The holo-display shimmered to life above the obsidian command table, projecting the battlefield in hard tactical clarity. Blue and red runes flickered across a three-dimensional map of the killing ground, each marker sliding over ridgelines, trenchworks, shell craters, armor columns, and infantry formations with machine-cold precision.
To anyone looking at the display for the first time, the heretic forces appeared trapped. Their forward elements were compressed against the unyielding defenses of the First Legion, while teleport assault groups struck at their rear, landing amid supply lines, command relays, artillery parks, and reserve formations.
It looked like a pincer maneuver nearing completion.
It looked devastating.
But a map was not a battlefield.
From the perspective of the men actually dying under the smoke-black sky, the enemy had not yet been crushed. The heretics still had space to maneuver, still had officers screaming orders through the vox, still had tanks dragging themselves through churned mud and burning wreckage, still had enough soldiers alive to hold a firing line if terror and fanaticism could keep them in place.
Their frontline regiments pushed forward under constant fire, trying to break the First Legion defensive wall before the assault troops in their rear could tear open their formation completely. Their flanks twisted inward, squads and companies peeling away to contain the First Legion warriors who had appeared directly among them in flashes of displacement-light and static.
One regiment, however, had taken the worst of the chaos.
The 20th Regiment.
Its commander had recently received a warning from Venomfang, and the memory of that warning had burned away whatever restraint he had left. He now enforced discipline with the frantic brutality of a man who understood that failure would not end with demotion, disgrace, or execution by firing squad. Venomfang did not waste death so cleanly.
"If I see a single coward," the commander roared into the regimental vox, his voice cracking through static and artillery thunder, "I will execute you myself!"
He did not say it once. He repeated it until the words became part of the barrage. He screamed at platoon leaders, threatened squad sergeants, cursed the wounded, and promised every man under his command that anyone who flinched, hesitated, or took one step backward without orders would not need to worry about the First Legion.
He would kill them first.
To make certain the lesson was understood, he seized a ripper gun from a heavy-weapon crew and opened fire on a knot of soldiers trying to retreat through the mud. The weapon barked in brutal bursts. Men folded, burst open, or vanished beneath sprays of blood and torn flak armor. The survivors stopped running at once, not because courage had returned, but because death now stood in both directions.
Fear bought him a few more minutes.
Only a few.
Fear alone could not hold back a First Legion assault.
The sky burned with plasma detonations. Heavy shells punched the ground into fountains of mud, bone, and scrap metal. Lasfire laced the smoke in red lines, while heavier beams carved through barricades and men alike. The ground trembled beneath the advance of First Legion armor, every track-link grinding down heretic bodies, shattered weapons, and the remains of defensive positions that had existed only moments earlier.
The 20th Regiment was crumbling. Its lines did not break all at once. They frayed. One squad fell back without permission. Another lost its officer and stopped responding to vox orders. A third emptied its ammunition into a target already dead because no one dared look away long enough to notice. Men huddled behind wrecked vehicles, fired blindly over rubble, or pressed themselves flat into craters as if the mud could hide them from tanks.
Explosions tore through the regiment's forward ranks. Bodies lifted from the ground like rag dolls and came apart in the air. A shell landed inside a half-dug trench and turned thirty men into a red mist that sprayed across the faces of those behind them. Another impact struck a munitions cart, and the secondary detonation rippled down the line, cooking off grenades, charge packs, and fuel canisters in a chain of sharp, vicious blasts.
Through it all, the First Legion Leman Russ tanks kept coming.
They did not move quickly. They did not need to. Their advance was slow, deliberate, and merciless, their battle cannons, hull-mounted weapons, and sponson guns firing in disciplined rhythm. Each discharge forced the heretics to duck, scatter, or die. Each pause between shots was too short to exploit.
The heretics' conventional weapons could only hope to damage the tanks in the brief moments when the First Legion gunners exposed firing angles or when a vehicle crossed uneven ground and presented a weaker plate. Las-blasts sparked and died against armor. Autocannon rounds hammered dents into reinforced plating but failed to penetrate. Krak missiles struck gravitic distortion fields, veered aside, or detonated early with useless flashes of light.
