium. Every mortal left such traces. Every living mind stirred the Sea of Souls, even if only as a faint ripple.
Qin Mo did not.
Where something should have been, there was only absence. Not darkness. Not concealment. Not the dull resistance of a blank mind guarded by discipline or sorcery. It was cleaner than that. Colder. A void cut into the pattern of existence, an area the warp could neither claim nor properly describe.
For a daemon of Tzeentch, servant of the Architect of Fate, that absence was blasphemy in its purest form.
The Empyrean was shaped by thought, will, memory, and possibility. Fate was not merely prediction. It was structure. Threads crossed, diverged, frayed, and tightened according to desire and consequence. Every soul was a knot. Every choice was a tension. Every death changed the pattern.
But this being stood outside the design.
Not hidden within the tapestry. Not shielded behind some mortal witch-trick. Outside it. A blind spot in the grand pattern. A place where prophecy struck an edge and stopped.
Ky'ei felt something it had not known in ages.
Fear.
Not the theatrical fear daemons mimicked to deceive mortals. Not the brief irritation of pain before banishment. Real fear, sharp and humiliating, crawling through its borrowed flesh. It longed for banishment now, for the release of dissolution back into the Immaterium, but even that desire was tainted by uncertainty. Before it fled, before it was destroyed, it needed to understand the anomaly before it.
Yet Qin Mo was not the only wrongness in this chamber.
Ky'ei's gaze snapped toward Yoan.
There, at least, it expected clarity. A mortal. A soldier. A soul marked by fear, duty, exhaustion, and the hard little hopes men carried into war because they had nothing else left.
Instead, Ky'ei saw contradiction.
Yoan's past unfolded before it in bright, merciless fragments. Betrayal by bounty hunters. A desperate flight through the Underhive. The wet dark of a tunnel where mutants closed in from every side. Teeth. Claws. The final scream of a man dragged down into filth, his body torn apart until nothing remained but scraps for carrion things and rumors for the living.
Then came Yoan's future.
A photograph clutched in his widow's trembling hands. His name spoken in a hab-room gone cold. His bones lying pale and forgotten in some hidden corner of Tyrone Hive, long after anyone who loved him had stopped hoping for a body to bury.
Past. Future. Death.
And yet Yoan stood in the doorway, breathing hard, weapons in hand, very much alive.
Real. Present. Defiant.
Ky'ei's iridescent feathers lifted and shivered as if a wind had passed through the room, though the air was still. Its long fingers flexed. The strands of fate around Yoan did not merely twist. They contradicted themselves. Threads that should have ended had continued. Threads that should have led to grief now led to battle.
The daemon spoke aloud before it could stop itself, each syllable dragging fragments of prophecy into the air. It described Yoan's death. His widow. The photograph. The corpse that should have been. The living man who could not be.
Yoan's jaw tightened. He did not lower his weapons, but Qin Mo saw the way his grip changed. The words had struck somewhere deep. Not because Yoan believed the daemon, but because too much of what it said sounded like the kind of truth no one wanted spoken.
Ky'ei turned back to Qin Mo, its voice thinning into something between a hiss and a choral lament.
"Do you understand how terrifying this is for me?"
Qin Mo looked at the daemon for a moment, then nodded. His expression remained calm, almost bored, but there was a hard glint in his eyes.
"I do." A pause. Then his mouth curved into a faint smirk. "You should be grateful you can still perceive the present. If Kairos, that two-headed fool, were here, he'd be as blind as a newborn."
Ky'ei froze.
Its pupils contracted into burning pinpricks. Both of its hearts seized inside the warped cage of its chest. For an instant, the daemon forgot the pain of its wounds, forgot Yoan's null aura gnawing at its form, forgot even the weapons aimed at it.
"Wait… Kairos…" Its beak clicked shut, then opened again. "How do you know my master's name—?!"
Panic struck it with physical force.
Qin Mo had spoken the name of Kairos Fateweaver as if it were a joke passed around a mess table. No reverence. No terror. No ritual care. A name mortals should not know, spoken with casual contempt.
Ky'ei was no mere warp predator. It was a splinter of its master's will, an instrument of Tzeentch's schemes, gifted with narrow but potent sight. It could glimpse what had been and what might yet be, even if only across short spans compared to the vastness of Kairos' own vision.
But this man—no, this thing—had named the oracle-daemon without effort.
Qin Mo's smirk vanished.
"You talk too much, daemon."
He raised his weapons and opened fire.
Scatter-laser beams tore through the chamber in hard white lines. The air cracked with heat. Ky'ei recoiled as the shots punched into its body, burning tunnels through flesh that was only partly flesh at all. Each impact sizzled, spat sparks of blue vapor, and sent strips of daemon-matter peeling away like burning parchment.
