Late Into the Night.
Grot was still in the middle of combat when the order reached him.
He stood knee-deep in rubble and spent casings, Thunderborn warplate streaked with ash, blood, and scorched promethium residue. Ahead of him, the last pockets of heretic resistance were breaking beneath coordinated fire. Grey's squad had already punched through the outer barricades, and Grot had been preparing to lead the next push when his helm-vox cut through the roar of weapons with a priority signal.
The channel carried Qin Mo's voice. No static. No delay. No explanation.
"Return to the fortress. Immediately."
Grot paused with his hammer raised over a twitching mutant's skull. For a heartbeat, even the battlefield seemed to hesitate around him.
Grey's voice came over the squad link a moment later, edged with confusion. "Now? We're still engaged."
Grot brought the hammer down, crushed the mutant flat, and turned away from the front line.
"The Lord Commander said immediately," he replied. "So immediately it is."
He did not like leaving a battle unfinished. No Thunderborn did. But discipline mattered more than appetite, and Qin Mo did not pull warriors from an active front without reason. Whatever waited at the fortress was either urgent, dangerous, or strange enough that Qin Mo wanted Grot's eyes on it personally.
That thought did not comfort him.
....
By the time Grot returned, the fortress had sunk into the tense half-silence of late night. The outer guns still tracked distant movement beyond the perimeter, but inside the walls most men had collapsed wherever duty allowed them to sleep.
Lumen-strips burned low along the corridors. Servos hummed behind sealed bulkheads. Somewhere below, fabrication machinery continued its tireless rhythm, shaping metal while humans rested.
Fortress guards escorted Grot through the underground complex without small talk. Their hands stayed near their weapons. Not because they feared him, but because something in the lower detention levels had put them on edge.
Grot noticed. He always noticed.
The air grew colder as they descended. The walls changed from reinforced habitation corridors to armored confinement passages lined with sensor nodes, recessed weapon slits, and emergency shutters. Every door they passed looked capable of sealing hard enough to cut a man in half. The smell shifted too: hot metal, disinfectant, old blood, and the dry electrical tang of active suppression fields.
When the final detention chamber opened, Grot understood why the guards were nervous.
Qin Mo stood inside the cell.
He was hunched over a newly assembled machine the size of a field generator, its outer casing still unfinished, cables and focusing vanes exposed beneath temporary shielding. Pale arcs crawled along insulated channels.
Small stabilizer rings rotated around a central core, correcting their own alignment with precise, insectile clicks. The machine did not roar or flare like Imperial technology trying to impress witnesses. It worked with quiet, controlled menace.
But the machine was not what drew Grot's full attention.
The prisoner bound to the restraint frame was the heretic Magus he had been hunting.
She hung upright in the cell's center, wrists locked above her head, ankles clamped to the floor, torso pinned by a medical restraint cage that doubled as a life-support rig. Her robes had been cut away where armor plates and hidden talismans needed to be removed. Dried blood marked one side of her face. Hexagrammic chains, Qin Mo's own gravitic clamps, and a dozen sensor needles held her in place.
Grot stared at her, then looked back at Qin Mo.
"Isn't this the High Magus of the heretics?"
His voice carried disbelief despite himself. A moment later, amusement crept in. He stepped into the cell, armor servos growling softly under his weight.
"How did you capture her?"
The Magus glared at him with naked hatred. Even restrained, half-starved, and sealed inside Qin Mo's suppression field, she tried to look like a queen awaiting the execution of lesser beings. Her lips peeled back from bloodied teeth. Her eyes burned with the fury of someone used to killing men with a thought.
Grot smiled under his helm.
Qin Mo did not answer the question. His gaze remained on the readings scrolling across the device's control face. Then he lifted one finger and pointed at the Magus's head.
"Punch her."
Grot slowly turned his helmet toward him.
"Excuse me?"
"Force her to use psychic power."
Grot's smile returned, wider this time. That was an order he understood.
He stepped closer. The Magus's anger sharpened into alarm. Her pupils dilated. Somewhere beneath the restraint frame, muscles tensed as instinct screamed at her to draw on the Warp, to lash out, to tear the armored brute apart before his fist reached her.
Grot did not give her time.
