Grey's augmented, expressionless gaze remained fixed on the captured officer.
His cybernetic optics dissected the man in layers: pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration rhythm, pupil dilation, micro-tremors in the jaw, sweat patterning across the brow. Data flowed across Grey's vision in clean tactical lines, stripped of pity and hesitation. The machine did not care that the man was terrified. It only cared what terror revealed.
A status prompt blinked across his sight.
[Processing required conditions…]
Grey had questions. The officer had answers. That was the only relationship between them that mattered.
"I ask," Grey said. "You answer."
The prisoner swallowed hard. His uniform was expensive by battlefield standards, tailored for an officer who had expected maps, servants, and clean command posts rather than blood on a chapel floor. His hands shook against the restraints binding him to the broken prie-dieu Grey had used as an interrogation seat.
"Who commands your forces?" Grey asked. "Your Marshal?"
"Y-yes!" the officer blurted. "His name is Venomfang. He's a psyker!"
The man's voice cracked on the last word, brittle with fear and revulsion. Even among traitors, psykers inspired caution. Especially among traitors who had learned to survive beneath one.
Grey's enhanced vision adjusted. The processing prompt changed.
[Truth.]
So the new optic suite did more than magnify, map, and target. It judged deception. Qin Mo's upgrades had turned Grey's eyes into an integrated interrogation engine.
Useful.
If the officer had possessed a neural link, Grey could have torn the information from him directly, ripping memory from wet circuitry and corrupted flesh like pages from a poorly guarded archive. Unfortunately, this man's mind was still sealed inside ordinary meat. Grey had to do things the slow way.
"Where is Venomfang?"
The officer hesitated. His eyes flicked toward the door, then toward the corpses scattered across the chapel's first floor. Officers, guards, attendants, and two robed staff members lay where they had fallen, their blood seeping between cracked tiles beneath faded images of Imperial saints. The chapel had once smelled of incense and polished wood. Now it smelled of hot metal, opened bodies, and burned propellant.
"Sometimes I see him in the command camp," the officer said quickly. "Sometimes on the battlefield. He moves constantly. I never know his exact location."
[Truth.]
Grey exhaled through his nose. Unimpressed.
A decapitation strike could cripple the enemy's war effort. A single dead Marshal could turn orders into rumors, reserves into useless masses, and officers into frightened men waiting for permission from a corpse. But only if the target could be found.
This prisoner could not provide that.
Grey did not ask another question. His cybernetic arm tightened into a fist. The officer's skull collapsed inward with a wet, final crack as an invisible pressure field crushed bone, brain, and breath into silence.
The last hostile on the first floor was dead.
Grey scanned the chamber.
A holographic prompt appeared in his vision.
[Unprocessed scene detected. Risk of discovery: HIGH.]
[Suggested Cleanup Methods: Dispose of bodies in side chambers. Remove fingerprints and biological residue. Neutralize blood trails. Suppress thermal residue.]
Visual overlays marked side corridors suitable for dumping bodies. Blood-spatter hotspots glowed amber. Fingerprint zones pulsed across furniture, doorframes, and the interrogation seat. A dotted route led toward what had once been a storage room for devotional candles.
Grey ignored all of it.
Clean work mattered when secrecy had to last. This did not. The other Thunderborn were already operating across the Upper Hive, and once the first military facility was destroyed, the enemy's neat little command structure would turn into panic, accusation, and conflicting orders. By then, no one would care whether a chapel floor had been scrubbed. They would be too busy wondering how many executioners had walked among them unseen.
Anruida's voice echoed through the neural link.
"Has anyone noticed? There are no civilians in the Upper Hive."
Grey's eyes narrowed.
"Same here," he replied, turning toward the stairwell.
His thermal imaging mode activated. The chapel's walls became a ghostly architecture of heat and structure. Every enemy on the second floor appeared through stone and plasteel: warm bodies, pulsing hearts, weapons held at rest, men leaning over consoles, men pacing, men standing guard near stained-glass windows they believed protected by height and privilege.
Grey saw their breathing patterns. Their posture. Their spacing. Their ignorance.
He raised his hand.
