"Throne's teeth, what now?!"
The cry tore through the half-built bunker, half-snarl and half-plea, spat from the cracked throat of a soldier who had already spent everything he had except fear.
"I'm a prisoner! I never even received a weapon!" someone shouted back, voice raw with panic.
"What else can we do? We hold the line!" another man barked. It sounded like courage only because terror had nowhere else to go.
"I don't have a gun! I don't have a gun! I DON'T HAVE A GUN!!"
"I'll man the heavy stubber! Take my lasgun!"
The remnants of the prisoner battalion had survived, barely.
Many of them carried nothing but shovels, hammers, lengths of pipe, and construction hooks, tools meant for moving ferrocrete and scrap plating, not stopping a charge of fanatics with bayonets, bombs, and teeth filed to points. Against the coming onslaught, those tools would do almost nothing.
But the prisoners were not fools.
They had rallied with the PDF instead of running, and that was the only reason any of them were still breathing. The cowards had died first. Those who broke from the trenches had been cut down before they made it ten paces, shot in the back by cultist fire or crushed beneath the treads of advancing enemy armor. The men who remained did not stay because they believed in victory. They stayed because every other direction led to death faster.
The half-built bunker had become their last refuge.
It was little more than a ferrocrete shell reinforced by exposed steel ribs, never meant to face a full assault before its roof, blast shutters, or internal bracing had been finished. The place reeked of promethium fumes, powdered concrete, hot metal, blood, and the sour stink of men trapped too close together. Rubble covered the floor in ankle-deep drifts, marked by boot treads, blood smears, dropped tools, and the brass glitter of spent casings.
Inside, the emplaced heavy stubber hammered without pause. Its muzzle flashed in brutal half-meter bursts, each stream of tracer fire cutting red lines through the smoke before chewing into the oncoming enemy.
The weapon's roar battered the ferrocrete walls. Shell casings struck the floor like brass rain, skittering under boots and vanishing into cracks. Lasfire lanced from the firing slits in disciplined volleys, red beams stitching across torsos, skulls, and flak coats painted over with heretical symbols. The air tasted of ionized dust, scorched flesh, and overheated power cells.
The added firepower eased the pressure on Qin Mo just enough for him to breathe.
He no longer had to kill every charging infantryman himself. The bunker could handle bodies. He could focus on the things bodies could not stop.
Suicide bombers. Armored walkers. Tanks.
The heretic horde was vast. Too vast to kill before it reached the bunker walls. They came through smoke and broken ground, screaming praises to gods that should not exist, their voices shredded by fanaticism and battlefield stimulants. Some wore looted PDF armor. Some wore nothing but rags, ritual scars, and explosive harnesses. Their skin was painted with crude devotional marks that glowed under chemical light.
Qin Mo knew how this would end.
Melee.
His eyes swept the battlefield.
Kalon was dead.
Qin Mo did not know when it had happened. One moment the old sanctioned psyker had been somewhere behind the line, his staff raised and his blind eyes fixed on horrors only he could sense. Now Kalon was gone. Only his force staff remained, lying half-buried in churned mud where a man had stood moments before.
Nearby, among a mound of bodies, a chainsword jutted upright from the ruined chest of a fallen warrior. Its teeth were clogged with meat and fragments of armor.
Qin Mo extended his hand.
The force staff and chainsword trembled, then tore free from the dead. They rose into the air, rotating slowly as if caught in an invisible current, before flying toward him and landing inside the bunker with two heavy thuds.
The prisoners nearest him recoiled. One man whispered a prayer. Another muttered a curse. A PDF trooper stared with the fixed, horrified attention of someone watching a miracle and wondering whether it was safe to survive it.
Telekinesis.
His third ability, alongside fire and lightning.
But Qin Mo did not stop at arming himself. He armed everyone who could still stand.
With short, precise gestures, he dragged discarded weapons and armor from the killing ground outside. Lasguns slid over rubble. Bayonets clattered across the bunker floor. Cracked helmets and dented flak plates floated through the smoke, sorted almost mechanically by usefulness.
Most of the armor was PDF-issue flak plating: cheap, standardized, and produced by the million across countless worlds. It was not carapace armor. It would not stop a heavy round, a chainblade, or a good hit from a cultist's autogun at close range. But it might stop one las-bolt. It might turn a killing fragment into a broken rib. In war, "might" was worth handing out.
He pulled in more lasguns as well. M35-pattern rifles, most of them battered but functional, with extended bayonet mounts suited for trench fighting. Reliable, ugly, and uninspired. Weapons designed not for heroes, but for masses of frightened men ordered to stand in rows and die slowly.
