Anruida fired three las-beams in rapid succession.
Each burst cracked through the smoke-thick air with a sharp, high-pitched whine, the focused energy cutting molten gouges across the fortress barrier. The wall shuddered under the impacts. Ferrocrete bubbled and ran like wax beneath a blowtorch, droplets of glowing slag spattering across the blackened ground below.
The acrid stink of scorched stone and vaporized metal rolled back over the assault team, mixing with the distant screams of sentries dying behind the breached defenses.
His advance slowed for half a heartbeat as he adjusted his firing angle.
Vendis surged past him before that heartbeat ended.
The Thunderborn became a golden blur of precision and violence, his scatter-laser spitting controlled bursts into the nearest firing nests.
A moment later, the shoulder-mounted plasma cannon on his armor locked, charged, and discharged three times in brutal succession. White-blue plasma struck the sentry post above the gate and swallowed it whole. Men, weapons, barricades, and plasteel reinforcement vanished inside a storm of incandescent fury.
Then came the next Thunderborn.
Grey.
Unlike the others, Grey wore no Thunderborn warplate and carried no heavy weaponry. He had no shoulder cannon, no gravitic hammer, no armor-mounted scatter-laser to add to the barrage. To any ordinary battlefield observer, he should have been the least dangerous figure in the assault.
Instead, he moved like a living spear tip.
His body blurred forward with impossible acceleration, every step driving him across shattered ground faster than targeting cogitators could track. Incoming fire stitched toward him and found only empty air. The defenders adjusted, panicked, and fired again. Grey was already past their first kill zone.
In less than four seconds, the legendary Wall of Koy was breached.
The fortress barrier, praised in loyalist propaganda and rebel boasts alike as an immovable shield around the command district, groaned like a wounded titan as whole sections collapsed inward. Ferrocrete slabs cracked away from adamantium supports. Reinforcement beams twisted under the stress. Dust, flame, and glowing slag poured into the yawning breach.
Grey barely spared it a glance.
The Wall of Koy had never been the real objective.
Without hesitation, five Thunderborn stormed through the opening. Their auric armor caught the red glare of burning emplacements, turning them into moving silhouettes of gold and fire. They did not slow to admire the breach. They did not pause to secure it. That task belonged to the forces behind them.
Their target lay ahead.
The command fortress.
The enemy had prepared for a teleportation incursion. That much became obvious the moment the Thunderborn crossed the inner kill zone. The fortifications around the command fortress were far heavier than those along the outer wall: overlapping heavy bolter turrets, reinforced firing slits, elevated hellgun nests, armored shutters, mine grids, and interlocking fields of fire designed to slaughter anything that appeared inside the perimeter.
Heavy bolters roared first, vomiting streams of mass-reactive shells in deafening salvos. Hellguns followed, their beams cutting the smoke in hard, bright lines. Lasblasts from ordinary infantry weapons filled the gaps between heavier fire until the entire approach became a blinding lattice of heat and death.
The volume of fire was staggering.
Explosions walked across the corridor. Walls shook hard enough to shed dust and broken masonry. Shrapnel filled the air, flashing against gravitic shields and ricocheting from armor plates. Smoke, steam, and pulverized ferrocrete turned the battlefield into a choking gray haze.
The Thunderborn advanced through it anyway.
Their golden forms appeared and vanished inside the smoke, never stopping, never bunching together, never wasting motion. Each warrior moved with the discipline Qin Mo had beaten into them through battle, lecture, and repeated warnings about soldiers mistaking powerful equipment for permission to be stupid.
The defenders had fought Thunderborn before.
They knew how strong the armor was.
They also knew brute force alone would not be enough.
On the second level of the command fortress, a heretic psyker leaned out from a reinforced firing slit. He wore ornate battle robes over fitted armor, both etched with profane symbols that shimmered with colors no proper light source could explain. His eyes fixed on the golden warriors below, and his lips curled into a smile that belonged on a man standing far behind safer walls.
The Thunderborn had already closed half the distance. Barely a kilometer remained.
The psyker muttered in a tongue twisted by the Warp, then withdrew from the slit and sprinted deeper into the fortress. Dark energy snapped around his fingertips like black lightning. His handlers and bodyguards scattered from his path, either out of reverence or fear. Probably both.
