As twenty full First Legion regiments withdrew to the orbital shipyards above Talon II for rest, repair, and resupply, Qin Mo had already turned his attention toward the next campaign.
Talon III.
The name sat in his mind like a sealed munition crate: familiar, dangerous, and not to be opened carelessly. Talon II had been secured, but not pacified. Its orbit was crowded with warships, supply haulers, repair tenders, and half-damaged troop transports cycling through emergency maintenance.
Regiments that had fought for days without proper sleep were being rotated into barracks carved into the orbital docks. Armor was stripped, weapons were recalibrated, wounded men were dragged into medicae stations, and logistics drones moved through it all with tireless precision.
Qin Mo did not have the luxury of exhaustion.
His preparations for Talon III were, in principle, simple.
Consult the shard of an ancient C'tan and ask what waited on the planet.
Simple did not mean safe.
Qin Mo did not fully trust the entity known as the Shapeshifter. Trusting a C'tan, even a broken one, seemed like the sort of mistake that ended with one's name being used as a cautionary example in several dead civilizations.
Yet the being had thus far proven useful. Its prophecies had been accurate often enough to matter, and more importantly, it appeared to possess a direct interest in his continued survival.
It wanted him strong. It wanted him victorious.
It wanted, very badly, for another C'tan to eventually break open whatever prison held it.
That did not make it loyal. It made it invested.
For now, that was enough.
That night, Qin Mo entered the dream-realm the Shapeshifter had woven for their meetings.
The transition came without fanfare. One moment he was seated in a sealed chamber aboard the orbital shipyard, listening to the muted vibration of engines, void-shield relays, and distant repair work. The next, the world folded into velvet darkness and expensive silence.
The chamber around him was the same as before: a luxurious room built from too many kinds of wealth to be tasteful. Polished black stone reflected a ceiling lost in shadow. Tall columns rose at angles that looked deliberate rather than structurally necessary. Silken curtains hung from nowhere and stirred without wind. The air smelled faintly of old incense, cold metal, and something sweet enough to become unpleasant if inhaled too deeply.
The vast bed at the center of the chamber remained, its sheets layered in black, silver, and deep crimson, more like the resting place of a decadent planetary tyrant than the meeting ground of a star-eating god-shard.
But the Shapeshifter was nowhere to be seen.
Qin Mo stopped just inside the chamber.
That was strange.
The Shapeshifter could take any form it pleased, but this was its own constructed domain. If it had granted him entry, it meant that it was willing to meet.
So why was it absent?
A sharp whisper cut through the stillness.
"Shhh!"
The bed moved.
A face slid upward from within the folds of the silken sheets, lips pursed in exaggerated warning. Its features were human for only a moment before they softened, sharpened, and flowed into something else. Golden eyes darted toward the shadowed corners of the chamber.
"The Nightbringer is here," the Shapeshifter whispered. "Do not let it find us. Hide. Quickly."
Qin Mo stared at it.
"What? You're joking, right?"
The face did not smile. That alone made him move.
Without waiting for a clearer answer, Qin Mo dropped low and slipped beneath the Shapeshifter-turned-bed. It was ridiculous. It was undignified. It was also the sort of absurd action that suddenly became reasonable when the possible alternative was attracting the attention of Aza'gorod.
The Nightbringer, Aza'gorod.
A C'tan that embodies death, darkness, and destruction itself within the Materium.
The first reaper. The black scythe of cosmic finality. The oldest and most powerful among the Star Gods.
The grim reaper of the cosmos, whose very presence eroded mortal sanity. It was the reaper, the shadow from which all myths of death were born. Entire civilizations had perished beneath its scythe-like will.
Even as a shattered remnant, even as a splinter, it would be a catastrophe.
If any fragment of the Nightbringer had entered this dream-realm, then either the Shapeshifter had drawn attention it could not handle, or something far worse was already moving unseen.
Qin Mo extended his senses.