The prisoners lacked training, but they understood desperation. If they were going to die, they would die with steel in their hands.
Then came a distant thunderclap.
Qin Mo's blood ran cold.
Artillery.
"We're done for," a PDF trooper whispered, his face draining of color.
Every eye turned upward.
The bunker was unfinished. It had no roof.
That fact passed through the survivors like a blade. If even one shell landed inside, there would be no wounded, no retreat, no heroic last stand, only meat, dust, and a crater where the last defenders had been. Fingers slowed on power packs. Bayonets stopped halfway into mounting lugs. Men looked up because looking up was all instinct allowed them to do.
"Focus on the fight!" Qin Mo snapped. He forced the command out hard enough to cut through the paralysis, then turned his own gaze to the open sky.
And he felt them.
Twenty shells.
Not as a blur of danger, but as individual masses falling through the polluted air above the bunker. Each had weight, velocity, spin, and a separate trajectory. Each was a promise written in metal and explosive filler.
Qin Mo shifted his focus away from the shells.
He focused on the air itself.
The rounds should have struck home.
Instead, they detonated high above the bunker, bursting in sequence against something no one could see. Shockwaves rolled over the open roof. Shrapnel screamed outward, flattened, deflected, and scattered across the battlefield like a storm breaking against invisible stone.
For one brief instant, Qin Mo had altered the behavior of the air above them, compressing and hardening it into a barrier dense enough to trigger impact fuses and tear shell casings apart before gravity could finish its work.
The soldiers stared.
"Did… did he just block artillery?"
No one answered. There was no time.
The artillery had failed.
The heretics were already charging.
....
Their numbers had thinned, but their resolve had not.
The failed barrage should have shaken them. Instead, it drove them into greater fury. They fixed bayonets, revved chainblades, raised crude icons, and surged toward the bunker with the hunger of men who believed death was promotion.
"Ammo count?" Qin Mo asked the nearest soldier.
The man checked his lasgun by habit even though he already knew the answer. His hands shook as he pulled the pack free and stared into the empty slot.
"Sir, we're dry," he said grimly. He showed Qin Mo the useless weapon, its chamber empty, its charge indicator black. All that remained was the cold weight of steel and a bayonet lug.
Qin Mo said nothing.
He raised his hands.
The chainsword at his feet lifted and settled into his right hand. The force staff drifted toward his left, its haft warm where Kalon's fingers had once gripped it. Qin Mo felt no blessing from it. No whisper of the Warp. No holy resonance. Just balance, weight, and the faint lingering static of a tool that had seen too much war.
Around him, the remaining soldiers fixed bayonets to empty lasguns. The prisoners gripped hammers, shovels, pipes, and knives made from sharpened scrap. Knuckles whitened. Jaws clenched. A few men whispered the Emperor's name. Others stared silently at the doorway, eyes bright with the brittle madness of those who had already accepted death and were now only negotiating the manner of it.
Qin Mo considered saying something.
Something inspiring. Something worthy of the moment. Something an officer in a propaganda lithograph would shout with a raised sword and a perfect jawline.
But Qin Mo was no orator.
He was a prisoner, an unsanctioned weapon, and a man who had no idea whether he would survive the next minute. In the end, only one thing needed to be said.
"It is an honor to fight alongside you."
For a heartbeat, the bunker went still. Then he thumbed the activation trigger on the chainsword.
The weapon roared to life.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!"
"FOR THE EMPEROR!"
The defenders charged.
The first to reach the enemy was a prisoner with a shovel held in both hands. He screamed as he swung, and for one glorious second the blade of the shovel caught a cultist across the jaw and split teeth from bone.
Then the horde swallowed him.
Hands seized his arms. A bayonet punched through his ribs. Something with iron nails driven through its palms dragged him down. His scream cut off beneath the wet crunch of breaking bone and the laughter of men who no longer remembered how to fear pain.
Qin Mo did not look away because he did not have the luxury.
He leapt into the heart of the enemy formation.
The chainsword howled through flesh, bone, and scavenged armor. Its vibration slammed up his arm hard enough to numb his fingers, but he kept the blade moving. A cultist's rifle came up; Qin Mo tore through the barrel and the hands holding it. Another lunged with a hooked knife; the force staff cracked across his throat and folded him backward.
Qin Mo drove the staff into the ground.
Fire erupted outward in a low, violent ring, crawling over mud, corpses, and legs. Men shrieked as their robes ignited. Explosive harnesses cooked off. The flames carved a gap through the charge.
The gap filled instantly.
So Qin Mo answered with lightning.
Blue-white forks leapt from his staff and hands, snapping from body to body. Eyes burst. Lungs seared. Hearts stopped mid-beat. Men collapsed as smoking husks, their weapons firing wild into their own ranks as muscles spasmed around triggers.
