With Ky'ei slain, the Legion forces finished wiping out the last remnants of enemy resistance within the fortress.
The final phase of the battle was not glorious. It was work.
Infantry squads advanced through shattered galleries and smoke-filled halls, checking corners, sealing access tunnels, and burning out the last pockets of cult resistance with disciplined volleys and flamers set to short, controlled bursts.
Combat drones crawled across ceilings and broken walls, their lenses sweeping over piles of corpses, collapsed barricades, and doors welded shut from the inside. Medicae teams moved behind the assault line, marking the wounded who could still be saved and the dead who could wait.
The fortress had been taken. Now it had to be made safe enough to stand in.
The two Knight pilots had proven invaluable in the battle.
Without them, the siege would have dragged on far longer. Their war engines had broken the enemy's strongest defensive concentrations, crushed armored resistance before it could regroup, and drawn fire away from infantry formations that would not have survived another direct push.
Even after the fighting turned into corridor clearance and bunker reduction, the memory of their machines remained everywhere: gouged floors, walls split by thermal lances, crushed enemy armor, and entire defensive emplacements flattened beneath titanic feet.
When the battle ended, the Knights were transported back to the orbital shipyard. Their arrival triggered a storm of activity. Sacristans, bonded retainers, menials, and machine-servitors of there Knight house swarmed over the towering war machines before the landing clamps had fully locked.
Cooling vapors hissed from open maintenance ports. Incense burners swung beneath adamantium knees. Armored access ladders unfolded along scorched plating while red-robed tech-adepts chanted binharic litanies over impact scars, damaged motive bundles, and weapon housings still radiating battlefield heat.
The Knights endured it all like wounded beasts submitting to the hands of trusted handlers.
Meanwhile, their pilots left the hangar deck behind.
One was a young woman with piercing eyes, ash-blonde hair, and the restless posture of someone who had spent too much of her life waiting for permission to prove herself. The other was an older warrior with a proud bearing and a face worn by command, grief, and the kind of hard discipline that came from killing men who had once shared his blood. Both carried their helmets under one arm as they followed a servo-drone through the orbital station's corridors toward Qin Mo.
The shipyard's corridors were cleaner than any battlefield, but not peaceful. Bulkheads vibrated faintly beneath the weight of fabrication engines. Servitors dragged ammunition racks past noble retainers in oil-stained livery. Vox-announcements echoed overhead, dispatching repair crews, cargo teams, and inspection details with mechanical indifference. Everywhere, the war continued in quieter forms: logistics, maintenance, orders, replacement parts, casualty lists.
When the two pilots arrived, they entered without hesitation and knelt together. Ceramite boots struck the metal decking with a heavy double clang that lingered in the chamber.
"We salute you, Lord Governor."
Qin Mo did not immediately respond.
He studied them instead. Warriors bound by oath, bloodline, and machinery. Heirs of a feudal order that had survived the Age of Strife, the Great Crusade, the Heresy, and ten thousand years of Imperial decay by becoming too useful, too stubborn, and too armed to casually discard.
Their armor was not plate mail. Their castles walked on adamantium legs. Their banners flew above engines capable of killing tanks. Their family histories were welded into Thrones Mechanicum, oath-scrolls, heraldic armor plates, and ancestral grudges so old that no one living could remember whether they had ever made sense.
"Take a seat," Qin Mo said.
He gestured for them to rise.
The two pilots obeyed. They sat with straight backs and quiet dignity before him, their helmets resting at their sides like severed heads from some older age of war.
Qin Mo leaned back slightly. "Tell me something. Who is the official governor of Talon II?"
The question caught them off guard. The young woman's eyes narrowed by a fraction. Her father remained still, but one hand tightened on his helmet's rim.
Qin Mo continued before either could answer. "I am merely the governor of the neighboring hive world. Technically, I don't rule Talon II. At least, not yet. There is no need for you to address me as Governor."
The older Knight spoke first. His voice was gravelled, controlled, and heavy with the kind of respect that did not quite hide calculation.