The blades of the fallen answered.
Combat knives, officer sabres, short swords, and broken bayonets lifted from the corpse-littered floor without a sound. Blood trembled along their edges, forming red beads that drifted briefly in the air before falling to the tiles. The weapons floated upward, aligned themselves with mechanical precision, and slid beneath the ceiling like patient executioners.
Each blade positioned itself directly below a marked target.
Another Thunderborn cut into the link. His voice carried the sharpness of someone who had just found something useful and ugly.
"I found a notice. It says the 'rebels' are massacring the Lower Hive. All Upper Hive citizens have been evacuated to the Spire for transport off-world."
Grey's expression hardened.
"Rebels," he said, the word almost too quiet to be speech. "Those bastards."
The lie was efficient. He almost respected the craft of it. Empty the Upper Hive under the excuse of protecting civilians. Blame every atrocity on the Lower Hive and the First Legion. Preserve the nobles, the clerks, the officers, the useful hostages, and anyone with enough wealth to deserve evacuation. Leave the truth buried under gunfire and propaganda.
"The Lower Hive is holding," Grey said. "The real traitors are up here."
He ascended the stairs. His armored boots made no sound. The chapel's second floor had been converted into an improvised command post, its walls draped with military maps, vox-cables, and blasphemously altered devotional banners. Officers turned as Grey emerged from the stairwell. Recognition never reached them. Only alarm did.
Too late.
The weapons below punched through the floor.
Blades erupted upward with surgical violence. One officer's throat opened before his hand reached his pistol. Another collapsed as a sabre pierced his chest and pinned him against a command table. A third fell with his spine severed, legs folding beneath him as his mouth opened around a scream that never formed.
Not one alarm sounded.
Grey walked through the room while bodies dropped around him. He barely suppressed a grin.
His new cybernetic arm was far superior to the original.
He remembered asking Qin Mo why an augment should grant anything resembling telekinesis. Grey had expected some obscure miracle, some answer involving relic technology or a fragment of forbidden Mechanicus doctrine. Qin Mo had given him a lecture instead.
"Your arm generates a localized, controllable magnetic field," Qin Mo had said, speaking with the relaxed irritation of a man explaining the obvious to someone who had not yet earned the right to call it obvious. "Metal objects are easiest. Conductive materials respond best. With enough refinement, you can exert force through environmental interactions rather than direct contact. Don't call it magic. It's not magic. It's physics with better tools."
Grey had understood perhaps half of it.
The useful half was simple: raise hand, choose target, apply force, kill enemy.
He clenched his fist once, testing the arm's response. The field answered smoothly. No lag. No tremor. No pain where the old limb had ended.
The chapel had no third floor. At the far end of the second level, a narrow stair led upward into the bell tower.
Grey moved quickly.
"Hold up, brothers," a jubilant voice burst through the neural link. "Found the enemy's armory!"
A heartbeat later:
"BOOM—!"
As Grey reached the top of the bell tower, a beam of light speared upward one kilometer away. For a fraction of a second, the distant district was outlined in white. Then the armory detonated. The explosion rolled outward through the Upper Hive, blooming behind polished towers and armored spires like a brief artificial sunrise.
The shockwave struck the chapel. Every stained-glass window shattered at once, spraying colored shards through the air. Saints, martyrs, and gilded Imperial heroes broke into glittering fragments around Grey's armor.
"Stay mission-focused," Grey said through the link. "War isn't won by killing the enemy at random."
"Relax, brother," Vendis one of the Thunderborns replied, calmer now and completely unrepentant. "I know the objective. I fired one shot from distance. Ammunition depot is gone. Secondary fuel stores are burning. No civilian casualties because, as we have established, the bastards thoughtfully removed all civilians before lying about us."
Grey did not answer. The explanation was acceptable. The enthusiasm was not, but he would deal with that later.
He stepped to the edge of the bell tower and began scanning.
The district unfolded beneath his enhanced vision.
The Upper Hive was cleaner than the lower levels, but not truly clean. It only hid its rot behind polished stone, armored glass, imported metals, and devotional facades maintained by people who would never live behind them.