His gauntleted fist drove forward in a short, brutal arc. He did not put his full weight behind it; Qin Mo had asked for a test subject, not a corpse. Even restrained, the strike landed with the force of a breaching ram.
A wet crack echoed through the chamber.
The Magus's head snapped sideways. Bone gave way beneath reinforced knuckles. Her cheek collapsed inward. Her skull partially caved around the impact, and her body convulsed hard enough that the restraint frame shrieked against its floor bolts.
The life-support rig reacted instantly. Needles drove deeper. Stabilizing clamps locked. A medicae injector hissed against her neck, pumping coagulants and emergency stimulants into ruined flesh.
The Magus tried to scream. What came out was a strangled, bubbling snarl.
For one brief moment, the air thickened. The cell lights flickered. A sour pressure pushed against Grot's teeth, the familiar warning sensation of Warp energy beginning to gather around a psyker under extreme pain.
Then the pressure broke apart.
No lightning. No telekinetic backlash. No invisible hand crushing his throat. No daemonic whisper sliding through the cracks of the room. The gathering force collapsed before it could become an attack.
The Magus sagged against her restraints, eyes wide with horror.
Qin Mo nodded once.
"It works."
Grot looked from the prisoner to the machine, then back again.
"I assume," he said slowly, "that this was not simply a creative method of interrogation."
Qin Mo tapped the device's casing with one knuckle.
"This is my latest anti-psyker instrument. It does not fight the Warp directly. That would be inefficient and unreliable. Instead, it disrupts the neural synchronization a psyker requires to establish and maintain a stable link to the Warp."
Grot tilted his head.
"How is that different from the suppression emitters built into Thunderborn armor?"
"Scale, focus, and brutality." Qin Mo adjusted a control dial, watching the Magus's neural readouts stabilize into useless noise. "Thunderborn armor weakens psykers inside combat range. It interferes enough to delay them, break concentration, and reduce precision. Useful in battle, but not absolute."
He rested one hand on the machine.
"This renders them inert."
The Magus made a wet, broken sound that might have been a curse. Her ruined jaw could no longer shape words. Her eyes, however, understood perfectly.
For a psyker, losing the Warp was not like being disarmed. It was closer to being blinded, deafened, and buried alive inside one's own skull. The Magus strained again, desperate to reach for whatever power had always answered her. Nothing came.
Grot felt his own excitement rise despite the grimness of the scene.
The machine was ugly, bulky, and obviously a prototype. Half its components were exposed. Its cooling system had been assembled from battlefield salvage and precision parts Qin Mo must have fabricated by hand. It was not yet fit for deployment outside a controlled chamber.
But if Qin Mo refined it, made it smaller, hardened it against battle damage, and integrated it into fortifications or portable field units, the implications were enormous.
Enemy psykers. Cult Magi. Witch-commanders. Sorcerers. Warp-tainted assets.
All of them reduced to meat inside the field.
Grot approved. Enthusiastically.
Then the practical question returned.
Why had Qin Mo summoned him from active battle for this?
"Starting today, you are to remain at the fortress," Qin Mo said.
"Understood." The answer left Grot automatically. Obedience first. Understanding second.
Then the meaning caught up with him.
The war was still raging across the Underhive. The heretics had not been eradicated. Every hour, isolated Imperial positions needed reinforcement, evacuation, supplies, or vengeance. Grot's armor, weapons, and experience could accelerate any assault Qin Mo pointed him toward.
And now he was being pulled from the front.
Grot stood straighter.
"I will follow orders, Lord Commander. But may I ask why?"
Qin Mo looked at him. His expression was composed, but Grot had fought beside him long enough to notice what others missed. Qin Mo's focus was too narrow. His eyes were dry from sleepless work. His jaw carried tension that had nothing to do with battlefield exhaustion.
He was not worried about a counterattack. He was worried about something larger.
"With my Thunderborn armor," Grot continued, choosing his words carefully, "I can significantly accelerate our frontline advances."
"I have a more important task for you."
Grot hesitated. More important than the war?
That was not a question he voiced. Qin Mo had not said it lightly.
