"FOR KATO!"
The man braced both boots against the armored truck's buckling deck and tightened his grip on the quad-barreled heavy stubber. The weapon shook his entire body as it fired, vomiting a continuous storm of lead into the densest knots of shrieking heretics flooding the rubble-choked avenue.
The heavy stubber roared like an angry engine being tortured past its limits. Its rotating barrels glowed a furious red, heat shimmer rising from them in wavering sheets, while brass casings poured across the blood-slick concrete below like a glittering metal rain.
Las-shots and solid rounds hammered the truck's hull. Sparks leapt from the armor plates. Smoke curled from fresh impact scars. The man did not flinch. His jaw was locked, his shoulders rigid, his eyes fixed with a predator's focus on the advancing enemy.
The sheer weight of fire tore through barricades, punched through walls, and shredded enemy formations before they could reform. A hab-building packed with heretics shuddered under the punishment. Its support columns failed one after another with sharp metallic cracks, and the structure collapsed inward, burying its occupants beneath a crushing tomb of ferrocrete, rebar, dust, and screaming bodies.
Grey stared at the weapon through his visor. "That thing was built for anti-aircraft, wasn't it?"
Grot shielded his face from the shimmering heat pouring off the barrels. "Looks like it. But he's modified the feed, the mount, and probably half the recoil system. No way it was designed to sweep streets like this."
Qin Mo crossed the killing ground with deliberate strides. Broken glass, spent casings, and fragments of masonry crunched beneath his armored boots. Rounds struck the air around him and either flattened against invisible pressure or veered away before touching his armor.
"You're more useful elsewhere," he said flatly. "Move. Urban fighting needs that firepower."
The gunner glanced down at him, unimpressed despite the blood, smoke, and impossible armor. "Oh? And you're taking over this position?"
Qin Mo did not waste time explaining.
He turned his shoulder toward the advancing heretics and fired.
A luminous sphere of volatile energy launched from his shoulder cannon, crossed the avenue in a heartbeat, and detonated above a packed cluster of cultists. For an instant, the blast hung in the air like a miniature sun. Then it collapsed inward with a crackling implosion.
A storm of las-beams rained down.
Everything caught beneath the burst vanished. Flesh, armor, banners, weapons, even the upper layers of the street itself were reduced to glowing vapor and falling ash.
The gunner watched the destruction, then looked back at Qin Mo. His expression changed from challenge to practical acceptance.
"Got it. Understood."
He cut the heavy stubber's feed, vaulted down from the truck, and shouted for his wife and children to move. Within seconds, the family was running deeper into the city, the modified weapon dragged along by a pair of militia fighters who clearly understood its value.
Qin Mo turned to Grey.
"You and the others split up. Secure the city."
Grey nodded once. His jump pack ignited, blasting dust and ash outward as he launched into the smoke-choked air.
The other power-armored warriors followed, scattering into separate districts like falling stars. Wherever they descended, death followed.
....
Grey landed atop a cracked high-rise and scanned Kato through the polarized visor of his power armor. His HUD painted the battlefield in layered data: heat signatures, friendly markers, hostile concentrations, structural instability warnings, power-grid fluctuations, ammunition explosions, radiation spikes, and vox-traffic so dense with panic that the system kept trying to prioritize distress calls from men who were already dead.
Kato was not merely under attack. It was being dismantled street by street.
Ruined hab-blocks and shattered manufactoria clawed at the underhive ceiling like broken teeth. Smoke rose between them in thick, choking plumes. Flickering lumen-strips, burning fuel spills, and muzzle flashes turned the city into a maze of red light and black shadow. Somewhere below, civilians screamed orders over one another while militia squads dragged wounded men through drainage channels and market tunnels that had become evacuation routes by necessity.
A brutal stalemate raged between the heretics and Kato's defenders.
To Grey's surprise, the equipment gap was not as wide as he had expected. Some militia fighters wore crude powered exoskeletons assembled from cargo lifter frames, mining braces, and old industrial servos. Others carried weapons that looked as if a gang mechanic, a black-market gunsmith, and a madman had argued over the same workbench and all somehow won.
One such weapon fired from a rooftop nest.
A golden beam lanced across the avenue and punched straight through an enemy tank. The vehicle's armor flashed white, its ammunition cooked off, and the turret burst upward in a plume of fire. The militia around the weapon cheered, then immediately ducked as return fire chewed apart the roofline above them.
Grey filed the sight away. Kato had survived this long because its people were not helpless. That did not mean they were winning.
His HUD tagged a heavy weapon nest inside the building directly beneath him. The heretics there had turned the lower floors into a fortified firing position, pinning down a militia advance with autocannon bursts and artillery spotter signals. Every attempt to cross the street ended with bodies sliding across the dust.
Grey activated his grav-shield.
