Upon reaching the fifth floor of the ruined hab-block, the escorting soldier stopped outside what had once been a conference room. Half the corridor ceiling had collapsed behind him, spilling dust, rebar, and insulation foam across the floor. The walls still carried old Administratum stenciling beneath soot and bullet scars, but most of the words had been burned away.
The soldier snapped into a crisp Aquila salute despite the blood drying on his sleeve. His hand trembled only after the gesture was complete.
Qin Mo gave him a brief nod, placed one hand against the battered metal door, and pushed.
The hinges shrieked. The door swung inward with a grinding protest, scraping over broken glass, spent casings, and flakes of ferrocrete knocked loose by earlier shelling. Qin Mo stepped inside without hesitation. His boots crunched across the debris, the sound too loud in the tense silence that followed.
The chamber was dim and narrow, its outer wall split open by a shell impact that had exposed the ribs of the building. A single lumen-strip hung from the ceiling by two cables, flickering in tired pulses. Each time the light failed, the faces around the room vanished into shadow. Each time it returned, they looked older.
Grey sat near the center with the surviving senior officers of the 47th Infantry Regiment. None of them had chairs. Those had been burned, broken, or turned into barricade material long ago. Instead, they occupied the cold ferrocrete floor, ammo tins, collapsed filing cabinets, and pieces of shattered furniture dragged into a rough circle around a portable map projector.
Their uniforms were torn. Their armor was dented. Ash and dried blood darkened their faces. A medic had wrapped one officer's head in field dressing so hastily that one eye was almost covered. Another kept pressing two fingers against the side of his neck as if checking whether his own pulse still existed. They were officers, but the Underhive had stripped away the clean lines of rank. What remained were survivors trying not to show how close they were to collapse.
At the sound of the door, half the room reacted on instinct. Hands twitched toward laspistols. One junior officer's thumb touched the safety catch before recognition reached his eyes. Grey looked up sharply, then relaxed by a fraction.
"It's him," Grey said. His voice was rough from smoke and shouting.
The tension eased, but did not disappear. These men had watched Qin Mo tear through enemy armor, bend artillery from the sky, and make soldiers ten times braver by standing where death was thickest. They had also watched him do things no sane Imperial officer would comfortably categorize as "safe." Gratitude and fear sat together in the room, neither strong enough to drive out the other.
Qin Mo crossed to an overturned ammunition crate and sat without ceremony. The crate creaked under him. He rested his forearms on his knees and looked around the circle.
No one wasted time with formal prayers. No one had the strength.
The regimental commander cleared his throat. The sound came out dry and painful.
"Let's begin."
A few heads nodded. A murmur of agreement passed through the room, low and exhausted, heavy with the dread of men who already knew the situation was bad and had gathered only to learn how bad.
The commander turned toward Qin Mo. He was a lean, middle-aged officer with a gaunt face, close-cropped gray hair, and a pair of cracked augmetic lenses fitted over eyes that no longer matched. One lens kept twitching as damaged servos tried and failed to focus. His uniform still carried the marks of discipline: collar tabs straightened, sidearm secured, command seals tucked away rather than torn free. He looked like a man holding himself together by habit.
"Klein," he said simply.
"Qin Mo." Klein accepted the name with a small nod. There was no visible surprise at its strangeness, no question about origin, no hesitation over the lack of rank. Either he had already asked Grey enough questions, or he had decided that titles mattered less than results.
He wasted no time.
"What should we do next?"
The question landed harder than Qin Mo expected.
For a heartbeat he thought Klein was testing him. Then he looked around the room and understood that he was not. Every face had turned toward him. Pale faces. Bandaged faces. Faces marked by burns, exhaustion, and the gray blankness that followed too many hours of fighting without sleep. They were not looking at him like subordinates waiting for a formal order. They were looking at him like drowning men watching someone on shore decide whether to throw a rope.
They expected an answer.
Qin Mo lowered his gaze. His fingers tapped once against his knee, then stilled. The dying lumen hummed overhead. Somewhere deep below the building, a distant explosion rolled through the hive's bones and made dust sift from the ceiling.
Klein watched him, then spoke again, adjusting his approach when he saw hesitation instead of certainty.
"According to initial intelligence, the Underhive rebellion was estimated at thirty thousand combatants," Klein said. "High Command deployed one hundred and seventy thousand troops to crush them. By all logic, this should have been a short punitive campaign. Bloody, yes. Difficult in places, yes. But not a disaster."