Wide avenues curved between administrative towers and military compounds. Private landing platforms jutted from spires. Transit bridges linked noble residences to command annexes. Public plazas had been stripped of civilians and filled with soldiers, barricades, fuel tanks, and mobile artillery.
Every patrol route was mapped.
Every armored vehicle was identified.
Every artillery position was noted.
Every resting soldier inside nearby buildings was marked by heat signature, posture, and probable readiness.
Data streamed into the mission log. Routes became lines. Buildings became grids. Enemy concentrations became threat clusters. Ammunition dumps, command vox-stations, medicae points, vehicle depots, and anti-air positions received priority tags. The information archived automatically, then synchronized with every Thunderborn operating in the Upper Hive.
Enemy deployments would shift once panic spread. Officers would redeploy reserves, tighten guard rotations, and waste time searching for infiltrators in places the Thunderborn had already left. Even so, the intelligence mattered. A regiment did not need perfect information to win. It needed better information than the enemy believed it had.
The all-out assault on the Upper Hive was coming.
The tactical picture being built now would decide how many men survived the first push.
Once Grey finished mapping one district, he moved to the next.
....
Elsewhere
Anruida arrived at a sprawling plaza nestled between glittering towers and armored residential spires in the heart of the Upper Hive's immaculate urban district.
Once, it had probably been a civic garden for people who used the word "public" to mean "accessible to those with permission." White stone walkways curved around dry ornamental fountains. Statues of past governors stood beneath purity seals large enough to cover a hab-room wall. Expensive trees, grown under artificial light and fed by imported nutrient systems, lined the promenade in disciplined rows. The air was filtered, cool, and faintly scented with something floral trying desperately to overcome the smell of military occupation.
Anruida disliked it immediately.
He had already marked four locations suitable for mass teleportation. The pristine Upper Hive made the work easier than the Underhive ever had. Ground surfaces were stable. Power conduits were intact. Buildings followed predictable layouts instead of collapsing wherever gravity had won its last argument. There were clear approach lanes, usable cover, and enough open space to prevent arriving troops from materializing inside walls, vehicles, or one another.
There was only one problem.
Every park and plaza had been converted into an enemy garrison.
Barricades cut across the walkways. Heavy bolters sat beneath marble arches. Ammunition crates were stacked beside devotional fountains. Soldiers slept under silk awnings stolen from nearby residences. A pair of light armored vehicles idled near the central statue, their engines muttering beneath camouflage netting.
Anruida did not hesitate.
He had to clear the site before it could serve as a beacon point.
Despite being Thunderborn, Anruida had never considered himself a warrior by nature. Grey was a blade. Grot was a hammer. Vendis treated destruction like a technical problem with fireworks attached. Anruida had always been the man who kept records, sorted data, maintained classified logs, and made sure Qin Mo's orders did not vanish into the usual Imperial swamp of missing paperwork and dead messengers.
Sometimes he suspected that was why Qin Mo had chosen him. Not because Anruida was the most violent survivor of the 44th Regiment, but because he remembered things correctly and hated disorder enough to fix it.
A combat administrator.
That was what he had once called himself in private. It had sounded ridiculous at the time. Standing in the open while an Upper Hive garrison turned every weapon toward him, it sounded even worse.
Lasfire erupted across the plaza.
Shoulder-mounted cannons roared. Autoguns barked from sandbagged positions. Heavy bolter shells tore chunks from the paving around his feet. A missile team fired from behind a fountain, the warhead streaking toward his chest in a trail of dirty smoke.
Anruida did not move.
He did not need to.
The gravitic shield around him caught the incoming fire in rippling distortions. Las-beams bled heat before reaching his armor. Solid rounds flattened into glowing scraps and fell to the white stone like dead insects. The missile crushed itself against the field, its nose folding inward before the charge detonated several meters short. The blast washed around him in heat and pressure, stirring the cloak of ash hanging from his armor.
Anruida raised his arm.
Scatter-laser bursts cut across the nearest infantry squad. Men vanished in flashes of white heat, armor and flesh opening under disciplined fire. His left shoulder cannon adjusted by a fraction and fired into a bolter nest, turning the weapon, crew, and marble arch behind them into molten spray.