"KILL HIM! USE THE BOMBS!"
"FOR THE SAVIOR!"
Qin Mo heard the cry and turned.
Several suicide bombers were forcing their way through the press, dragging heavy explosive packs against their chests. Their eyes were wide, blissful, and utterly empty of survival instinct.
Qin Mo thrust the staff forward.
A bolt of lightning erupted from the Aquila-shaped head and tore through the enemy ranks. The first bomber detonated instantly. The blast triggered the second, then the third, and the chain reaction rolled through the formation in a series of expanding fireballs. Shrapnel, body parts, and burning cloth sprayed across the battlefield. Cultists who had been chanting a moment earlier vanished into smoke and red mist.
Qin Mo exhaled heavily.
This was power.
To stand alone against hundreds. To turn a charge into slaughter. To make the battlefield react to his will instead of the other way around.
For one dangerous moment, fury drowned caution. And in that fury, he failed to notice the most important detail.
The force staff was not amplifying him. It was only giving his hands a longer reach.
Then a voice cut through the chaos, harsh and commanding.
"SHELL THEM!"
Qin Mo spun, taking a cultist's head off mid-turn.
Another voice answered, strained and hesitant.
"But… our own troops—"
"SHELL THEM!"
Qin Mo's heart sank.
He had already spent too much energy. His limbs felt heavy. His breath scraped in his throat. Blocking artillery once had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit, and now the enemy commander was willing to erase his own front line to kill one impossible prisoner.
If the guns fired again, the bunker and everyone around it would be finished.
Then the horizon flashed white-orange.
A massive explosion bloomed in the distance, followed a heartbeat later by a rolling boom that shook the ground beneath Qin Mo's boots. The enemy's cries faltered. Their charge stuttered as heads turned toward the blast.
Something important had just died. A munitions dump. A command post. A battery position. Qin Mo did not know which, and he did not have enough breath left to care. Whatever it was, its destruction shattered the enemy's nerve.
Even the cultist Qin Mo had just beheaded twitched toward the blast, its corpse stumbling one more step as if some dying fragment of instinct still wanted to return to its master.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the battle ended.
The heretics broke.
They did not retreat with discipline. They vanished into smoke and darkness, dragging wounded, icons, and broken weapons with them. Their howls echoed across the blood-soaked plain, growing thinner with distance until only the hiss of cooling las-barrels and the ragged breathing of the living remained.
Qin Mo's knees buckled.
He hit the ground hard, gasping, the chainsword still growling weakly in his hand until he forced his thumb off the trigger. Silence rushed in around him, broken by groans, coughing, and the soft patter of blood dripping from armor plates.
He looked around for survivors.
They came one by one.
A prisoner with half his face burned black. A PDF trooper dragging another man by the straps of his flak vest. A woman with a bayonet still fixed to an empty lasgun, her hands shaking so badly she could not unclench them. Men limped from smoke and rubble, bloodied and hollow-eyed, staring at Qin Mo as if unsure whether he was human, saint, monster, or simply the reason they were not dead.
When they had entered the bunker, there had been two hundred.
Now fewer than twenty remained.
They were wrecks of humanity. Uniforms shredded. Armor hanging in cracked pieces. Faces gray with shock beneath soot and blood. Yet they were alive, and in the Imperium, survival was often mistaken for divine judgment.
A young PDF trooper stepped forward. He looked barely old enough to shave, though his hair had already gone shock-gray at the temples. Sweat and blood plastered it to his forehead. His cheek was split open. His flak vest had been punctured in three places, and one sleeve hung in ribbons from his arm.
Still, his eyes were sharp. He raised his fist in the Aquila salute.
"Grey," he said. His voice was hoarse but steady. "Sir. What are your orders?"
Qin Mo blinked at him.
"…You're asking me?"
He was a prisoner. An unsanctioned psyker. A condemned man with a number instead of rank.
Not an officer.
But the survivors did not look at his collar first anymore. They looked at his hands, the dead around him, the shells that had failed to kill them, and the enemy that had fled. At some point during the battle, command had stopped being a title and become the person everyone turned toward when death arrived.
Grey lowered his fist but did not lower his gaze. The others waited behind him. Prisoners and PDF alike. No one argued. No one laughed.
"Your collar," Grey said.
He pointed toward Qin Mo's throat.
"It didn't affect you at all, did it? Should we remove it?"
Qin Mo reached up.
His fingers touched cold iron, engraved warding marks, and the battered restraint ring still locked around his neck. Only then did he remember.
He was still wearing the psy-dampening collar.