At that range, he remained beyond the strongest reach of the Thunderborn anti-psyker fields. Their armor could interfere, disrupt, and punish a psyker who came close enough, but distance still mattered. For now, the witch had time to act.
The Thunderborn had no patience for sorcery.
Beam cannons locked onto the upper fortress windows. Scatter-laser bursts raked the second level, chipping reinforced ferrocrete and shattering armored glass. Most of the shots splashed against the fortress shell, burning craters into surfaces designed to withstand direct siege fire.
The psyker's incantation reached completion.
A distortion rippled through the battlefield.
For an instant, weight felt wrong. Smoke bent sideways. Dust lifted from the ground in trembling sheets. The Thunderborn gravitic shields flickered as the warp-infused assault struck them, not with raw power, but with interference, an ugly, invasive pressure that tried to turn their own protective fields against themselves.
The anti-psyker countermeasures built into the armor dampened the effect almost immediately.
Almost.
That brief disruption was enough for the enemy to exploit.
Four elite shock troopers burst from a lower sally port and charged toward Vendis. They wore matte-black carapace armor over sealed combat suits, their visors glowing red behind plasteel masks. Hellguns were already raised, power coils whining as they prepared to fire into the tiny window of vulnerability the psyker had opened.
Yoan had never faced hellguns in live combat.
But Qin Mo had described them in gruesome detail.
A lasgun could kill a man. A hellgun could punch through armor, burn organs through sealed plating, and turn a brave soldier into a steaming corpse before he understood he had been hit. At close range, even Thunderborn armor did not deserve casual arrogance.
No one had time to react.
Fortunately, no one had to.
The gravitic shields rebooted almost instantly.
The moment the field snapped back into place, the charging shock troopers were caught mid-stride. Their forward momentum met crushing gravitational force. Armor buckled inward. Limbs folded at impossible angles. Chests collapsed with wet, heavy cracks. Weapons clattered to the ground as the men carrying them became ruined bundles of meat, broken bone, and split carapace plating.
Vendis did not even look down. His cannon was already tracking the next target.
From another firing slit, the psyker appeared again. His face had gone pale beneath smeared warpaint. Shock and fury twisted his features as he gathered power for another incantation.
〈"ℜϖℵℑψϖ—"〉
Two seconds later, Grey heard the scream.
"My head—my HEAD! AHHHHH!"
The psyker's spell collapsed inside his own skull.
His eyes bulged. Dark fluid streamed down his cheeks like black tears. Veins rose beneath his skin and blackened as uncontrolled psychic energy surged through his mind, no longer shaped, no longer directed, no longer his.
"BOOM!"
A muffled detonation punched through the second floor.
Blood, brain matter, shattered bone, and scraps of warded armor erupted from the firing slit and splattered across the scorched ground below. The Thunderborn reached the fortress foot a heartbeat later and stepped through the gore without slowing.
Their shoulder-mounted cannons fired as one.
Four gaping breaches opened in the command fortress walls. Reinforced ferrocrete shattered inward. Internal barricades vanished beneath plasma, beam fire, and gravitic impact. Then all five Thunderborn stormed inside.
The purge began.
They split apart with practiced efficiency, each warrior claiming a level, each level becoming a sealed killing ground. Screams echoed down stairwells and ventilation shafts. Most ended almost as soon as they began. Those who tried to surrender died beside those who tried to fight, because no one inside the command fortress was innocent of what it had commanded.
Within thirty seconds, the fortress was cleared.
Outside, enemy reinforcements rushed forward, desperate to reclaim their stronghold before the loss fully registered across the front. They reached the perimeter just in time to see beam fire erupt from their own firing slits. Heavy bolters mounted for their defense turned inward against them. The command fortress had not merely fallen.
It had changed ownership.
Grey, unarmored but no less lethal, descended toward the fourth floor after clearing the upper levels. The air inside the fortress was thick with smoke, blood mist, burning insulation, and the metallic stink of ruptured ammunition lockers. Emergency lumens strobed red across the corridor, lighting corpses in broken flashes.
