Hearing the officer's resolute answer, Qin Mo nodded once in satisfaction. This was approval, brief and practical, given to a man who had chosen to keep standing when the ground beneath him was already soaked with the blood of better soldiers.
Qin Mo turned, preparing to lead Grey and the others toward the next battlefield. Then a voice cut through the cold underhive air.
"Wait!"
The word cracked across the trench like a las-shot.
A single soldier stepped forward from the line. He was young, but the underhive had already scraped youth from his face. Mud clung to his boots and trousers. Soot blackened one side of his jaw. His battered lasgun was clutched so tightly that his knuckles had gone white around the grip. His hands trembled, but he kept them on the weapon instead of hiding them.
His face was pale. His eyes were terrified.
They were also defiant.
Qin Mo slowly turned his head. Behind the scarred ceramite of his warplate, his expression remained unreadable.
"What is it?"
The soldier swallowed. His gaze flicked toward the officers, then toward the trenches, then back to Qin Mo. Around him, the remaining men went still. No one told him to shut up. No one had the strength.
After a moment, he forced out the question that had been sitting in every throat since the offensive collapsed.
"Does holding the line here actually mean anything?"
Silence fell over the trenchworks.
Not peaceful silence. Not disciplined silence. The silence of men waiting to see whether honesty would be punished.
Every pair of eyes turned toward Qin Mo. Some soldiers stared openly. Others pretended to adjust charge packs, check bayonets, or wipe mud from their weapons while listening with everything they had left.
They had all thought it.
This soldier had merely been brave enough, or exhausted enough, to say it aloud.
After all, the original offensive plan was in ruins. The regiments had been scattered. Vox traffic had become a graveyard of broken calls, contradictory orders, and screaming static. Supply lines were cut. Command was dead or missing. Every man still holding a firing step knew the truth in his bones.
They were not staying because they believed in victory.
They were staying because there was nowhere else to go.
Qin Mo looked at the soldier for a long moment, then nodded.
"Of course it means something."
The soldier's grip tightened around his lasgun. He wanted to believe. The men behind him wanted the same thing, but hope had become painful to touch.
Qin Mo continued, voice steady and hard enough to carry across the trench.
"The longer you hold this position, the more time I have to assess the other fronts. I need to know which strongholds still stand, which routes are cut, and which units can still fight. Once I have that, I will regroup every remaining force I can find."
He paused, letting the words settle into men who had heard too many orders and too few explanations.
"Then we purge the underhive of heretics, cut our way back through the bastards who trapped us here, and march out alive."
On the surface, it sounded like a strategy. A thin one. A desperate one. But still a strategy.
Even the most optimistic fool in the trench could hear the lie buried in the last part. No one truly believed all of them would leave the underhive alive. Some did not believe any of them would.
But what other currency remained? Ammunition was low. Food was worse. Command had failed. Faith alone did not stop artillery. Hope was the only thing still being issued in unlimited quantities, and even that had to be stolen.
A low, bitter mutter spread through the trenches.
"How the hell did we end up in this mess…?"
"Emperor, tell us…"
"Who came up with this offensive plan?"
"Were we just pawns in some noble's little game up in the spire?"
"Bet the bastards are drinking clean water while we choke down sump-air and die for their reports."
The muttering grew sharper. Resentment, long held down by discipline and terror, began to leak through the cracks.
The officers noticed immediately. Several hands moved toward sidearms by instinct. Their faces hardened into the familiar expression of Imperial authority preparing to save order by killing the first man careless enough to stand in front of it.
The standard response to insubordination was execution.
A laspistol shot. A body in the mud. A sermon afterward about discipline. Before any weapon cleared leather, Qin Mo raised one hand.
The officers froze.
He did not shout. He did not threaten them. He simply stood there, still and silent, and that was enough.
Qin Mo understood something they either did not or could not afford to admit. Men were not servitors. Carbon-based lifeforms had limits. Push past those limits and they did not become more loyal, more brave, or more useful. They broke.
These soldiers were at the edge. If force was used now, they would not become disciplined. They would shatter completely.