A low hum passed through his armor. The air around him tightened, pressure shifting until loose grit lifted from the rooftop and began orbiting his boots.
Then he stepped down.
"CRACK!"
The roof gave way beneath him. Grey dropped through three weakened floors in a cascade of ferrocrete, insulation foam, and twisted pipework before slamming into the heretic-occupied level below. The impact buckled the plating under his boots and threw nearby cultists off their feet.
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
The heretics stared at him from behind artillery controls, ammunition stacks, and barricades made from torn hab-furniture. Their hands still gripped weapons. Their mouths hung open. Their faces twisted with the stunned horror of men who had just watched death descend through the ceiling.
Grey raised his right arm.
Miniature energy spheres erupted in rapid succession, filling the room with searing scatterfire. Bodies crumpled. Armor melted. Weapons detonated in their owners' hands. The stink of burned flesh and fused plastek flooded the chamber before silence reclaimed it.
Grey turned in a full circle, weapon still raised.
The entire floor was clear.
He moved to the remaining artillery pieces and expanded his grav-shield. The machines screamed as invisible pressure folded barrels, cracked breeches, crushed recoil assemblies, and compressed ammunition feeds into useless scrap.
A shell detonated outside.
"BOOM!"
Shrapnel tore through the windows, slowed in his shield, and rained harmlessly across the floor. Grey's HUD snapped toward the blast origin. Thermal overlays and structural scans pierced walls, floors, and smoke until a distant artillery crew appeared seven hundred meters away, hidden behind two buildings and a collapsed manufactorum gantry.
Grey switched his shoulder cannon to Gauss mode.
He fired.
The shot punched through every obstacle in its path. Reinforced walls vaporized. Steel rebar split apart. A line of startled heretics vanished mid-shout as the beam reached the artillery emplacement and erased it in a flash of white heat.
As the distant gun fell silent, a tank rumbled from an alley below. Its left armor panel bore a crude painted image of a woman in a heroic pose, rifle raised, hair streaming behind her like a banner.
The turret hatch opened. A man with a bright red mohawk popped out, one hand raised in a triumphant gesture.
"OHHH YEAH! THANKS, BROTHER!"
A nearby explosion threw debris across the street. The man immediately ducked back inside.
Behind the tank came a motley column of fighters: men and women in scavenged armor, gang leathers, patched flak, chainmail made from industrial cable, and all of them marked by the same red mohawk.
Grey narrowed his eyes. "Bloodcrest Gangers?"
He had assumed most Underhive gangs had either joined the traitors, been wiped out, or fled into the deeper tunnels. Apparently, Kato had forced even the gangs to choose a side.
The tank commander reappeared, this time screaming into a vox-bead.
"STOP PUSHING FORWARD, YOU IDIOTS! THE CHAPEL'S ABOUT TO FALL! THE CHAPEL'S ABOUT TO FALL!"
A panicked voice answered through the local vox spill. "WHAT? The chapel is the rear guard! How the hell is it in danger?"
"STOP ADVANCING! PULL BACK TO THE CHAPEL, NOW!"
The Bloodcrest fighters reversed course at once. Some vaulted onto the tank. Others sprinted beside it, boots pounding through dust and blood as the vehicle turned toward the city center.
Grey watched them go with cold suspicion.
He did not trust Underhive gangs. To him, they were wild dogs with guns: dangerous, hungry, useful when pointed at an enemy, and liable to bite the hand beside them the moment food ran short.
Still, they were running toward the chapel, not away from it.
That was worth noting.
Grey turned from the rooftop breach and launched himself toward the next district. Better to purge the city himself than rely on allies he did not understand.
....
Grey charged down the street through a storm of traitor fire.
His multilaser shrieked, cutting enemy infantry apart in disciplined sweeps. His shoulder cannon boomed, cracking open barricades and fortified windows. His grav-shield flared with every impact, turning solid rounds into molten slag and dragging useful energy from incoming lasfire before feeding it back into his armor's hungry systems.
By the time he reached the district's edge, every heretic in his path was dead. The street behind him was marked by cooling craters, severed limbs, shattered weapons, and the thin rain of ash drifting down from burning hab-levels above.
Then Qin Mo's words returned to him.
"When I complete my masterpiece, and you see what it can do, you'll realize how weak and inefficient your current weapons truly are."
Grey had laughed at that once. Not openly, perhaps, but close enough.
Now he stood amid the wreckage of an enemy sector he had erased almost alone and understood.
His previous armor would have failed minutes into this fight. Its power cells would have drained. Its joints would have locked. Its shielding would have collapsed under the first serious barrage. He would have died behind cover, praying that the next shell chose someone else.
This armor let him walk through the storm.
Grey looked toward the next district. His visor marked movement. Enemy signatures. Dozens. Hundreds.
A cruel grin tugged at his mouth.
"You've got ten minutes left to live, worms."
He stepped over the charred corpses and advanced.