He pivoted methodically.
Not fast. Not dramatic. Efficient.
One firing pit ceased to exist.
Then another.
A vehicle crew tried to reverse behind cover. Anruida's cannon struck the engine block, and the machine split open from within, vomiting flame through every seam. A squad attempted to scatter through the ornamental trees. His visor tagged their movement through foliage, and his forearm weapon cut them down in three short bursts.
The garrison's discipline lasted less than a minute. Its death took three.
When the final hostile heat signature stopped moving, Anruida lowered his weapons and surveyed the plaza. The fountains were shattered. The trees burned in several places. The governor statues still stood, though one had lost its head to a ricochet. White stone had become blackened, cracked, and slick with blood.
Clear.
Without hesitation, Anruida fired his shoulder cannon downward.
The blast punched through the plaza's decorative surface and into the structural layers beneath. Stone, plasteel mesh, and old conduit housing vaporized under controlled heat. He fired again, widening the cavity, then again, angling the hole so that a casual inspection from above would see only damage consistent with battle.
He placed the teleport beacon inside the deepest part of the hollow.
The device unfolded like a compact metal flower, stabilizer fins biting into the surrounding structure. Its locator core pulsed once, then settled into a low, hidden rhythm. Anruida checked the encryption handshake twice, confirmed the beacon's signal strength, and sealed the cavity by melting the surrounding metal plating over it.
The repair was ugly enough to look accidental. That was the point.
Future patrols might see a scorched crater. They would not find the beacon unless they already knew where to cut.
As he worked, an old thought returned. It came quietly, with the dangerous simplicity of an idea born from too much power and too little time.
Why don't we just kill every enemy in the Upper Hive?
Anruida looked across the plaza. He had erased a garrison in minutes. Grey could do the same. So could the others. Five Thunderborn, moving from district to district, striking without warning, cutting down officers, burning depots, destroying armor. The idea had a seductive shape. Simple problems invited simple answers.
Then he dismissed it.
The Upper Hive was enormous, nearly the size of the Lower Hive, and stretched across tens of thousands of blocks, towers, transit corridors, private estates, military compounds, shrines, hangars, archives, and hidden chambers. Enemy soldiers were not all standing in tidy plazas waiting to be killed. They were inside buildings, beneath streets, guarding spires, manning artillery, sleeping in barracks, escorting prisoners, moving supplies, and hiding behind human shields.
Killing every hostile personally was not strategy. It was fantasy with ammunition attached.
That was when Anruida understood the purpose of Thunderborn armor more clearly than he had before.
Qin Mo had not designed it to replace an army.
He had designed it to let a handful of elite soldiers break the parts of the enemy that ordinary infantry should never have to reach alone.
Command nodes. bArtillery parks. Power relays. Teleportation sites. Anti-air batteries. Psyker assets.
The enemy's spine, joints, eyes, and lungs.
The army would do the rest. Standard infantry would sweep through the broken defenses, secure districts, process prisoners, hold ground, protect civilians, and turn victory from an explosion into occupation. Thunderborn did not replace soldiers. They made soldiers' survival possible.
Anruida activated his thrusters.
The jump pack lifted him above the ruined plaza, heat rippling across the cracked marble below. From this height, the Upper Hive looked almost peaceful in places: clean towers, soft lights, distant aircraft, devotional banners snapping in artificial wind. Then his visor overlaid the truth: garrisons, artillery ranges, patrol nets, kill zones, evacuation routes, hidden command structures.
He opened the neural link.
"Let's pick up the pace, brothers," Anruida said as he launched toward the next sector. "At this rate, we can have the assault corridors marked by tomorrow."
Grey answered first. "Confirm beacon stability after every placement."
"Already doing it."
Vendis laughed over the link. "That almost sounded like confidence."
"It's called administration," Anruida replied. "You should try it before blowing up the next armory."
"No promises."
Anruida allowed himself the smallest smile as the next target district expanded across his visor.
Below him, the Upper Hive still believed itself protected by walls, soldiers, lies, and height.
It was wrong.
The war for the Upper Hive was about to begin.