They were not refusing to hold the line. They were not throwing down weapons. They were not turning their guns on their officers. They were cursing incompetence, fear, and the hive's ruling class because those were the only enemies close enough to name.
They were venting.
So Qin Mo let them.
The outbursts rose, faltered, and died under their own weight. No one had the strength to sustain rage for long. Anger required energy, and the underhive had taken nearly everything.
Only when the last mutter faded did Qin Mo speak.
"Are you done whining?"
The trench went silent. Cold eyes swept across the line. Qin Mo did not soften his voice.
"Then get back to the fortress and fortify your defenses."
No one moved at first. Qin Mo's tone hardened.
"Even if our chances of cutting our way out of the underhive and kicking the Governor's teeth in are less than one in a thousand, we still have to try."
No rousing speech followed. No promise that the Emperor would preserve them. No lie about glory, destiny, or noble sacrifice.
Just one undeniable truth. Fight. Or die.
The soldiers did not cheer. But they moved.
One by one, then squad by squad, they turned back toward the fortress. Boots dragged through mud. Lasguns settled against shoulders. Men with hollow faces checked ammunition, tightened straps, and helped wounded comrades limp toward the defensive works.
Their expressions remained ashen. Their bodies were exhausted.
Yet somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the bitterness, beneath the certainty that High Command had spent their lives like loose change, something stubborn still remained. The faintest hope that they might survive.
And that one day, if the Emperor was very generous or very amused, they might settle the score.
The officers exchanged quick, grateful glances with Qin Mo before following their men inside. They had been spared a mutiny. More importantly, they had been spared the duty of creating one.
With that settled, Qin Mo turned away.
Grey fell into step beside him, and together they moved out into the dark.
....
Midnight. Fifty kilometers west of the 47th Regiment's fortress.
The ruins of a collapsed hab-block rose around them like the ribs of some dead industrial beast. Most of the upper floors had fallen inward decades ago, burying old hab-cells beneath layers of ferrocrete, rusted pipe, and household debris that no one had cared enough to salvage. A few rooms near the ground level still held shape, protected by luck, stubborn architecture, and the sheer laziness of decay.
Qin Mo's small group had taken shelter inside one of those intact pockets. The chamber smelled of dust, mold, burned insulation, and old human occupancy. Faded devotional strips still clung to one wall, their ink blurred by moisture. A cracked pict-screen hung from a bracket, dead for so long that grime had become part of its casing.
Most of the squad slept in shifts, or tried to.
Qin Mo did not.
He sat near the center of the room, power cells arranged in neat rows before him. Pale flame moved across his gauntlets in controlled streams, not burning the casings, but feeding energy into them with careful precision. Charge indicators flickered from red to amber to weak green. The smell of hot metal and ozone gradually overpowered the room's stale rot.
Grey remained awake as well. He crouched near a broken window frame, visor linked to the recon drones sweeping the district ahead. Tiny machine silhouettes crossed the darkness outside, their lenses dimmed, engines throttled low to avoid drawing attention.
"Are you sure there's supposed to be an outpost here?" Grey asked. His helmet tilted slightly as he examined the feed.
"Why wouldn't there be?" Qin Mo replied without looking up.
"Because it doesn't exist."
That made Qin Mo pause.
Grey expanded the tactical overlay and projected it between them in a muted glow. The map marked an Imperial outpost less than two kilometers ahead. The drone feed showed only broken streets, collapsed market stalls, leaning towers, and old gang barricades swallowed by dust.
"I've scanned the area multiple times," Grey said. "Different routes, different angles, different elevations. Nothing."
He jabbed a finger toward the flickering display.
"No campfires. No sentries. No vox traffic. No bio-signatures worth mentioning. If four regiments are stationed here, they're doing an excellent impression of rubble."
The underhive beyond the window seemed to swallow his words. It was an endless layered darkness broken by distant furnace-glow, leaking hazard lamps, and the occasional flash of gunfire somewhere too far away to matter. Searching by visual feed alone would take hours, possibly days.