The return fire was not useless.
A Leman Russ battle cannon spoke. A heretic firing pit disappeared.
A hull heavy bolter swept across a squad attempting to reposition. Bodies jerked and folded as mass-reactive rounds punched through them.
A plasma blast struck a barricade made from cargo containers, turning the metal white-hot and boiling the men behind it alive before the structure collapsed.
The 20th Regiment commander clenched his jaw so hard his teeth hurt.
Even he was close to losing his nerve.
The First Legion army was still advancing. Not lunging forward in reckless fury, but gaining ground steadily, meter by bloody meter, while the 20th Regiment was forced to fight in retreat. That was the worst kind of fighting for troops like his. They had to move backward without looking like they were running. They had to maintain formation while stepping over the dead. They had to keep firing while watching enemy armor grow larger through the smoke.
A Talon II PDF regiment was not built for that standard of warfare. Not under these conditions. Not with its rear threatened, its flanks aflame, and its officers more afraid of their own masters than the enemy.
It was an impossible standard.
The commander knew it.
That only made him more desperate.
He grabbed the nearest soldier by the shoulder and hauled him around. The man nearly slipped in the blood-slick mud before snapping to attention. He was young, helmet too large for his face, eyes wide behind a cracked visor.
"You," the commander said. "Come here."
"Sir!"
The commander shoved a melta bomb against his chest. The charge was heavy, ugly, and warm from recent handling.
"Strap this to yourself. Charge their tanks."
The soldier stared at the bomb. Then at the First Legion line. Then back at his commander. Color drained from his face until he looked more corpse than conscript.
"M-me…?"
The commander drew his laspistol and pressed the barrel against the soldier's temple. The muzzle burned hot enough to make the man flinch.
"Are you refusing?"
"No, sir, I—"
"You don't go, I execute you right now."
The soldier's eyes darted between the merciless enemy ahead and the merciless officer behind him. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment before words finally came out, broken and desperate.
"But, sir… I've served under you for so lo—"
BANG.
The lasbolt burned through his skull at point-blank range. Bone, blood, and cooked brain matter sprayed across the mud. The body dropped beside the melta charge, one hand twitching twice before going still.
The commander did not look down.
He turned to another soldier.
"You. Come here."
The second man obeyed immediately. His face had gone pale, but his hands moved quickly when the commander thrust the melta bomb into them.
"For the Lord of Wisdom," the commander said, voice low and vicious, "I order you to destroy their tanks."
The soldier swallowed. He had seen what hesitation meant. Whatever fear remained inside him had to choose between instant death and the possibility of useful death.
He chose the latter.
"For the Lord of Wisdom!" he roared, more to convince himself than anyone else.
He strapped the melta bomb across his back, tightened the harness until the weight bit into his shoulders, and sprinted toward the First Legion Leman Russ tanks.
"Cover him!" the commander screamed. "Cover him!"
The remaining heretics opened fire at once. Not with discipline. Not with accuracy. They fired because failing to fire might make them next. Lasguns snapped. Autoguns rattled. A heavy stubber chattered until its barrel glowed. The air around the suicide runner filled with wild suppressing fire, enough to make him believe, for one mad moment, that his regiment was behind him.
The belief strengthened him.
His fear burned into zeal.
"For the Lord of Wisdom!" he shouted again, boots pounding through mud, shell craters, and scattered corpses.
He ran harder. Faster. Farther from his own line.
Then unease crept in.
There were not enough shots coming at him.
The First Legion had seen him. He was certain of that. An officer had even risen halfway from the hatch of a Leman Russ command tank and looked directly at him through magnocular lenses. The man watched him approach, then ducked back inside without giving any visible order to fire.
The tanks did not slew their turrets toward him. The infantry did not panic. No heavy bolter cut him down.
The First Legion line continued advancing as if a suicide bomber sprinting toward them with a melta charge strapped to his back was an inconvenience too minor to interrupt formation.