His mouth tightened.
"Reality proved different. The rebels number over three hundred thousand. Ten times the estimate. They are not merely gangs with stolen weapons. They have full industrial zones, ammunition workshops, vehicle repair yards, field hospitals, fuel stores, and command nodes. The Underhive has been turned into a self-sustaining war machine beneath our feet."
No one interrupted. Several officers looked at the floor. One clenched his jaw hard enough for the muscles to jump. Klein continued.
"Three days ago, the entire frontline collapsed in a single night. Not bent. Not penetrated. Collapsed. Vox relays failed almost simultaneously. Ammunition convoys vanished. Reserve units received contradictory orders. Before anyone understood what was happening, the Lord Marshal and every senior officer attached to forward command were dead."
The room went still. Even those who already knew the report seemed to feel the weight of it again when spoken aloud. Qin Mo's expression did not change, but his attention sharpened.
A rebellion with hidden industry. Intelligence failure by an order of magnitude. Coordinated sabotage. Command assassination. Supply disruption. A collapsing offensive inside terrain that already favored the defenders.
This was not a riot.
This was a campaign planned by someone who understood exactly how the Imperial war machine moved and where to cut it. Klein's voice grew lower.
"Before his death, the Lord Marshal realized something was wrong. His final order was to redeploy fifty thousand troops away from the attack formations and fortify the main supply lines. Officially, it was presented as reinforcing logistics. In practice, it created a chain of defensive strongholds behind the offensive spearheads."
He stopped there. His piece had been said.
Qin Mo looked up. "Go on."
Klein hesitated. "I can. But I don't know what you already understand. I would rather focus on the details that matter."
Qin Mo met his gaze directly. "I know nothing."
That produced the first true silence of the meeting. One officer blinked. Grey looked sideways at Qin Mo, then at Klein, as if waiting for someone else to explain that this was not a joke. Qin Mo leaned back slightly on the crate.
"I'm not a commander. I'm not an officer. I was just a grunt from the 44th Regiment. I got thrown into the Underhive, started digging trenches, and somehow survived long enough for everyone to start asking me questions." His mouth twitched without humor. "I don't even know why High Command ordered defensive positions built during what was supposed to be an offensive campaign."
Klein stared at him for a moment. Then he let out a short breath that might almost have been a laugh if any of them had remembered how to laugh properly.
"Ah." The sound carried no mockery. If anything, it was relief. A problem had finally become definable. "Then I will start from the beginning that matters."
He leaned over the projector and activated the map. The portable unit coughed, flickered, and threw a ghostly tactical display into the air above the floor. The image stuttered with missing data and corrupted overlays, but the shape of the defensive network remained visible: green sigils for known or suspected Imperial positions, red for confirmed losses, amber for uncertain contact, and black gaps where no information existed at all.
Klein pointed to the forward zones.
"The original plan was simple. Multiple regiments were to advance along the main transit corridors, seize industrial nodes, destroy rebel stockpiles, and drive toward the deepest command centers. The enemy was expected to fight as scattered insurgents. They did not."
His finger moved across the map, tracing a line of collapsed positions.
"The rebels allowed our spearheads to descend, then cut the routes behind them. They sabotaged maglev tracks, collapsed service tunnels, poisoned water points, mined lift shafts, and sent false vox traffic through captured channels. Regiments lost contact with adjacent units. Platoons fought blind. Some received orders from officers who were already dead. Others marched directly into kill zones because the route markers had been altered."
A wounded captain sitting near Grey spat a curse under his breath. No one rebuked him.
"The vox network?" Qin Mo asked.
"Shattered," Klein replied. "Long-range communication is gone. Local vox works only when the relays nearby are intact, and most are not. Runners vanish. Servo-skulls are being shot down or captured. We tried signal flares in the larger shafts; the enemy used them to triangulate artillery."
"Astropaths?"
Klein gave him a flat look.
"Dead, mad, or unreachable. Take your pick."
Qin Mo nodded once. "Continue."
Klein did.
He described how the invasion force had entered the Underhive with confidence and died by pieces. How regiments thought they were advancing beside allies, only to discover their flanks had ceased to exist hours earlier. How supply dumps had exploded behind the lines. How medicae stations had been overrun because evacuation routes were changed by someone with access to Imperial codes. How several armored columns were lured into manufactorum districts whose floors had been cut from beneath them.