"Look out!" Anruida's voice rang through his mind.
Grey barely registered the warning before Anruida blurred past him, a streak of gold and blood-red motion. His movement left only a flickering afterimage in the corridor.
Where Anruida had been, an enemy now lay in ruins. The man's chest cavity had become a smoking void, the weapon in his hands fused into a useless lump.
Anruida straightened and gave Grey a quick, sharp smirk. "That spinal augment is really something."
Grey ignored the remark.
"How's your mission coming along?" he asked instead.
Anruida's amusement faded into focus. He checked the runes scrolling across his forearm console, then drew a line through the air with two fingers. A small tactical projection flickered between them, showing beacon placements across the upper hive district.
"I've planted several teleport beacons on the left side of the Upper Hive. Haven't started on the right." He pointed toward the cityscape beyond the broken fortress wall. "The central parade avenue splits the district. Left and right."
"I know." Grey lowered his head in thought.
Anruida waited silently. For all his sharp tongue, he knew when a decision was being made. Outside, the fortress shook as enemy fire struck its lower walls. The rebel command structure was dead or dying, but the army beyond it had not yet realized it had become headless. That ignorance would not last.
A moment later, Grey looked up.
"Forget the right side," he said. "We strike now, before the enemy has time to reestablish command."
Anruida nodded once. "Understood."
His fingers danced across the forearm console as he initiated teleport preparation. Runes flared across the armor of each Thunderborn as their stabilizers synced with the beacons already planted across the western sector.
"Everyone, prepare for teleportation," Grey ordered.
The team activated the sequence simultaneously.
The command fortress vanished.
Smoke, blood, fire, and gunfire collapsed into white displacement light. A heartbeat later, the hellish warzone was gone, replaced by the fortified calm of New Kato's command heart.
Yoan arrived frowning. Something heavy hung from his gauntleted grip.
"The hell did this come from?"
Everyone turned.
Yoan was holding a perfectly severed arm. The cut was so smooth it looked less like battlefield mutilation and more like a surgeon's demonstration. Blood still dripped from the stump, pattering onto the clean floor of the receiving chamber.
Apparently, it had come through the teleporter with him.
No one had time to care.
Grey ignored it, already opening a secure vox-channel to Qin Mo. His report was concise: the Wall of Koy had been breached, the command fortress seized, multiple beacons placed in the western sector, and the enemy's upper command structure thrown into disarray. His recommendation followed immediately.
Strike now.
Before the enemy could reorganize.
Before reserve commanders understood what had happened.
Before the fortress's fall became a rallying cry instead of a decapitation.
Qin Mo's response came after less than a second.
Two simple words.
"Begin war."
....
"Wake the hell up!"
The regimental commander's order thundered through every barracks, staging hall, armor bay, and trench line in New Kato. Vox-speakers crackled with static as his voice surged across the fortress network like an alarm bell made human.
"By order of the Lord Commander, every soldier is to prepare for battle! The entire regiment is moving! We are storming the Upper Hive! Kill those traitor-born mongrels!"
Sergeants sprinted through corridors before the announcement finished repeating. Boots hammered against metal decking. Barrack doors slammed open. Men woke with curses, prayers, and hands already reaching for weapons. No one asked whether this was a drill. New Kato did not waste sleep on drills at this hour.
To Creed, the First Legion still looked undisciplined.
Even the Cadian Shock Troopers had regarded the Legion with the guarded skepticism of professionals forced to share a battlefield with something that did not fit any proper military category. The First Legion did not move like the Astra Militarum. Its soldiers swore too freely, improvised too quickly, and treated certain regulations as suggestions written by men who had never been shelled in a tunnel.
But one fact could not be denied.
This army was made from survivors.
Some had endured a suicide war in the Underhive and crawled out with weapons in their hands. Others came from the Lower Hive's hardest militias, veterans of brutal urban warfare where a wrong turn could mean ambush, starvation, gang execution, or worse. The newest recruits from the Underhive were still training and would not be deployed yet. Qin Mo had no intention of throwing half-formed soldiers into a decisive assault simply because bodies were available.
This war was for the killers.
And the killers moved quickly.