The soldier's faith seized upon the only explanation it could tolerate.
The Lord of Wisdom watched over him.
His god had hidden him from the enemy's wrath. His charge was blessed. His sacrifice would be glorious. He would become a name spoken in whispers among survivors. He would be remembered.
Then he saw the drone.
It floated above the First Legion front line, small and dark against the smoke-lit sky. Its anti-grav vanes kept it perfectly steady despite shockwaves rolling beneath it. A narrow holo-projector beneath its chassis flashed a simple warning in bright, pitiless letters.
[DO NOT APPROACH.]
The soldier did not slow.
Warnings were for the faithless.
He tightened his grip on the detonator.
"The Lord of Wisdom watches over me!"
His foot crossed an invisible boundary.
The world below his waist vanished into pain.
An unseen force struck him like an industrial press dropped from orbit. His legs pulverized before he fully understood what had happened. Bones shattered into wet fragments. Muscles collapsed into pulp. His boots, shins, and knees flattened into the mud beneath a localized gravitic crush field.
He fell forward, screaming.
Now he understood.
That was why the warning had been there.
That was why the First Legion had not bothered to shoot him.
Survival instinct tore through his fanaticism. He clawed backward with both hands, dragging his ruined lower body through blood and mud, trying to escape the invisible pressure before it reached his chest. The melta bomb scraped against his back. His fingers dug trenches into the ground.
The drone advanced faster.
It glided over him without haste.
The field passed across his body.
For a fraction of a second he felt his ribs compress, his lungs empty, his spine crack, and the melta harness buckle against him. Then there was no soldier anymore. Only a red smear pressed into the mud and a damaged melta charge crushed flat before its arming sequence could complete.
Inside the Leman Russ command tank, the First Legion regimental commander watched the feed and sneered.
"What an idiot."
He leaned toward the tactical console and issued a command to the grav-shielded drone cluster.
"Push them."
The drones surged forward.
Panic erupted among the heretic ranks.
Every soldier who had watched the suicide runner die understood what would happen if those machines reached them. They fired desperately at the small, fast-moving targets, but fear ruined their aim. Shots went high, wide, or ricocheted from gravitic distortion. A lucky las-burst struck one drone's casing, but the machine corrected itself and kept moving.
And because the heretics were firing at the drones instead of the advancing infantry, they exposed themselves to First Legion counterfire.
The Leman Russ tanks fired again.
The 20th Regiment's line buckled.
....
New Kato, Command Center
Inside the war room, the battle appeared cleaner than it truly was. The holo-display did not show the smell of burned flesh, the screams trapped beneath shellfire, or the way men hesitated before running because they knew their own officers might shoot them in the back. It showed icons, pressure lines, fire arcs, and casualty estimates.
Creed did not need more than that.
His eyes narrowed as the enemy formation shifted again. He saw the weakness immediately: one section of the red formation bending inward too sharply, its movement irregular, its response delayed, its command signals fragmented by panic and interference.
The 20th Regiment.
Its troops were hiding, falling back, and bunching together behind wreckage. Its officers were still transmitting orders, but the responses came late or not at all. Its discipline had not fully collapsed, but the fracture was visible. A trained commander did not need to wait for a rout to recognize one forming.
Creed pointed at the holo-display.
"This is it. The 20th is breaking. This is where we concentrate the breakthrough force."
Qin Mo studied the same position for a moment longer. His expression remained calm, but the data reflected in his eyes shifted as he followed the probable routes of collapse. If the 20th Regiment gave way, the enemy's front would not merely bend. It would tear open, exposing neighboring units to enfilade fire and allowing First Legion assault elements to roll the line from inside.
He nodded.
"Agreed."
Qin Mo activated his vox-transceiver.
"Grey. Anruida. Yoan. Prepare for teleportation. Once you arrive, begin your assault immediately."
Inside New Kato's deployment chamber, Grey received the order without visible surprise. He had been waiting for it.