....
With the power-armored warriors leading the counterattack, Kato's urban battle stopped being a stalemate and became an extermination.
Entire blocks of traitors were wiped out. Entrenched enemy positions were reduced to rubble. Heavy weapon nests that had held militia companies in place for hours disappeared beneath plasma bursts, gauss fire, and gravitic collapse.
The militia no longer had to breach every fortified building with ladders, grenades, and desperate men carrying demolition charges under fire. Now, when a squad found a strongpoint, they shouted a warning, pulled back, and watched the structure vanish seconds later.
For Kato's defenders, the advantage was obvious.
The drawback became obvious just as quickly.
The power-armored warriors were not from Kato. They did not know which buildings had histories, which alleys fed hidden shelters, which shrines mattered to local families, or which market halls had stood for a thousand years through gang wars, sump floods, famine, and plague.
To them, a centuries-old monument was simply another bunker if heretics fired from inside it.
Militia officers winced as ancestral walls collapsed. Gangers cursed when old turf landmarks disappeared under fire. Civilians stared in horror as places they had defended for generations were sacrificed to win the next street.
No one ordered Qin Mo's warriors to stop.
Everyone understood the arithmetic.
A building could be rebuilt. A dead city could not.
....
Grey fought his way to the city's edge, where Grot and the others were already regrouping. Behind them, Kato's militia forces reformed in ragged lines, their commanders dragging squads back into order through shouted threats, prayers, and sheer exhaustion.
The surviving heretics fled into the wasteland beyond the settlement.
The lucky few who escaped the streets did not get far.
A roaring wall of flame, miles wide, swept across the outer ruins. It rolled over broken roads, collapsed hab-shells, abandoned barricades, and fleeing cultists with deliberate hunger. Men became ash before they could scream. Vehicles vanished in secondary explosions. Banners burned down to their poles.
None survived.
Then Qin Mo descended from the smoke-dark sky.
His armor was scorched. His Aquila-topped staff dripped with blood. The two-headed eagle gleamed above his gauntlet, its wings spread in eternal vigilance, bright against the ash and firelight.
Behind him came the last defenders of Kato.
The city's remaining forces gathered in the broken avenue below: PDF survivors, local militia, gang fighters, bounty hunters, armed civilians, stretcher-bearers, mechanics, scavengers, and children old enough to carry ammunition but not old enough to understand why their hands would not stop shaking.
A PDF officer pushed through the crowd, saw the staff, and dropped to one knee.
"Praise the Emperor!" he shouted, voice cracking with relief. "Praise the Emperor! Praise His chosen warriors!"
The soldiers followed at once, kneeling in ragged waves. Some did it out of faith. Some did it because their officers did. Some did it because they had just watched salvation fall from the sky and had no better language for it.
But the civilians, gangers, and bounty hunters did not kneel before the staff.
They knelt before Qin Mo himself.
They knew what had happened. No sermon could dress it up into something cleaner. Without these reinforcements, Kato would have bled out street by street until the last chapel, market, tunnel, and hab-warren fell silent.
Qin Mo surveyed the assembled survivors.
Their ranks were diverse in the way only the Underhive could make them.
Local militia stood with hand-me-down rifles, patchwork flak vests, mining helmets, gang-made plate, and more courage than training.
Gangers formed loose clusters around their colors, armed with brutal jury-rigged weapons, chainblades, stubbers, pipe rifles, chemical burners, and whatever else they had taken from dead enemies or built in illegal workshops.
Bounty hunters lingered at the edges, wrapped in long coats and scavenged armor, scarred faces half-hidden beneath rebreathers, their eyes weighing every ally like a possible contract.
PDF remnants stood among them, uniforms torn, insignia blackened, discipline battered but not broken.
Men and women who normally would have killed one another over a ration chit now stood beneath the Imperium's banner because the alternative had tried to eat them all.
It was a strange army.
It was also alive.
For the moment, that was enough.
Then a bounty hunter near the front raised one hand. He was tall, lean, and wrapped in a coat patched with armor plates from at least three different regiments. His voice carried the cautious tone of a man who knew he was being disrespectful but had decided someone had to say it.
"No offense, Lord… but did you have to turn half the city into ruins?"
The crowd went still. Several PDF soldiers looked ready to shoot him. A few gangers looked like they wanted to hear the answer.
Qin Mo turned away and began walking toward the city center. The ash shifted around his boots. Fires guttered in the broken windows above him. Behind him, thousands of exhausted survivors waited for judgment, reassurance, or another impossible order.
"This is war," he said.
He did not say it cruelly. He did not say it with pride. He said it like a fact no one in the Underhive could afford to misunderstand.
Then he made them a promise.
"When this war is over, I will build a new city. One so grand that even the Spire Lords will envy it."
He paused, looking toward the shattered heart of Kato.
"New Kato shall be your reward."