The enemy presence inside the spire was surprisingly light.
Grey's augmented optics tagged two guards at the entrance. Beyond them, the stairwell coiled upward through the tower's hollow core, narrow and steep, with one defender stationed roughly every three steps. The pattern was disciplined enough to slow ordinary intruders, but too rigid to survive anything faster than a man.
In the distance, another enemy military outpost detonated in a bloom of flame and promethium. The shockwave rolled across the ruined district, rattling loose stone from the spire's outer skin. Grey used the noise as cover.
He drove both augmetic arms straight through the blast door.
The door shrieked as reinforced metal split around his fists. The sound was swallowed by the deeper crash of the distant explosion and the wet crunch that followed as Grey seized the two guards on the other side. Their eyes widened. One tried to raise his weapon. The other barely managed to inhale.
Grey crushed them both before either man could scream.
Their bodies collapsed in ruined heaps at his feet. He stepped over them, stripped the combat knives from their belts with quick, economical motions, and charged up the stairwell.
The spire became a vertical killing ground.
Grey stormed the winding stairs like a living thunderstrike, his boots striking stone hard enough to crack old masonry. He was unavoidably seen, but that did not matter. None of the defenders lived long enough to sound an alarm.
The first man turned toward the noise and died with a knife across his throat. The second reached for his vox-bead and lost three fingers before Grey opened his neck. The third fired once into the wall, the shot going wide as Grey slammed him face-first into the steps and tore the blade free before the corpse stopped sliding.
Blood slicked the stone. Bodies tumbled down the stairwell behind him, limbs striking railings and walls in dull, broken impacts.
Even without the luxury of using Bullet Time, every enemy reaction looked agonizingly slow to his enhanced perception. Their hands crawled toward triggers. Their eyes shifted by fractions. Their mouths opened to form warnings that would never become words.
Grey did not simply kill them. He harvested their weapons as he moved. Every fallen guard yielded another knife, another blade, another piece of metal sharp enough to obey his telekinetic field.
By the time he reached the upper levels, a swarm of stolen knives orbited around him in a controlled ring, each one suspended point-forward, turning with his movements like fragments of a personal execution engine.
At the summit of the spire, the stairwell opened onto a launch platform exposed to the poisoned wind. Missile pods squatted in armored cradles along the platform's rim, their targeting arrays angled toward the Wall of Koy and the embattled districts beyond. Power cables snaked across the deck. Warning runes blinked red on half-maintained control panels.
Awaiting him there was a confused officer holding a steaming tin mug, along with several subordinates stationed near the missile pods.
For one absurd heartbeat, the officer looked more irritated than afraid, as if Grey were a junior aide who had entered the wrong room. Then his gaze dropped to the blood dripping from Grey's hands and the knives circling his body.
"Intrud—"
A dagger buried itself in his throat before he could finish the word. The mug slipped from his fingers and struck the deck with a hollow clang, spilling recaf across his boots as blood bubbled over his collar.
Grey released the rest of the blades.
They crossed the platform in a single lethal burst. One punched through an operator's eye lens. Another entered beneath a jaw and exited through the skull. Three more struck men reaching for alarm switches. A pair of technicians died against the missile control console, their bodies slumping over keys they never had time to press.
By the time the final knife struck home, the platform was littered with twenty-eight corpses. Each kill had been recorded, categorized, and confirmed by Grey's optical systems.
[Kill Count: 28 | Time Elapsed: 3.02 seconds]
"Shame I didn't wear my power armor," Grey muttered.
There was no pride in his voice. Only irritation.
Had he anticipated the strategic importance of the Wall of Koy and this spire, he would not have wasted time on stealth. He would have arrived fully armored, smashed through the lower gates, and crossed the platform under fire while the ground shook beneath him.
It did not matter now. Regret was useless unless it corrected the next decision.
There was more work to do.