The chamber remained quiet. Too quiet. No pressure of another presence. No cold hunger moving through the edges of the illusion. No blade-like attention scraping across his mind. Only the Shapeshifter's own unstable psychic architecture, trembling around him like a room held together by bad memories.
Then the Shapeshifter whispered again, and this time its words made no sense.
"My brother… why did you help the Necrontyr forge weapons?"
Qin Mo froze.
The voice was no longer playful. It wavered, not with fear, but with old betrayal. The sound carried weight, a grief so ancient it had fossilized into accusation.
"We had an agreement," the C'tan continued. Its voice shifted through several tones at once, as if a choir of the same being were speaking from different wounds. "After the War in Heaven, we would leave together. To the void beyond this cursed galaxy. Beyond the hunger. Beyond the hatred. Beyond them."
"?"
Qin Mo's brow furrowed.
"What?"
The Shapeshifter did not seem to hear him.
He crawled out from beneath the bed and stood, watching carefully. The bed shuddered, then collapsed inward, its silk and carved frame folding into a smooth sphere of pale light. A heartbeat later the sphere unfolded into a glowing orb, then a rotating star chart, then a mass of drifting symbols that looked like navigational data viewed through grief.
"We were to create a paradise," the Shapeshifter said. "A haven for us lesser C'tan. No war. No devouring by stronger kin. No crawling in the dark between the stars, waiting to be noticed. The galaxy was to be our canvas. Every star, a brushstroke. Every planet, a sculptor's stone..."
The star chart expanded, becoming a vast radiant nebula suspended above the chamber floor. It was beautiful in the precise, sterile way only an immortal predator could imagine beauty: light without warmth, symmetry without life, grandeur without mercy.
"And I…" The Shapeshifter's voice softened. "I was to be its muse. Shifting into countless forms, providing inspiration for the artisans… That is why we refused to fight at your side, Deceiver."
Qin Mo's expression hardened.There it was.
Deceiver.
Mephet'ran.
The Shapeshifter's form flickered violently, losing coherence. It became a child made of starlight, then a skeletal monarch, then a curtain of mirrors, then a face Qin Mo could not quite focus on before it changed again. The dream chamber shivered with it. Shadows stretched. The polished floor rippled. The columns bent slightly, not because geometry had failed, but because the mind maintaining the scene had forgotten what shape they were supposed to hold.
"You promised," it whispered. "You promised we would leave. You promised the Necrontyr were tools. You promised…"
Qin Mo had heard enough.
He raised one hand. Lightning gathered around his fingers, sharp and white, not a storm but a precise discharge of force.
"Wake up."
The bolt struck the Shapeshifter squarely.
The C'tan shard spasmed. Its unstable form collapsed into a smooth, featureless sphere of cold light that hit the floor without sound. For a moment the entire dream-realm went still. The curtains stopped moving. The shadows steadied. The oppressive sweetness vanished from the air.
Then the sphere trembled.
"Thank you," it whispered.
Qin Mo lowered his hand, still ready to strike again.
"What the hell was that?"
"Nothing important," the Shapeshifter replied.
The answer was too fast. Its surface rippled uneasily, and Qin Mo could feel the uncertainty beneath the words. The entity was not merely lying to him. It was trying to lie to itself.
He folded his arms.
"You mistook me for the Deceiver."
The sphere dimmed.
"I mistook a memory for the present."
"That is not better."
"No," the Shapeshifter admitted after a pause. "It is not."
Silence settled between them, brittle and uncomfortable. Qin Mo studied the shard carefully. The incident confirmed nothing, but it suggested several unpleasant possibilities. The Shapeshifter might be a damaged lesser C'tan with memories tangled around Mephet'ran. It might be a shard of something that had once known the Deceiver intimately. Or it might still be performing, layering truth and deception until even suspicion became useful to it.
With C'tan, madness and manipulation were not mutually exclusive.