Yoan's null-field aura did not destroy Ky'ei by itself. He was no mighty Untouchable, no perfect expression of the Pariah gene whose presence could reduce warp-spawn to ash by proximity alone. His blankness was weaker, uneven, and instinctive.
But it was enough.
Enough to make Ky'ei's limbs hesitate. Enough to thicken the air around its sorcery. Enough to drag at the unholy energies binding it to the Materium.
The daemon staggered as the shots struck home. Warp-flesh sealed, split, and sealed again, never quite healing properly under the pressure of Yoan's presence. The room filled with the sharp stink of ozone, scorched feathers, and burned things that had no right to smell like meat.
Still, it did not die.
"This is why I told you to use melee," Qin Mo said, firing again without looking away from the target.
"I know." Yoan's voice came through clenched teeth. He adjusted his stance, chainsword in one hand, grav-hammer in the other. "Ranged weapons tear the shell apart. Melee makes the banishment stick."
Qin Mo gave the smallest approving nod.
Yoan charged.
His boots struck the floor hard enough to make spent casings jump. The chainsword roared to life, its teeth screaming through the chamber. The grav-hammer's core woke with a deep, hungry vibration that traveled through Yoan's arms and into his bones.
Ky'ei's right eye flicked toward Archon's liquefied corpse.
Its left eye tracked Yoan's approach.
The daemon's graviton shield flickered once, distorted by the null aura, then collapsed into sparks of failed light. Yoan saw it fail and did not slow. He had never trusted the shield to save him.
Time seemed to narrow.
In that suspended instant, Yoan saw Ky'ei's eyes still moving.
Aware. Calculating. Choosing.
Then the daemon vanished.
The air folded inward where it had stood, leaving behind a smear of blue sparks and the stink of burning incense.
"It's here."
Qin Mo moved before the last spark died. He stepped straight through the wall without hesitation, his body passing through plasteel and stone as if the material had forgotten how to be solid.
Yoan followed through the doorway instead, teeth bared, armor scraping against the frame as he sprinted after him. Qin Mo did not need spoor, blood, or footprints. His senses locked onto the fleeing warp entity with predatory certainty, following the bruise it left against realspace.
They ran through twisting corridors lit by failing lumen-strips. Metal floor grates rang beneath Yoan's boots. Pipes spat steam. Somewhere behind them, alarms stuttered and died. The daemon's passage left scorch marks along the walls, feathers of unreal fire clinging to corners before guttering out.
The chase ended in the training hall.
Dozens of charred corpses littered the open floor. They had once been soldiers. Now they were blackened shapes fused to armor, weapons still clutched in curled hands, mouths open in final surprise. Training targets hung half-melted from rails overhead. Weapon racks had collapsed into slag. The smell was worse here: burned cloth, cooked flesh, molten plastek, and the coppery taste of blood heated until it became vapor.
Ky'ei waited at the center of the hall, hunched and smoking, one wing dragging behind it like torn cloth. Its feathers had lost their shimmer. Its beak was cracked. Holes burned through its torso revealed shifting light beneath, as if its body were a cage barely containing the madness inside.
It glanced at its own mutilated form, then raised one claw.
A wall of warp-flame erupted across the hall. Blue fire spread in a hungry sheet, licking over the corpses without consuming them properly. It was not meant to kill. Not at first. It was a delay, a desperate barrier thrown between predator and prey.
Qin Mo did not stop.
The battlefield shifted.
Not with a flash. Not with a ritual circle. Space simply obeyed him in a way it should not. The distance between Ky'ei and Qin Mo shortened as if the hall had been folded along an invisible seam. Floor tiles bent, stretched, and slid beneath the daemon's talons. The warp-flame Ky'ei had raised became its own trap, dragging it forward through the barrier it had conjured.
The daemon's eyes widened.
Qin Mo was already waiting.
"EAT THIS, WARP-SCUM!"
The Aquila Staff swung down like a warhammer wrapped in lightning.
Yoan struck in the same heartbeat, chainsword screaming as he brought it across the daemon's wing.
Impact.
The staff smashed into Ky'ei's skull with a crack that echoed through the hall. A shockwave rippled through the daemon's body and into the floor. Yoan's chainsword bit deep, chewing through feather, sinew, and bone-like warp matter. The teeth jammed for half a second, then tore free in a spray of burning ichor.
Ky'ei flew backward ten meters and slammed into an adamantium wall hard enough to buckle the plating.
Before it could gather itself, Qin Mo attacked again.
Ky'ei's mind raced.
The hall had changed again. No, not changed. Compressed. The space between Qin Mo and the wall had shortened, folding distance into nothing. It was not simple teleportation. The daemon knew teleportation. It knew rifts, warps, gates, mirrors, and wounds through which daemons slipped between worlds. This was different. Cleaner. Material. Obedient.
The battlefield itself was being rewritten.
Then Ky'ei felt the wound on its skull.