Grey raised his augmetic arm. The telekinetic emitter built into the limb woke with a low bass hum, vibrating through the metal decking beneath his boots. One by one, the missiles lifted from their launch bays. Restraint clamps snapped. Fuel lines tore free. Warheads drifted upward from their cradles, suspended in invisible chains.
Several warning runes flared across the control consoles. Somewhere inside the missile array, machine spirits screamed in binharic panic.
Grey clenched his fist.
The entire array folded inward. Warheads crumpled. Launch racks twisted. Guidance vanes shattered. Internal fuel tanks ruptured and compressed into useless knots of armored plating. The missile pods shrieked as metal warped around metal until the whole emplacement became a mangled carcass of steel.
Only then did Grey step to the edge of the platform and look toward the Wall of Koy.
The fortress dominated the district like an iron cliff. Its walls rose from the ruins in layered tiers of ferrocrete, armored plating, and old defensive bastions reinforced so many times that no single architectural style remained visible. Smoke curled from gun positions along the battlements. Searchlights swept across the approaches. Heavy weapons tracked the battlefield with slow mechanical menace.
Grey's enhanced vision zoomed in. Distance collapsed into tactical clarity.
His optics scanned the fortress sector by sector, outlining enemy troops concealed in crumbling buildings, crouched behind shattered barricades, or moving through covered trenches. He could not read their faces or confirm every insignia from this range, but every movement was mapped, measured, and fed into his threat display.
At the fortress's heart loomed a massive iron citadel. Vox aerials bristled from its roof. Armored cables ran from its lower levels into the surrounding command bunkers. Crude sigils of authority had been painted across its front in white and red, already streaked by ash and rainwater. It sat at the center of the Wall of Koy like a squat iron beast anchoring the enemy command structure.
Grey focused on a particular officer walking in and out of the citadel. The man moved with the controlled urgency of someone receiving reports faster than subordinates could obey them. Every time he emerged, nearby troops straightened. Every time he spoke, messengers ran.
Grey tracked him until the officer stepped into full view.
The moment Grey formed the intention to identify him, his bioprocessor engaged.
A line extended from the officer's shoulder, marking his rank insignia for analysis. Another tracked his gait, comparing it against databanks filled with trillions of recorded movement profiles. A third zoomed in on the dossier clutched in his hand, scanning the flickering runes across its surface whenever the document angled toward the light.
The final conclusion appeared in the center of Grey's vision.
[Rank: Regimental Commander, Planetary Defense Force | Possible Discrepancy: Talon II may use alternate rank nomenclature]
[Document: Upper Hive Defense Plan, 13th Army]
[Identification Certainty: 99.3%]
Grey chuckled.
"This guy's worse than our own regimental commanders."
He was certain now. The fortress inside the Wall of Koy was the enemy command center.
Grey hesitated for only a moment.
Then he saw officers hastily packing files into armored cases. Troops were fueling vehicles. Vox operators were tearing down equipment that had been fixed in place minutes ago. Command staff moved with the strained precision of men trying not to look panicked.
The enemy was relocating.
The destruction across the Upper Hive had alerted them. They knew their static positions were being hunted, and they were preparing to move their command post before the next strike landed.
Grey made his decision.
He activated his vox-link.
"Attention, Thunderborn. Lock on to my signal. Prepare immediate teleportation. I've located the enemy command center."
The moment Grey's voice entered the network, every Thunderborn halted his current task.
One warrior pinned beneath relentless artillery fire stopped returning shots and shifted into extraction posture. Another paused mid-kill, retracting his blade from a dying officer with disciplined precision. A third broke off pursuit of a fleeing command squad and turned toward the beacon rune appearing in his visor. Yoan and Anruida confirmed readiness a heartbeat later.
No one asked for clarification. No one demanded proof.
Grey had found the head.
Now they would cut it off.
Grey leapt from the spire.
For a few seconds, the world became wind, smoke, and the distant glitter of gunfire. Then his frame slammed into the ground below, punching a crater through shattered stone and sending dust blasting outward in a gray cloud. His synthetic skin split along one cheek from the impact. He ignored it.