"Still no readings?" Qin Mo asked.
"Nothing useful."
Qin Mo set down the power cell in his hand.
"Switch to thermal imaging."
"How do I—"
"Use your voice."
Grey turned his helmet toward him.
"My voice?"
"I installed voice recognition in the armor precisely so people like you wouldn't fumble with controls during a firefight."
Grey stared at him for a second.
"People like me?"
"Soldiers."
"That sounded more insulting than necessary."
"It was exactly as insulting as necessary."
Grey sighed, then looked back toward the hovering drone feed.
"Fine. Thermal imaging mode."
A soft click passed through the squad channel as the drones adjusted sensors. The display shifted. Darkness became layers of heat. Cold ferrocrete turned blue-black. Hot pipes glowed in dull veins beneath the street. Small animal shapes flickered and vanished in drainage cracks.
The drones made another pass.
....
This time, they found it.
The missing outpost had not vanished. It had hidden in plain sight.
The position sat exactly where the map indicated, deep in the heart of an old gang stronghold built around what had once been a black-market plaza. Its outer barricades were layered with thermal masking, scavenged insulation, and sheets of heat-dispersing metal stripped from manufactorum ducts. To standard bio-scanners, most of the compound had appeared as part of the surrounding ruin.
Grey leaned closer to the display.
"Four regiments stationed here, huh?"
Through the drone feed, the outpost looked nothing like the dying positions they had passed earlier.
There was no frantic last stand. No broken perimeter. No soldiers curled behind barricades waiting for the next shell to erase them.
There was order.
Work parties reinforced firing platforms. Heavy weapons were being dragged into prepared nests. Engineers or men doing their best imitation of engineers welded plate across weak points. Others laid out kill zones, checked wire, stacked ammunition, and marked fallback routes in chalk and lumen paint.
No one seemed relaxed. But no one seemed broken either.
"Let's move," Qin Mo said.
He stood and started toward the exit.
"Aren't we bringing the others?" Grey asked, glancing back at the sleeping squad.
Qin Mo did not answer immediately. His gaze passed over the resting soldiers, then toward the sentry drones hovering outside the shelter. Their patrol patterns were stable. Their fields of fire overlapped. Their charge was sufficient.
"They need sleep," he said at last. "We need answers."
Grey looked from him to the drones, then nodded.
Satisfied the others were as safe as anyone could be in the underhive, he followed.
....
The outpost occupied a vast plaza hemmed in by towering hive spires.
Once, it had been a black market. Qin Mo could still see the bones of it beneath the fortifications: collapsed vendor stalls, faded gang markings, rusted hooks suspended from overhead rails, old cages built for people or animals or whatever passed between those categories in the underhive. Narrow side streets radiated from the plaza like knife wounds, each one choked with scrap barricades and old smuggling routes.
This had been a place of illicit trade, stolen machinery, contraband weapons, human misery, and quiet disappearances.
Now it was a bastion of the Planetary Defense Force.
Sandbags lined the old market steps. Cargo containers had been welded into walls. Heavy stubbers covered the main approaches. Razorwire shimmered faintly under cold lumen-light. Mine markers had been scratched into ferrocrete in disciplined rows. A pair of half-ruined statues, probably gang trophies from some forgotten turf war, had been turned into observation posts.
The defenders barely looked up when Qin Mo and Grey landed near the outer perimeter.
The moment they saw power armor, most of them dismissed the sight and returned to work.
That alone told Qin Mo something. These soldiers were too busy to be impressed.
Civilians moved among them. Not warriors. Not formally, at least. Hab-refugees, laborers, old market families, wounded dependents, and underhive survivors with hard eyes and practical hands. They hauled ammunition, carried water, reinforced barricades, mended torn uniforms, stripped weapons, and dragged sacks of broken masonry to fill gaps in the walls.
This was not a broken army.
This was a disciplined force under pressure, well prepared enough to function and desperate enough to use every hand available.
"Look at this…" Grey murmured.
He nudged Qin Mo and gestured to their left.