The officers added details where they could. Not formal reports. Not polished briefings. Fragments. A bunker complex that stopped answering after transmitting screams and machine-code distortion. A convoy found empty, every vehicle intact, every crewman gone. A whole company ordered to withdraw through a tunnel that had been deliberately flooded with chemical runoff.
Grey listened with his arms folded, face darkening with every sentence. The 44th had died without understanding the scale of the trap. Now the shape of it was becoming visible, and visibility made the anger worse.
By the time Klein finished, Qin Mo had fully grasped the disaster.
All long-range communications had been severed. Other than the fifty thousand troops diverted to defensive strongholds, the rest of the invasion force was presumed annihilated or cut off beyond recovery.
No one knew which fortifications still stood. There was no coordination between surviving elements. The worst-case scenario was not dramatic speculation. It was the most reasonable working assumption: every other stronghold might have already fallen except the building they were sitting in.
They were the last confirmed survivors. At least, until proven otherwise.
Then Klein revealed the detail that had been kept to regimental command level and above.
"If the offensive failed," he said, voice grim, "the only viable route connecting the Underhive to the Lower Hive was to be destroyed."
Grey stiffened. His fists clenched so tightly the knuckles went pale beneath grime.
"Destroyed?" he demanded. "The ascent route? The only way out?"
"Yes."
"Who the hell issued that order?" Grey snapped. "This was a trap. Someone wanted us all dead down here."
A few officers flinched at the accusation, not because they disagreed, but because saying it aloud made the thought dangerous. Klein shook his head slowly.
"My family is in the Upper Hive," he said. "I have every reason to care whether the Underhive breach reaches upward."
Grey's anger faltered, but only slightly.
Klein continued. "As far as I know, the plan was devised and executed solely by the Lord Marshal himself. I do not know whether he suspected the scale of infiltration, or whether he simply intended to seal the wound if the offensive failed. Either way, the order exists."
The room seemed to grow colder. The single lumen-strip buzzed overhead. Outside the cracked wall, the ruined hab-block groaned as wind moved through broken floors.
"The worst-case scenario isn't that we're the only ones left," another officer muttered. His bandaged hand rested on a holstered laspistol as if the weapon offered comfort. "It's that the entire Hive City has already fallen and no one down here knows it yet."
Klein did not answer immediately. That was answer enough.
"…That is a possibility," he said at last.
Grey looked like he wanted to punch the wall, the table, or the entire Departmento Munitorum.
"By the Emperor, how did our intelligence fail this badly?"
No one had a useful response. Qin Mo raised one hand.
"Enough."
The word was not loud, but it cut through the room.
Grey turned toward him, still breathing hard.
Qin Mo looked from one officer to the next. "The most important thing right now isn't figuring out who screwed up, who was bribed, who was infiltrated, or who deserves to be dragged in front of a firing squad. That comes later, if we survive long enough to make anyone answer for it."
His gaze settled on Grey.
"Right now, we figure out how to stay alive."
Grey held his stare for a moment. Then he exhaled through gritted teeth and gave a sharp nod.
Qin Mo turned back to Klein.
"Did High Command issue strategic orders for the defensive chain? Maps, supply records, fallback plans, stronghold layouts, anything useful?"
Klein reached to his belt without hesitation and pulled free a reinforced data-slate. The casing was cracked, one corner sealed with tape and devotional wax. He handed it over.
"Everything I could salvage before forward command went dark."
Qin Mo activated the slate. The screen flickered twice before stabilizing. A tactical map appeared, less detailed than the projector but more stable. Fortification markers glowed across the Underhive's layered geography. Thin lines indicated transit corridors, maintenance routes, collapsed maglev tunnels, sump channels, old freight shafts, and manufactorum service arteries.
Several positions were marked red. Destroyed.
Others blinked green. Status unknown.
Seventy kilometers east: a fortress held by two regiments.
Fifty kilometers west: a bunker complex held by four regiments.
Beyond those, every marked stronghold lay at least one hundred to two hundred kilometers away, separated by hostile districts, broken infrastructure, ruined transit systems, industrial zones, collapsed corridors, and enemy-held terrain.
Qin Mo studied the map in silence.