He rose and sprinted toward the Wall of Koy.
He did not take cover. He did not zigzag. He chose the fastest line between two points and committed to it completely.
The fortress walls were heavily manned. Even Grey's speed could not keep him hidden for long. Searchlights snapped toward him. Auspex posts began screaming alerts. Sirens wailed across the Wall of Koy as enemy troops scrambled to defensive positions, hauling heavy boltguns onto pintle mounts and rotating plasma turrets, autocannon nests, and missile racks toward the approaching blur.
Grey's speed was inhuman.
For several seconds, the defenders could only stare at the figure crossing the killing field. He was too fast to be a normal infantryman, too small to be a vehicle, and too direct to be a scout. Confusion cost them the first shots. Fear stole the rest of their accuracy.
Then desperation overcame discipline.
They opened fire in his general direction.
Heavy-caliber rounds tore through Grey's synthetic skin, exposing reinforced cybernetics beneath in brief flashes of silver and black. Lasfire scorched his outer tissue. Shrapnel snapped against his augmetic frame. None of it slowed him enough to matter.
At that moment, Grey deployed Qin Mo's teleportation drone.
The compact machine launched from his harness and shot ahead, anti-grav vanes flaring as it skimmed low over the battlefield. It maintained a hundred-meter lead, weaving through incoming fire while broadcasting a hardened teleportation beacon back through the combat network.
A second later, white light cracked open around the drone's path.
The first Thunderborn appeared in a burst of displaced air. He landed hard, scanned his surroundings in a single sweep, and charged forward without waiting for orders.
Then came the second.
Then the third.
Then Yoan and Anruida arrived together, their armor locking into formation before the teleportation glow had fully faded.
All five Thunderborn had abandoned their previous objectives. Now they were singularly focused on this mission.
Their power armor reflected the harsh glare of the fortress searchlights. Jump packs ignited with brutal orange fire. Gravitic shield housings pulsed across their backs and shoulders, forming overlapping distortions in the air around them.
Heavy gunfire rained down.
The gravity shields held.
Autocannon shells flattened into distorted fragments before they reached armor. Plasma bolts smeared across the fields in brief, blinding flashes. Heavy bolter rounds lost momentum and tumbled aside like spent metal rain. The incoming fire was so dense that several suits began issuing heat and capacity warnings, their systems converting the absorbed impacts into stored energy faster than the armor could comfortably bleed it away.
Grey opened the squad channel while running.
"Brothers, I have a plan."
The words were almost unnecessary.
In the same instant, his neural net transmitted the strategy across their combat-links: approach vector, breach point, timing window, shield rotation, target priorities, and follow-through. The plan unfolded in their minds faster than spoken language could carry it.
They understood without hesitation.
Anruida, charging at the front, raised both arms toward the defenders on the wall. His shoulder cannons adjusted first, tilting down toward the wall's base rather than the men atop it. The targeting choice made several enemy gunners hesitate. They expected him to suppress the battlements. He was aiming at the fortress itself.
A barrage of shrapnel-laser bursts tore across the ramparts. Entire scores of defenders were cut down where they stood, their weapons spinning from dead hands as the battlement line dissolved into sparks, blood, and falling bodies.
Then Anruida's plasma cannon fired.
Three searing beams struck the Wall of Koy in rapid succession.
The first hit melted through the outer armor facing, turning ferrocrete and plasteel into glowing slag. The second punched deeper, collapsing internal reinforcement struts and blasting molten debris across the killing field. The third struck the weakened section at its base and carved a wound large enough for giants to pass through.
The wall sagged. Metal screamed. Stone cracked. A massive section of the Wall of Koy slumped inward, glowing red at the edges as vaporized material hissed into the open air.
Grey's plan was simple. It was not elegant, subtle, or doctrinally refined. It had been honed in an earlier battle, the same basic maneuver used to capture the rogue Cultist psyker.
Blow a hole in the enemy's defenses.
Then charge through.