Two soldiers knelt beside a civilian who had lost both legs below the knee. The wounds were old, wrapped in clean but reused bandages. One soldier held a bowl of ration broth while the other helped the man drink from a canteen. Neither acted embarrassed by the task. Neither looked impatient. Nearby, a child no older than ten sorted spent power cells into usable, damaged, and dead piles under the supervision of a one-eyed corporal.
Everything moved with methodical urgency.
Efficient. Calm. Human.
A female officer hurried toward them from the command barricade. She was young for her rank, though the underhive had done its best to correct that. Her coat was clean by battlefield standards, her boots polished beneath the mud, and her eyes lit with sudden, fragile excitement when she saw their armor.
"Are… are you part of the Lord Marshal's bodyguard?" she asked.
Her voice tried to remain formal. Hope slipped through anyway.
"No," Grey replied before Qin Mo could. "We're regular soldiers. Not part of the Lord Marshal's retinue."
The change in her face was immediate. Hope did not vanish all at once. It drained, leaving discipline behind like a mask hastily put back into place.
"I thought he had sent his forces," she said quietly. "I thought… we were saved."
She recovered quickly, or tried to. Her shoulders straightened. Her eyes moved over their armor, their weapons, their lack of accompanying command staff.
"Are you here seeking refuge? Regardless, we need more hands. If you can fight, repair, carry, or keep watch, you're welcome to join us."
Grey turned toward Qin Mo, expecting an answer.
Qin Mo did not respond. He stood utterly still.
His gaze moved across the outpost. Across the soldiers stacking ammunition. Across the civilians carrying scrap. Across the wounded man drinking from a canteen. Across the officer standing in front of him, earnest, strained, and polite.
Something inside him twisted.
At first, he could not identify the feeling. It was not fear. Not suspicion. Not the normal battlefield unease of walking into an unknown position and finding it too orderly.
It was physical.
Revulsion crawled over his skin beneath the armor. His fingertips tingled inside his gauntlets. The air felt thick and greasy, as if some invisible residue had soaked into every surface of the plaza. His throat tightened. His stomach clenched. The back of his mind recoiled from the place with an intensity that made no rational sense.
It felt like stepping into a latrine that had been sealed for years and discovering someone had painted it to look clean.
Worse than filth. Contamination. His jaw tightened. The heat inside his armor began to rise.
"…I want to build an incendiary bomb."
Grey's head snapped toward him.
Qin Mo's voice was tight, each word forced through clenched teeth.
"Big enough to burn this entire cesspit to the ground."
The female officer stared at him. Confusion came first. Then alarm.
Grey's eyes widened behind his visor. An unprovoked, irrational desire for destruction. Sudden emotional escalation. Environmental revulsion with no visible source.
Only one thing came to mind.
Psyker corruption.
"Qin Mo," Grey said carefully. "Are you—"
"I AM NOT OUT OF CONTROL!"
The shout cracked through the plaza.
Every nearby soldier stopped. A heavy stubber team turned from their emplacement. Civilians froze with crates in their arms. The female officer took one step back before forcing herself still.
Flames licked from the seams of Qin Mo's armor.
His faceplate began to glow, first dull red, then white-hot along the edges. The scarred metal warped under the heat. Droplets of molten slag slid down from the helmet and struck the ferrocrete with sharp hisses.
Grey's blood ran cold.
This was not ordinary overheating.
This was the moment before Qin Mo unleashed fire.
And there was no enemy in sight.
"This place…" Qin Mo said. His voice crackled with heat, distorted by the glowing faceplate. "This place is lost."
Flame spat from the grille of his helm with each breath. His right gauntlet rose slowly. The motion was deliberate, heavy, and terrible.
His finger leveled at the officer standing in front of them.
The woman went still.
"…She's one of them."
Grey's hand moved toward his weapon. The soldiers around the plaza began to raise theirs. No one fired. Not yet. Qin Mo's voice dropped into something hotter than rage and colder than certainty.
"SHE'S A PSYKER!"
The flame around him surged.