"The official governor was slain by the Archon. My daughter is correct to address you so. You will win this war, Lord Governor, and when you do, this world will require a ruler. It is only proper that we acknowledge the truth before the Administratum buries it beneath parchment."
Qin Mo understood the ways of the Knightly Houses well enough.
They were modern echoes of ancient Terran chivalry, obsessed with honor, duty, inheritance, and fealty. But their ideals did not make them simple. A Knight House could wrap politics in oaths, ambition in loyalty, and survival in the language of sacred duty so thoroughly that only a fool would take every bow at face value.
These two, father and daughter, had already sided with the resistance. They had fought bravely. They had risked their machines, their blood, and their claim to legitimacy by opposing the traitors.
But they did not represent their entire noble house.
If they wanted House Lannis to survive the coming settlement, they needed backing. More specifically, they needed Qin Mo's backing. If Talon II passed under his authority, then his decree could decide whether they became honored loyalists, dispossessed survivors, or inconvenient nobles with two very large war machines and too many dead relatives.
And more than that, they needed to prove their worth before anyone could accuse them of begging for inheritance on the strength of battlefield desperation alone.
Qin Mo tapped one finger against the armrest of his seat.
"I encountered another Knight on my world," he said suddenly. "A Knight who fought for the enemy. Its pilot favored ranged weapons."
The young woman's lip curled in disgust.
"Aelann," she said. "Pilot of Roaring Tempest."
The name came out like a curse she had long since learned to pronounce politely in public.
"A disgrace to House Lannis," she continued. "Like the rest of the traitors we put down."
Her father sighed, but he did not correct her. If anything, the old Knight looked more tired than disapproving.
"House Lannis fractured when the war began," he said. "Some sided with the Archon. Some clung to the old governor's court because their estates, titles, and debts depended on it. Others waited too long, hoping the war would end before they were forced to choose."
His jaw tightened.
"A few of us held to our oaths to the Emperor."
He paused, and for the first time his composure cracked enough to show what lay beneath it. Not grief exactly. Not regret. Something harder. Something sealed shut because opening it would serve no purpose.
"When your fleet arrived, we had already been fighting in the lower hive for months. We slew our kin. Not strangers. Not nameless rebels. Kin."
The chamber seemed quieter after that. Even the distant hum of the station's machinery felt muted.
"They chose treason," the old Knight said. "They chose damnation. We answered them."
Qin Mo said nothing. He did not need to.
There was no remorse in the old Knight's voice. Only finality. The sort of finality common among Imperial survivors, who knew that grief was a luxury best postponed until after the last enemy stopped moving.
The young pilot leaned forward. Her sharp eyes gleamed with anticipation.
"So tell me, Lord Governor…" she said. "Who do you believe is the rightful heir to House Lannis?"
Qin Mo blinked. For one rare second, the question struck from an angle he had not prepared for.
"What?" he asked. "It is obviously you two. Why is this even a question?"
Donna Lannis smiled. It was not a warm expression. It was the smile of a duelist hearing an opponent step exactly where she wanted him.
"Because lineage, succession, and inheritance laws matter."
Then she began to explain.
Not quickly. Not simply. Not in the way a soldier explained ammunition counts or a commander explained a battlefield. Donna laid out the politics of the Knight Houses with the precision of someone who had been taught since childhood that bloodlines were weapons, titles were armor, and a misplaced claim could kill a dynasty as surely as a volcano cannon.
The Knight Houses were ancient, tracing their origins back to humanity's first great expansion among the stars, before the Imperium, before the Ecclesiarchy, before ten thousand years of ceremony had buried function beneath ritual. In those days, Knights had been warrior-kings and frontier guardians, ruling feudal domains on distant resource worlds where survival depended on armored engines, oaths of service, and the ability to destroy whatever crawled out of the dark beyond the walls.
When the Imperium came, the Houses bent the knee in different ways.
Some became Questor Imperialis, bound directly to the Imperium and its temporal authorities: High Lords, Sector Lords, Imperial Commanders, Planetary Governors, and those with enough recognized authority to command armies in the Emperor's name.