The Shapeshifter's sphere slowly unfolded into a vague humanoid shape. It avoided a face this time.
"Why have you come?" it asked. Its tone was quieter now. Less theatrical.
Qin Mo let the matter rest, for the moment.
"Show me the current state of Talon III."
"As you wish."
The chamber dissolved.
In its place, Talon III materialized before Qin Mo's eyes.
The world hung in darkness, turning slowly, its surface scarred by old mining operations, dead industrial zones, ash plains, and polluted weather systems that crawled across the atmosphere like infected tissue beneath skin. Data did not appear as neat Imperial cartography. It came as vision, intuition, and symbolic compression: places of violence brightening, population centers darkening, underground movement threading beneath the crust in restless lines.
Qin Mo studied it carefully.
Talon III remained a desolate wasteland.
The surface cities were mostly dead. The great mining ports, once built to move ore, promethium derivatives, industrial machinery, and millions of laborers, now stood hollow beneath dust storms and chemical snowfall. Habitation blocks had become tombs. Rail arteries vanished beneath dunes of powdered rock. Processing towers leaned over dead excavation pits like rusted skeletons.
But the planet was not empty.
The Ork infestation had not been contained. If anything, it had grown. Their surface presence was scattered, but the deeper layers of the world crawled with them. Qin Mo saw movement through the old mine networks: crude fortifications hammered into human tunnels, fungus growths spreading through abandoned ore galleries, ramshackle workshops belching smoke into ventilation shafts never designed to carry that kind of heat.
It made sense.
Talon III had been a mining world. Its infrastructure, its cities, and much of its civilization had been built below the surface. The Orks had found ready-made warrens large enough to shelter mobs, vehicles, scrap forges, and whatever passed for logistics in the brutal enthusiasm of their species.
If left alone, they would not remain an infestation. They would become a proper Waaagh! seed.
Elsewhere, the Slaaneshi cults had descended into something worse than mere rebellion.
Qin Mo forced himself to look.
They had turned hab-caverns into theaters of mutilation and worship. Manufactoria had become galleries where living bodies were modified, displayed, broken, remade, and applauded by crowds too drugged or devoted to understand that horror had replaced art. Combat arenas ran without pause. Pain cults competed with dueling schools. Noble pleasure chambers had been expanded into districts of excess where music, chemicals, surgery, torture, and sacrament bled together until no clean category remained.
None of the impulses were unnatural in isolation. Desire. Art. Combat. Beauty. Self-expression. Ambition. Sensation. Mortals had always sought such things.
But here, every boundary had been cut away. Every appetite had been sharpened until it consumed the person who held it. Every act had become escalation. Every escalation demanded witnesses. Every witness became participant, victim, or offering.
Qin Mo's expression tightened.
He did not flinch because he was fragile. He flinched because he still understood what human beings were supposed to be.
Compared to the underground madness, the polar regions were eerily calm.
The north and south poles were almost empty, locked beneath ice, mineral crust, killing winds, and environmental conditions harsh enough to discourage even desperate survivors. The mining clans had rarely built there. The old Administratum had marked the regions as resource-poor and strategically irrelevant. Few human roads reached them. Fewer still remained intact.
That made them valuable.
Untouched ground. Clean approach vectors. Limited civilian presence. Fewer cult nests. Less Ork infrastructure. Harsh terrain, yes, but terrain Qin Mo could shape and fortify.
A campaign could begin there.
A foothold could be built before the enemy understood where the knife had entered.
"I see…" the Shapeshifter murmured.
Its voice drifted from everywhere at once, softer than before. The planetary image trembled, and faint threads of possibility moved across its surface.
"I see you victorious. And when the dust settles…"
The world brightened in Qin Mo's vision, encircled by lines of control spreading from orbit to pole, from pole to subterranean arteries, from battlefield to administration.
"This star system will be yours."
Qin Mo chuckled once.
"Not a bad prophecy. I hope you're not just flattering me so I'll come rescue you."