Grot glanced toward the Magus, still hanging in the restraint frame, then toward the anti-psyker device. The implication settled uneasily in his mind. Qin Mo expected danger at the fortress. Not ordinary danger. Not rebels with guns or mutants in tunnels. Something that required Thunderborn protection, anti-psyker suppression, and secrecy.
He bowed his head.
"As you command, Lord Commander."
Qin Mo nodded.
"Good. Get some rest."
Grot turned toward the door, then paused at the threshold.
"Am I to assume I won't be fighting for the foreseeable future?"
Qin Mo did not answer. His attention had already returned to the machine's readings, the prisoner's neural activity, and whatever problem was forming behind his eyes.
That was answer enough.
Grot left without another word. The guards sealed the chamber behind him, and the corridor swallowed the heavy rhythm of his steps.
Inside the cell, Qin Mo finally turned away from the device and looked at the Magus.
There was one question that mattered more than the test.
"How were you captured?"
The Magus stared back through one swollen eye. Blood ran from her broken mouth. Her face had been deformed so badly that speech was impossible even if pride had allowed it.
But Qin Mo did not need words to read her confusion.
Hatred, yes. Pain, certainly. Terror now, after the failure of her power. But beneath all of it sat something else: bewilderment.
She did not know how she had ended up in his fortress.
Qin Mo's frown deepened.
Vanessa.
He exhaled sharply through his nose, filed the question away with all the others he did not yet have time to answer, and returned to his research.
....
Later that night, Qin Mo fell asleep at his workbench.
At least, that was what his body did.
His head rested against one folded arm beside scattered tools, half-finished schematics, and the humming anti-psyker device. The chamber lights dimmed automatically. Somewhere beyond the walls, guards changed shifts, drones moved through supply corridors, and the fortress continued to breathe like a machine built out of desperation.
But his mind did not sink into ordinary sleep.
When awareness returned, Qin Mo found himself standing in a bedroom.
It was lavish in a way that did not belong anywhere beneath Tyrone Hive. Polished flooring. Heavy curtains. A bed wide enough for a noble family to waste space on. Soft light from hidden fixtures, warm and golden instead of the cold industrial glare of fortress lumens. The air smelled faintly of perfume, old wood, and rain-washed leaves, scents so absurdly out of place in the Underhive that they felt more threatening than blood.
A massive tree stood in the corner.
Its roots sank into the floor without breaking it. Its trunk rose almost to the ceiling, bark dark and ridged like old ironwood. Leaves spread in an unnaturally vibrant canopy, each one lit from within by a green pulse too regular to be life and too organic to be machinery. The bark shifted subtly when Qin Mo looked at it, not like flesh, but like a surface rearranging its pattern to match his attention.
It did not belong in the room.
That was the point.
Qin Mo approached without haste.
A grotesque face pushed out from the bark, splitting the trunk into a wide, manic grin.
"Boo~! Did I scare you?"
Qin Mo stopped an arm's length away. His expression did not change.
"You find this amusing?"
The grin vanished immediately.
The tree folded inward. Bark softened into skin. Branches drew back like retracting limbs. Leaves dissolved into strands of dark hair. In a few seconds, the thing in the corner had become a young girl standing barefoot on the polished floor, wearing an expression far too old for her face.
Qin Mo recognized her.
The same girl from his earlier visions. The one who had become a tank. Then a nobleman. Then something else whenever identity became inconvenient.
She studied him with bright, unsettling interest.
"I remember who you are now," she said. "You are the Forgemaster."
Qin Mo's gaze sharpened.
"Another title? Last time you called me the Shapeshifter. Which is it?"
The girl laughed and wagged one finger.
"No, no, no. Shapeshifter is me."
Her outline flickered. Flesh became armor. Small hands became gauntlets. In the space of a breath, Grey stood before him in full Thunderborn plate, though the posture was wrong and the smile was all hers.
"All because of that damned Void-Dragon," she continued, Grey's voice twisted around her venom. "It shattered me into fragments. My memories are incomplete, scattered across prisons and echoes and stolen shapes. But I am the true Shapeshifter."
The bedroom lost its walls.
The curtains unraveled into darkness. The floor flattened into a sheet of reflected starlight. The bed, the lamps, the ceiling, all of it fell away until Qin Mo stood in a field of stars stretching without end.
