Chapter 229: The Rebel Psyker
The rebel 120mm rocket launchers were relatively low-capability weapons — effective range around a thousand metres, optical sights, shaped-charge warheads that could kill a Chimera. In urban terrain they were a serious threat. In open ground at fifteen hundred metres, with Kian's entire force outranging them significantly, they were mostly a concern to manage rather than a genuine tactical problem.
The Chimeras held at standoff distance and suppressed. Old Kae and Little Kae worked the indirect fire grid, walking grenade rounds into the trench network on coordinates fed from the auspex. Aimed indirect fire into prepared positions — the defenders couldn't return effective fire, and the arc of the grenades found them regardless of how deep they dug.
Fifteen minutes. Then a rebel officer's voice carried over the din: "We can't hold this! Get the Marshal!"
In the rear of the column, Silentium's eyes opened.
He had been sitting cross-legged on a cargo hauler, meditating inside his powered suit, when the sensation arrived — a psychic signature, strong and undisciplined, pushing through the warp-interface like a fist through paper.
He locked his attention on the rebel position. Another psyker. A powerful one.
He keyed his helmet vox to Kian immediately.
"Warning — strong psychic activity detected ahead. There is a psyker in the rebel force. Significant capability."
Kian's reporting rhythm broke. Then his discipline reasserted itself.
Psykers had no fixed ceiling. The upper end of what they could do ranged from battlefield-scale to genuinely apocalyptic. Even at moderate power levels, a trained psyker could wreck a Chimera with a direct strike, suppress entire squads with mental force, or tear through personnel without conventional weapons touching them.
Silentium himself could sustain a kinetic barrier against over a hundred autogun rounds, lift himself and several others in sustained flight, and produce a psychic shockwave that turned crowds into scattered debris.
He had just started framing a warning to the force when Little Joel's voice came across the vox.
"Sir — there's something wrong out there, someone — we don't know what to do—"
Kian switched the screen to Little Joel's powered suit picter feed.
A man had risen from the rebel trench line. Pale-faced, dressed in worn military clothing, both arms extended — thin arcs of psychic lightning flickering between his fingers like current between contacts.
The moment he appeared, every weapon in the force engaged him simultaneously. Chimera autocannons, Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubbers, lasrifles, autoguns — thousands of rounds in the first seconds.
Every projectile stopped dead approximately three metres from his body.
Solid rounds hung in the air as though caught in amber. Laser beams touched the invisible field and detonated against it, bursting in mid-air. The fire continued for over ten seconds — tens of thousands of rounds accumulating into a floating wall of suspended ordnance around the man.
The soldiers stared. The firing trailed off into silence.
The psyker lowered his hands. The accumulated rounds, shells, and grenade fragments flew outward like discarded trash. Several grenades detonated on impact with the ground, sending dirt columns skyward.
He surveyed the force facing him with a hawk's unhurried assessment.
"The Governor's dogs. You come to my ground and think you can make trouble."
He rose half a metre from the earth and accelerated toward the formation, staying low, moving fast — and maintaining the kinetic barrier as he flew. Soldiers fired continuously. Nothing reached him.
At three hundred metres out he stopped and raised both arms. Something began forming between his hands — a compressed sphere of warp energy, instability made visible, psychic lightning crawling across its surface.
Raw immaterium forced into the material universe, pressurised, given shape.
Kian saw it coming and accepted the loss before it happened.
The psyker aimed at the nearest Chimera and released.
CRACK.
The vehicle's front armour received the impact — a circular penetration, clean through the plate, the compressed warp energy continuing through the interior. Then the expansion. The Chimera came apart as though hit by a heavy artillery shell, crew and nearby infantry consumed in the blast.
One attack. Equivalent to two hundred millimetre artillery.
Some soldiers fell back. Others kept firing uselessly. A lasgun-turret Chimera locked its twin barrels on the psyker and fired at maximum output — the kind of sustained high-power las that burned through tank plate — without the operator considering what it would do to the barrels.
The psyker felt the threat. He reshaped his barrier into an angled geometry rather than a sphere, and the high-powered beams deflected off it.
He was already gathering the next strike, arms rising again, a second lightning sphere building.
"Insects. Every last one of you."
The sphere launched.
It stopped in mid-air.
Every witness saw it — the sphere simply halted, suspended, its energies beginning to conflict with something external. Then the contained warp energy collapsed inward and exploded in a burst of immaterium discharge, psychic lightning scattering across the ground harmlessly.
The psyker's expression shifted from contempt to sharp attention.
Someone in the force had done that.
At the rear of the formation, a powered suit had risen half a metre from the ground — Silentium, drifting forward at speed, coming to rest fifty metres from the rebel psyker.
The rebel felt the psychic signature.
His face changed entirely.
"The same — you're the same as me! A chosen one! Like me!"
[End of Chapter 229]
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