Despite their rough edges, the First Legion responded with terrifying efficiency. Sudden deployments were no longer exceptional to them. They had been ambushed, teleported, shelled, starved, surrounded, and ordered into battle with less warning than this. Muscle memory took over before sleep fully left their eyes.
Within moments, soldiers across multiple regiments assembled at armories and equipment stations. Praetorian Pattern power armor opened on reinforced racks, internal frames spreading like steel rib cages. Troopers stepped inside, sealed their suits, and waited as armor plates locked over their bodies with sharp mechanical clacks. Pressure seals hissed. Helmets came down. Visors lit with squad runes, ammunition counts, medical telemetry, and dimensional stabilizer status.
Weapons followed.
Upgraded lasguns were stripped from racks, checked, charged, and slung. Bayonets locked into place. Grenades were distributed by logistics drones that glided through the chaos without slowing. Medicae kits, replacement filters, charge packs, ration bricks, and emergency sealant cartridges vanished into pouches and armor compartments.
Tank crews ran for the armored bays.
Leman Russ engines coughed, growled, then roared awake. Commanders climbed into turrets while drivers ran final power checks and gunners verified ammunition feeds. The tanks rolled onto open ground in heavy columns, their tracks grinding over reinforced deck plates. The smell of promethium exhaust spread through the staging zone, thick and oily.
As infantry and armor converged on the mass teleportation platforms, the autonomous war-machines were already moving.
Artillery pieces rolled from fortified hangars. Gravity-shield drones rose into assigned positions above their regiments, their projectors humming with restrained force. Combat drones locked into formation patterns. Logistics drones aligned supply sleds in neat rows, ready to follow the army into the killing zone if Qin Mo ordered it.
The war engine of New Kato was waking.
And it woke hungry.
Once preparation neared completion, Grey's voice entered the entire Legion vox-channel.
"Twelve regiments will teleport in first and establish the frontal battle line. In the western sector, where teleport beacons are already in place, assault forces will deploy behind enemy lines and cut their retreat routes. In the east, where beacon coverage remains limited, we advance the old-fashioned way."
Across the staging grounds, men listened. Some stood inside armor that still smelled of machine oil. Some sat in tank compartments with gloved hands resting against controls. Some waited beside artillery tractors, medicae drones, or ammunition pallets. None spoke.
Grey continued.
"The Lord Commander once said: 'I place no faith in brilliant tactics or lucky gambits. I place faith in superior weapons, overwhelming firepower, and unbreakable armor.'"
A ripple passed through the vox-net. It was not laughter. Not exactly. The soldiers knew Qin Mo well enough to believe he had said it exactly that way.
"The Thunderborn have paved the way," Grey said. "The enemy's command has been struck. Their defenses are compromised. Their confusion will not last, so we will not give them time to recover. We advance, we split them, we crush them, and we do not stop until the Upper Hive belongs to mankind again."
His voice hardened.
"The Lord Commander watches over us. Deliver the final blow."
A deafening war cry exploded through the vox-network.
It rolled from regiment to regiment, tank to tank, helmet to helmet, until the entire fortress seemed to vibrate with it. Men who had survived the Underhive shouted beside former militia fighters. Cadians raised their voices with grim discipline. Tank crews slammed fists against hull plating. Infantry struck weapon stocks against armored chests.
Every soldier felt it.
Not as superstition. Not entirely.
As certainty.
Somewhere above them, beside them, and behind every machine he had built, Qin Mo was watching.
And indeed, he was.
Deep within the command center, Qin Mo stood before layered hololithic displays, watching through drone feeds, helmet relays, orbital telemetry, and battlefield projections. The army of New Kato filled his screens: infantry sealed in Praetorian armor, tanks growling in disciplined ranks, artillery awaiting coordinates, drones hovering like patient predators, and thousands of soldiers ready to be hurled into the Upper Hive by technology no Imperial commander on Talon had ever imagined.
He studied the data for one final second.
[Beacon integrity. Stable.]
[Dimensional stabilizers. Acceptable.]
[Enemy command disruption. Confirmed.]
Qin Mo's fingers moved across the control interface.
One command.
The mass teleportation sequence activated.