Before crossing into this cursed universe, he had understood Hive Cities as lore entries, exaggerated illustrations, and absurd numbers attached to fictional megastructures. Now the map in his hands gave those numbers weight. Seventy kilometers was not a convenient battlefield distance. It was a campaign. A march through darkness, ambush corridors, toxic air, broken lifts, hostile civilians, corrupted manufactoria, and enemy patrols that knew the terrain better than any Imperial commander ever had.
A Hive City was not a city. It was a vertical world made of metal, hunger, bureaucracy, industry, and corpses. And they were lost somewhere near its rotten roots.
Qin Mo dragged one finger along the eastern route, then the western.
"If we want to survive," he said, "the first step is to hold long enough to learn who else is still alive. We identify which defensive positions are intact. If too many have fallen, we retreat from isolated points and reestablish a tighter perimeter around ground we can actually defend. If enough still hold, we connect them, fortify them, and turn this part of the Underhive into something the rebels have to bleed for."
Klein narrowed his eyes. "You still want to defend?"
"Yes."
"Why?" Klein asked. There was no challenge in his voice now, only the blunt need for an answer. "Do you genuinely believe reinforcements are coming?"
"No."
The certainty of the answer silenced the room. Qin Mo looked at the map rather than the officers.
"There are no reinforcements."
A few men absorbed that like a physical blow. One closed his eyes. Another whispered something under his breath that might have been a prayer or a curse.
Klein's jaw worked once. "Then what is the point?"
Qin Mo finally looked up. A faint smirk cut across his tired face, sharp and controlled.
"Because if you give me enough time, I can make every soldier here ten times stronger."
No one spoke.
Klein's gaze flickered toward Grey and the surviving men of the 44th. Each of them carried a metallic backpack device, crude-looking but functional, strapped over armor and scavenged webbing. Klein had seen what those devices did. He had watched bullets flatten and fall before touching the men wearing them. He had watched ordinary soldiers survive ground they should never have crossed.
If that was Qin Mo's work… Then perhaps the claim was not madness. Perhaps it was logistics.
Grey noticed Klein looking and lifted his chin slightly, as if daring the commander to call it impossible.
Klein exhaled through his nose. His expression remained wary, but the shape of his doubt had changed. It no longer asked whether Qin Mo could do impossible things. It asked what those impossible things would cost.
"…Alright," Klein said.
He straightened as much as injury and exhaustion allowed.
"I'll follow your lead."
The words shifted the room. Not dramatically. No one cheered. No one suddenly looked hopeful in the way propaganda posters insisted soldiers should. But shoulders settled. Men who had been waiting for command to collapse entirely now had something to organize around.
That mattered.
Qin Mo pointed to the eastern stronghold on the map.
"I'll head there first and confirm whether anyone is still alive."
Grey opened his mouth, probably to argue. Qin Mo cut him off with a look.
"Not immediately." He tapped the display. "Before that, we reinforce this position. If this building falls while I'm gone, everything else becomes irrelevant."
Klein nodded once. "What do you need?"
Qin Mo looked around the conference room, then beyond it, mentally stripping the hab-block down to load-bearing walls, usable metal, firing angles, fallback routes, and underground access.
"First, this building is unreliable. A few more shell impacts or a serious ground assault, and the upper floors will come down on everyone inside. We need to expand the defensive footprint, tie the hab-block into nearby structures, and turn the lower levels into a proper fortress. Not pretty. Functional."
He counted on his fingers as he spoke.
"We need internal supports. Blast baffles. Multiple fallback lines. Firing slits instead of windows. Observation holes where we can afford them. Barricades that channel attackers instead of merely blocking doors. Kill lanes through the ground floor. Secondary exits. Tunnels dug beneath the main structure for shelter, storage, and movement under fire."
An officer with a blood-stained sleeve leaned forward despite himself. "Underground bunkers?"
"Yes," Qin Mo said. "The rebels have artillery. If our answer to artillery is 'hope it misses,' we deserve what happens next."
A few grim smiles appeared and vanished quickly.
Qin Mo continued.
"Second, we don't have enough heavy weapons. I want every heavy stubber recovered, repaired, mounted, and given overlapping arcs. Fixed meltaguns at choke points if we have the parts. Krak charges wired as directional traps. Lasgun charge packs sorted by output, not by whatever Munitorum crate they came from. Grenades gathered and counted. No ammunition sitting in piles where one lucky shot cooks the whole room."
Klein listened without interruption. His cracked augmetic lenses whirred softly.