The Aquila Staff had left more than broken flesh. A deep, festering mark burned across its form, the substance around it corroding where the symbol had struck. The daemon stared through pain and understood.
Not a mere relic. Not a simple staff decorated with an Imperial emblem.
Ten thousand years of human worship had saturated the symbol. Countless soldiers had died beneath it. Countless prayers had been whispered to it. Countless men and women had looked upon that shape and imagined protection, judgment, duty, sacrifice, and wrath.
Faith had accumulated around the Aquila until Qin Mo's hand gave that weight direction.
The staff had become a divine weapon in truth.
Ky'ei had no time to marvel or despair. The Aquila Staff rose again.
Space collapsed.
Ky'ei and the wall behind it were dragged forward together, twisted as if the hall had become cloth clenched in Qin Mo's fist. The daemon tried to anchor itself with a burst of warp-force, but Yoan's null aura clawed at the spell before it could form.
Crack.
The staff shattered Ky'ei's beak.
Yoan stepped in from the side and brought the grav-hammer down on its leg. The weapon's core flared. Bone, sinew, and ectoplasmic matter flattened under a localized gravity spike, collapsing into sludge.
Ky'ei shrieked. The sound struck the walls, split into several voices, and died under the pressure of Qin Mo's presence.
Qin Mo shifted his grip and swung upward like a man teeing off.
The Aquila Staff connected beneath Ky'ei's ribs. Luminous force detonated at the point of impact, not spreading outward in a wild blast but driving through the daemon's body in a focused surge. Ky'ei burst into light. Fragments of its form peeled away and vanished before they struck the ground.
The force launched it across the training hall.
It should have crashed into the far wall.
Qin Mo willed the wall aside.
The barrier did not crumble. It simply ceased to obstruct the path. Ky'ei hurtled through the opening, smashing through empty air and across a hundred meters of corridor beyond before finally striking the floor in a spray of sparks and shattered plating.
Before it could crawl upright, Qin Mo raised one hand.
The daemon was dragged back.
Not pulled by chains. Not lifted by telekinesis alone. The space around it contracted and carried it with the unwilling obedience of matter caught in a collapsing frame. Ky'ei scraped across metal, claws carving furrows in the floor, until it slammed down before Qin Mo once more.
Then came the final assault.
The staff crushed its throat.
Yoan drove the chainsword into its belly. The weapon howled, teeth grinding through warp-flesh, catching, tearing, and spitting blue-black ichor across Yoan's armor. He leaned his weight into the strike, jaw clenched, refusing to give the daemon even the dignity of distance.
Ky'ei's body spasmed. Its wings beat once against the floor, weakly, scattering ash and feathers that dissolved before they landed.
"Well done."
The daemon spoke despite its ruined mouth. The words came wet with blood and unreality, each one dragged through a throat half-crushed by the Aquila Staff.
"You have bested me. But remember, this only happened because I was weakened. The Null. This weak mortal shell. The Materium. The constraints of reality."
Qin Mo looked down at it. Then he smiled.
"Oh? Then tell me... can you ever enter the Materium without being weakened?"
Ky'ei fell silent.
Its eyes shifted once toward Yoan, then back to Qin Mo. The answer was obvious. Worse, it was inescapable. A daemon could rage, scheme, possess, manifest, and tear at the walls of reality, but the moment it entered the Materium, it accepted limitation. It needed cracks. Rituals. Hosts. Sacrifice. Weakness hidden beneath the theater of power.
Qin Mo's smile widened by a fraction.
"Unless the Eye of Terror swells a hundredfold…"
He leaned closer.
"No. It is impossible."
For the first time since the battle began, Ky'ei had no answer.
"Then this is farewell, daemon."
Qin Mo reached down and closed his hand over Ky'ei's skull. His fingers dug into cracked horn and burning feathers.
"In the name of humanity. I BANISH YOU!"
White-hot flame erupted from his palm.
It was not promethium. Not psychic fire. Not the blue witch-flame Ky'ei had conjured moments before. This was older, cleaner, and far more hostile to the thing trapped beneath Qin Mo's hand. Star-fire poured into the daemon's skull, devouring the warp-flesh anchoring it to realspace.
Ky'ei screamed.
Its body melted without becoming liquid, unraveling into sparks, ash, feathers, fragments of memory, and shredded echoes of half-born prophecies. The training hall shook as the daemon's presence tore loose from the Materium. Yoan staggered back, chainsword still snarling in his grip, while the null pressure around him flickered in response to the dying warp-entity.
The fire grew brighter.
Ky'ei's claws gouged the floor. Its wings beat once, twice, then collapsed into burning shadows. Its eyes fixed on Qin Mo, and in their depths the daemon's fear sharpened into something else. Not triumph. Not surrender. Recognition, perhaps. Or one final attempt to wound with words where power had failed.
In its last moment, Ky'ei whispered.
"This… was part of the plan."
Then it was gone.