Others became Questor Mechanicus, tied to the Adeptus Mechanicus by pacts of maintenance, supply, doctrine, and machine-veneration. Their fiefdoms lived beneath the shadow of forges, their pilots sometimes more machine-oath vassals than nobles in the old sense.
A rare few became Freeblades, wandering warriors severed from House, land, and lineage, carrying only their armor, their grudges, and whatever honor had not yet been spent.
But fealty alone did not define a House. Lineage did.
"Bloodlines matter, Lord Governor," Donna said. "An unbroken chain of ancestry is as vital to a House as the sanctity of the Throne is to the Imperium. A Knight House without clear succession is not a fortress. It is a castle built on shifting sand."
Every House had its ruling line. A High Monarch, High Scion, High King, High Queen, or whatever ancient title local tradition had preserved. Beneath that ruler stood Barons and Baronesses, each governing strongholds, estates, lesser fortresses, vassal settlements, bonded armsmen, Sacristan families, and engines assigned to their branch. Below them sprawled cadet lines, lesser nobility, distant cousins, bastards made legitimate by war, and claimants tolerated only so long as they remained useful.
In theory, honor bound them together.
In practice, birth was a weapon as real as a power lance.
Donna and her father were Knight Baron and Knight Baroness, respected but lesser nobles, far below the old ruling branch of House Lannis. And despite being the only loyalists who still possessed functioning engines and the will to use them, they could not simply declare themselves the House's future without inviting challenge from every surviving cousin, Mechanicus petitioner, court advocate, and spire-born opportunist hoping to acquire a Knightly title by marriage, favor, or forgery.
"Most of House Lannis sided with the traitors," Donna said. Her tone cooled as she spoke, the earlier hunger for recognition hardening into something personal. "We are the last of the faithful. The minority. The inconvenient survivors."
Her fingers curled into a fist on her knee.
"Yet we are the only ones who still fight for the Emperor. Should we not inherit everything?"
Qin Mo felt the dull throb of an oncoming headache.
I am not a noble, he thought. I am not from a Knight House. I did not survive prisons, underhive wars, xenos cults, and dimensional technology just to become a referee for aristocratic succession law.
Somehow, this felt more irritating than studying the complexities of dimensional transmission. Machines at least failed for reasons. Nobles failed because their great-great-grandmother's third cousin had signed a treaty during a famine nine centuries ago and now everyone involved thought that mattered more than artillery.
Politics.
Donna seemed ready to continue. "This may seem trivial to you, but—"
Qin Mo raised one hand.
"Enough."
She stopped immediately, caught off guard by the finality in his tone. Her father did not move, but relief flickered across his face so briefly that most people would have missed it.
"You want my endorsement?" Qin Mo asked. "Fine."
Donna's expression sharpened.
Qin Mo exhaled, already composing the decree in his mind. Legal recognition. Emergency authority. Preservation of loyal Knight assets. Confirmation of succession due to treason, extinction, and battlefield merit. Ecclesiarchy approval for moral legitimacy. Mechanicus validation for Thrones Mechanicum, engine inheritance, and Sacristan continuity. Administratum filing afterward, preferably after the war, when clerks could be buried under enough seals to make argument inconvenient.
"I will draft an official document recognizing you both as the rightful heirs of House Lannis," he said. "I will have the Ecclesiarchy and the Mechanicus validate it. The old ruling branch forfeited its claim by treason. Loyal blood remains. Loyal engines remain. Loyal service has been rendered in battle."
He looked at Donna directly.
"That should settle it, correct?"
Donna's eyes gleamed with fierce triumph. For a moment, her discipline failed and she elbowed her father like a daughter rather than a noblewoman maneuvering for dynastic survival.
The older Knight sighed, but his smile was real this time. Polite, weary, and deeply relieved.
To them, this was enough.
Qin Mo would soon be recognized as the official governor of two worlds. His word would carry weight. His decree would shape the future of House Lannis. If he won the war, Imperial authority would stand behind his judgment, and any rival claimant would have to challenge not merely two surviving Knights, but the man who had liberated Talon II.
"We are ready for battle," Donna declared as she stood. Her salute was sharp enough to cut the air. "Send us to the most dangerous battlefield. The most glorious battlefield."