He turned toward Anruida and Yoan. Both were seated near the teleport zone, their Thunderborn-pattern power armor gleaming under cold lumen light. Servos idled beneath layered plates. Weapon systems sat locked in standby. The air around them smelled of machine oil, ozone, and the faint metallic bite of charged gravitic fields.
Anruida stood first, calm and controlled, checking his gauntlet locks by habit. He moved like a soldier who believed preparation was a form of prayer, though he would never have phrased it that way.
Yoan rose more quietly. His presence still made nearby personnel uncomfortable. Even men who had fought beside him avoided looking at him for too long. The instinctive unease surrounding a Blank did not vanish because armor made him useful. It merely became easier to pretend away.
Grey gave them both a curt nod.
They returned it.
No speeches were needed.
Back in the command center, Qin Mo turned to the Master Control AI.
"Calculate teleport coordinates. Target: enemy 20th Regiment, rear-left pressure point. Prioritize arrival zones with maximum disruption and minimal friendly overlap."
The AI responded at once. Streams of data unfolded across the holo-display, measuring terrain, enemy movement, atmospheric interference, shield activity, artillery saturation, and the energy load required for precision insertion. Three bright blue markers appeared behind the weakening enemy line.
Until now, Qin Mo had held the Thunderborn back because of the enemy Knight.
The Knight was still a problem. A single war machine of that class could destroy infantry formations, shrug off conventional fire, and turn a breakthrough into a slaughter if deployed at the wrong moment. Even Thunderborn armor was not something Qin Mo intended to waste through arrogance.
But the 20th Regiment was breaking now.
And timing mattered more than caution.
Creed glanced from the display to Qin Mo. His brow furrowed.
"You're only sending three?"
Qin Mo smirked.
"That's all we need."
Creed did not immediately answer. He understood elite forces. He understood decisive pressure. But three warriors against a regiment still sounded less like a deployment and more like an act of faith.
Qin Mo was not acting on faith.
Thunderborn-pattern power armor was not standard First Legion line infantry wargear. It was not meant to turn a soldier into a slightly better infantryman. It had been designed around an obscene premise: that one properly equipped warrior, supplied with sufficient power, protection, mobility, data-linking, and firepower, could break formations normally requiring an entire regiment to engage.
The armor did not merely protect. It let its wearer move through battle as a mobile breach unit. Gravitic shielding blunted heavy fire. Integrated weapon systems allowed immediate engagement across multiple ranges. Servo-muscles gave ordinary human bodies the strength to carry weapons too heavy for standard troops. Battlefield links turned each wearer into a command node.
Three Thunderborn inserted at the correct point would not need to defeat the 20th Regiment by killing every soldier in it.
They only needed to make an already-fracturing formation understand that the rear was no longer safe.
Qin Mo raised the vox again. His tone hardened slightly.
"One more order. Avoid direct engagement with the Knight. If it moves toward you, break contact, reposition, and force it to waste time. Play it safe until I arrive."
Grey's response came immediately.
"Understood."
There was no protest. No boast. Grey had survived long enough under Qin Mo's command to understand that bravery and stupidity often wore the same face until artillery removed the distinction.
Qin Mo set down the vox-transceiver and turned to Creed.
"I'm leaving things here to you."
Before Creed could respond, Klein frowned from beside the tactical table. He had been watching the energy readouts rather than the troop markers, and what he saw did not reassure him.
"Wait. Doesn't the teleport system need to recharge?"
Qin Mo chuckled.
"We've only teleported twice this battle. It's not like before, when we were deploying entire armies in seconds. The system is well within tolerance."
Klein's frown deepened. "That sentence contains several assumptions I dislike."
"You dislike most sentences involving my equipment."
"Because your equipment keeps redefining what the word 'equipment' means."
Qin Mo stepped toward the exit, still watching the battlefield through a secondary projection linked to his gauntlet.
"The teleportarium has enough reserve capacity for this insertion. As for the pursuit phase…"
He paused at the threshold.
"I'll be back to recharge it when we need it."