"Third, we need materials. Metal. Copper. Rubber. Ceramite fragments. Wiring. Circuit boards. Broken auspex units. Vox parts. Lasgun regulators. Power cells. Heat sinks. Suspensor components if anyone finds cargo-lifter wreckage. Anything with a motor, coil, capacitor, actuator, or stable housing."
One of the officers stared at him. "For more of those shield packs?"
"For shield packs first," Qin Mo said. "After that, weapons, armor, sensors, power distribution, and anything else I can build before the enemy realizes what I'm doing."
"Sorry to interrupt," Klein said, raising one hand.
Qin Mo looked at him.
Klein's voice remained calm, but the room could hear the problem before he finished speaking.
"We no longer have a logistics division. No engineering corps. No supply convoys. No proper machine shop. Most of our servitors are destroyed, missing, or worse than useless without an Enginseer. We have wounded infantry, frightened survivors, a damaged hab-block, and whatever scrap the battlefield hasn't swallowed."
He paused.
"You are asking for fortress construction, heavy weapon emplacement, underground works, ammunition sorting, and advanced fabrication with the men in this room."
Qin Mo's smirk returned. "Yes."
Klein stared at him. "That is your answer?"
"No," Qin Mo said.
He stood. The motion drew every eye in the room. In the flickering lumen-light, his shadow stretched across the cracked wall behind him, huge and uneven, crossed by hanging cables and weapon scars.
"My answer is that it doesn't matter."
He looked from Klein to Grey, then to the exhausted officers seated on the floor.
"You organize the men. You establish watches. You decide who can still stand, who can still shoot, who can carry, who can dig, who needs to sleep before they become useless, and who should not be trusted near ammunition because their hands are shaking too badly."
He pointed toward the floor beneath them.
"You give me workers, salvage, space, and time."
His eyes sharpened.
"I'll handle the rest."
For a moment, no one moved.
Then Grey rose first. The young soldier looked exhausted enough to fall over, but his voice came out steady.
"You heard him. Metal and electronics. If it looks useful, drag it in. If it looks sacred, drag it in carefully. If it looks like junk, drag it in anyway and let him decide."
That broke the hesitation. Officers began speaking over one another, not in panic now, but in the rough rhythm of work being divided. One sent runners to the lower floors. Another ordered casualty lists updated and ammunition gathered. A third began marking usable rooms on the map. Someone called for every squad leader still alive to report strength, weapons, and wounded within ten minutes.
Klein watched the room come alive by degrees. Not hope. Not yet. But motion. The first useful antidote to despair.
Qin Mo turned toward the assembled soldiers near the doorway.
"Scavenge everything," he ordered. "Metal first. Electronics second. If you can't find electronics, bring me copper and rubber. Strip wiring from dead vox-lines if you have to. Pull reinforcement rods from collapsed walls only after someone checks whether the ceiling will follow. Do not touch unknown cult devices barehanded. Do not bring me anything still ticking unless you enjoy becoming a warning to others."
One soldier swallowed. "And if we find Mechanicus-marked equipment?"
Qin Mo looked at him.
"Bring it to me before anyone starts praying at it."
Grey snorted despite himself. The sound was small, brief, and badly needed.
Klein did not laugh. But the corner of his mouth twitched.
"…You actually think you can do this?" he asked.
Qin Mo's smirk widened, though his eyes remained hard.
"I don't think I can." He glanced once at the tactical map, at the blinking unknowns scattered across the Underhive like dying embers. "I know I can."
Klein held his gaze for several seconds. The commander's hand tightened around his weapon, not in threat, but like a man bracing himself before stepping onto ground he knew might collapse. Doubt remained. It would have been foolish if it did not. But belief had entered the room beside it, unwelcome and stubborn.
At last, Klein nodded.
"Very well." He turned to his officers, voice gaining the edge of command again. "You heard him. Move."
The conference room emptied into motion. Boots scraped over glass. Orders spread into the corridor. Men who had been waiting to die began hunting through ruins for metal, wire, and miracles that could be built by hand.
Qin Mo remained by the map for a moment longer, studying the eastern stronghold's blinking sigil. Seventy kilometers of hostile Underhive separated them from the next possible pocket of survivors. The route was long, ugly, and almost certainly watched.
First, they would make this place harder to kill.
Then he would find out who else had survived.
And if the rebels wanted the Underhive to remain their war machine, they were going to learn what happened when someone else started improving the design.