At the center of that starfield stood a luminous figure of blue-white energy. It had no human face, yet Qin Mo understood its focus. It held a blade in hands made of light, drawing strands of stellar fire into the weapon's edge and hammering them into shape without an anvil. Every strike sent ripples through nearby suns.
"The Forgemaster was the youngest and weakest of the C'tan," the girl narrated. "Weakest, if one judged only by raw hunger and direct force. But it did not rely on such crude measures. It created weapons. Engines. Prisons. Artifacts so potent that even other Star Gods coveted them."
The starfield shifted again.
A purple entity emerged across from the blue figure, its form changing faster than sight could settle: serpent, monarch, mirror, blade, beast, child, shadow. Every shape lasted only long enough to imply a lie before becoming another.
"That was me," the girl said. "The Shapeshifter."
Her voice darkened. The bitterness in it sounded practiced, but not entirely false.
"But you remained whole while I was shattered. All because you betrayed me."
Qin Mo kept his attention on the vision, not the emotion wrapped around it.
"Explain."
"The weapon the Void-Dragon used to shatter me?" She clenched her fists. "It was your creation."
The image changed.
The Void-Dragon appeared as a vast metallic presence coiled around a storm of caged lightning, its body more machine-principle than flesh. In its grasp was a weapon shaped from blue stellar fire, too clean and deliberate to be born from the Dragon's own nature. The purple Shapeshifter lunged, split into a hundred forms, and tried to flow around the strike.
The weapon found all of them.
The Shapeshifter broke. Not in a flash of melodrama, but in pieces: shards of purple light torn away and hurled across darkness, each fragment still alive enough to hate.
"I was not the strongest," the girl whispered, "but I was fluid. Ever-changing. The Void-Dragon should never have been able to destroy me."
Another image followed.
The blue Forgemaster stood behind the Void-Dragon, watching the Shapeshifter's fragments scatter. The figure's posture suggested satisfaction. Or perhaps the vision wanted Qin Mo to think so.
Then other presences emerged in succession.
Iash'uddra, a churning mass of hunger and segmented shadow. Nyadra'zatha, burning with violent stellar heat. Others whose names Qin Mo half-remembered from broken lore and half-felt in the marrow of the vision. One by one, the images showed them weakening, falling, being consumed.
The girl smiled.
"One by one, you devoured them all."
Qin Mo did not speak.
The revelation pressed against every assumption he had made since awakening in this universe. He had believed he was channeling C'tan power, or perhaps fused with some surviving fragment of a Star God. That explanation had been terrible enough.
This vision suggested something far worse.
Not a fragment. Not a vessel. Not an accident.
A whole C'tan identity buried beneath the name Qin Mo.
For several seconds, his mind turned inward, connecting memory, ability, instinct, and the strange joy he felt when matter obeyed his designs. He thought of weapons assembled from scrap with impossible ease. Fortresses grown from ruined hab-blocks. Armor made practical by intuition no human engineer should possess.
Across from him, the girl watched with a sly smile beginning to curl at the edge of her borrowed face.
Then Qin Mo stopped thinking about himself and started thinking about the story.
Something was wrong.
Not everything. A good lie rarely failed completely. Parts of it might even be true. The weapon. The betrayal. The shattered being. The old C'tan names. Enough truth to make the lie digestible.
But the shape of it did not fit.
If the Forgemaster had stood beside the Void-Dragon in so critical a moment, if it had forged weapons that changed the balance among the Star Gods, if it had survived whole while others were shattered, then why had Qin Mo never heard of it?
Warhammer lore was incomplete, contradictory, and often buried beneath unreliable Imperial ignorance. He knew that. But this was not some minor dynasty footnote or forgotten xenos epithet. This would have been central to the history of the C'tan. The kind of detail that should have left scars across multiple records, myths, shards, and Necron legends.
Instead, nothing.
No Forgemaster. No youngest C'tan. No hidden artisan-god standing behind the Void-Dragon.
The girl's smile faded as Qin Mo looked at her.
He stared longer, letting the silence sharpen.
Then realization settled into place. Cold, clean, and ugly.
"You're not the Shapeshifter."
His voice dropped into something flat and dangerous.
"You're the Deceiver, Mephet'ran."