Qin Mo did not answer immediately.
Instead, he turned to the holographic display.
With a wave of his hand, the projection shifted. Data-ghosts, tactical overlays, fleet markers, atmospheric readings, casualty projections, and orbital vectors spiraled together before resolving into a new world.
Talon III.
Donna's eyes shone with excitement.
This was it.
The invasion of Talon III.
The next great campaign in the name of the Emperor. Her first true planetary assault under Qin Mo's command. A battlefield vast enough for Knights to stride beneath burning skies, glorious enough for banners, songs, and the kind of deeds her House would need if it was to be reborn from treachery and civil war.
She straightened, already preparing herself to receive the order.
"Talon III is already lost," Qin Mo said.
His voice was calm. That made the words worse.
Donna's expression flickered. The excitement did not vanish, but it stumbled. Her father's gaze moved from the hologram to Qin Mo's face.
"If you knew what was happening on that planet," Qin Mo continued, "you would be sick."
The projection deepened. Talon III rotated slowly in the air, its continents overlaid with warning sigils, corrupted vox bands, population collapse estimates, and regions marked in the cold colors of strategic triage. Whatever Donna had imagined, the display offered none of it. No clean landing zones. No noble battlefield. No orderly enemy line waiting to be broken beneath a charge.
Only contamination, collapse, and the kind of war where glory rotted quickly.
Donna's battle-lust did not die. If anything, it changed shape. Excitement became resolve, bright and reckless.
Qin Mo noticed. Of course he noticed.
"Talon II will fall soon," he said. "But I have no intention of wasting time. I will deploy twenty regiments and your two Knights to Talon III."
Donna lifted her chin.
"Your mission is not to invade," Qin Mo said. "It is to defend."
The hologram changed again.
Two towers appeared.
They were massive spires, rising like black obelisks from broken polar terrain. Their silhouettes were severe, functional, and utterly unfamiliar to any Imperial fortification doctrine Donna had studied. They had no chapel-bastions, no gun-crowned battlements, no heraldic curtain walls, and no obvious gatehouse. Instead, their surfaces were smooth, layered, and segmented around internal mechanisms that the projection refused to explain. Gravitic anchors, buried power cores, heat sinks, directional emitters, and sealed control vaults appeared only as abstract glyphs before the display hid them again.
Donna frowned.
"What… is that?"
"You will find out once they are operational," Qin Mo replied.
His tone offered no further explanation.
The older Knight studied the towers in silence. He did not understand the technology. That was obvious. But unlike Donna, he understood the weight of Qin Mo's phrasing. Defend. At all costs. Unknown installations placed at the poles of a corrupted world. Twenty regiments as shield, two Knights as anchors.
This was not a glorious charge.
This was guarding a blade while its edge was being sharpened.
"These two installations will be placed at the north and south poles of Talon III," Qin Mo said. "You will defend them. You will keep enemy forces away from the construction zones, power feeds, and activation systems. You will preserve the regiments assigned to you where possible, but the installations take priority."
Donna's jaw tightened slightly.
Qin Mo's gaze shifted to her. "At all costs."
She hesitated.
Not because she was afraid. Not because she doubted the order. Fear of death had been trained out of her long before she ever sat within a Throne Mechanicum. Doubt in battle could be endured if it had a purpose. But this mission did not fit the shape she had prepared herself for. She had expected assault. Impact. Honor won at the spearpoint. Instead, Qin Mo was sending her to guard two unknown machines on a world he had already judged lost.
She did not understand the significance of the mission.
But she understood command.
She understood oath.
And she understood that Qin Mo was not a man who wasted Knights on meaningless symbolism.
Donna rose from her seat, then knelt again. Her father followed a heartbeat later. Their armor joints clicked softly in the quiet chamber.
"For the Emperor," Donna said. The words were formal, but the fire behind them was her own. "For the Imperium's glory. We will stand. We will fight. We will triumph, or we will die with honor."
Her father bowed his head.
"House Lannis will hold," he said. "Whatever comes."
Qin Mo nodded.
"Good."