The Shapeshifter did not answer immediately. Its humanoid outline dimmed, and the false sky around Talon III darkened with it. Qin Mo sensed displeasure, but not anger. Something closer to frustration.
At last, it spoke.
"You do not actually believe I expect you to march into the Necron dynasties, destroy their war machines, break through their Tesseract Labyrinth, and set me free by force of sentiment, do you?"
Its voice sharpened.
"I am trying to help you."
Qin Mo said nothing.
The Shapeshifter's form rippled. When it continued, desperation had crept beneath the pride.
"We once cowered in the dark corners of the galaxy, fearing our stronger kin. We hid from those who would devour us. We bartered, fled, lied, and survived because survival was the only dignity left to us. But now we all are shattered, and you remain whole."
Its face formed briefly, eyes fixed on him with unsettling intensity.
"You have no need to fear anymore. Yet you have merged with a human, and now you hesitate over every power that should be yours by nature. You cannot even summon your Forge. I know it is your human mind speaking to me now. I know you distrust me. But I still sense something familiar within you."
The face softened.
"So please. Do not mistake caution for wisdom in every matter."
Qin Mo exhaled slowly.
His distrust of the Shapeshifter was justified. It had tried to manipulate him before. It hid information when clarity would have been useful. It spoke like an ancient thing accustomed to treating lesser minds as pieces on a board.
But there was no need to be needlessly hostile.
Information had value. So did cooperation, however temporary.
"Thank you," Qin Mo said.
He meant it.
The Shapeshifter seemed to notice. Its outline steadied, then coalesced into a vaguely humanoid figure with a faint, wry smile.
"Do not mention it."
A pause.
"And next time, try not to break me into smaller pieces while helping me regain my composure."
"Next time, try not to start the meeting by telling me the Nightbringer is in the room."
The Shapeshifter's smile became thin.
"In my defense, it seemed true at the time."
"That is also not better."
For a moment, something almost like amusement passed between them. Then the Shapeshifter withdrew, unwilling to prolong the meeting after revealing too much of its own damage.
The vision dissolved.
Qin Mo was ejected from the dream-realm with the abrupt force of a door closing in his face. His consciousness snapped back into his physical body aboard the orbital shipyard.
He opened his eyes.
The chamber around him was quiet. Real. Armored walls. Tactical displays. The muted vibration of the station. No silken bed. No shifting god-shard. No false shadows whispering about ancient betrayal.
He had seen enough.
Everything that needed investigation had been investigated. Talon III was not beyond use, but it was beyond negotiation. The Orks would have to be contained and burned out of the underground networks before they gathered into something larger. The Slaaneshi cults would have to be purged quickly, decisively, and without giving them time to turn invasion into spectacle.
The poles would be the first knife-points.
Qin Mo began issuing orders.
Massive quantities of supplies were transmitted to Talon II's orbital yards and staged for the next operation: ammunition, armor components, drone cores, medicae stockpiles, void-sealed rations, prefabricated fortification blocks, atmospheric processors, shield projectors, gravitic anchors, and enough replacement parts to keep an army moving after the first plan inevitably met reality.
Regiments not assigned to the Talon III campaign remained behind to assist the Thunderborn in fully securing Talon II. The planet was conquered, not tamed. Enemy remnants still hid in ruins, underground vaults, and abandoned industrial districts. Those would be rooted out while the main offensive prepared elsewhere.
The fleet received its instructions next.
Warships and shipyard systems were to prepare for full dimensional transmission to Talon III's orbit. Upon arrival, the fleet would establish immediate orbital superiority, deploy auspex nets, and deny surface-to-orbit traffic. Ground forces would descend first upon the northern and southern polar regions, where construction battalions and engineering drones would raise fortified landing zones before deeper operations began.
Every force assigned to the first wave had one priority.
Protect the construction effort.
Not glory. Not pursuit. Not immediate cleansing of every visible target.
A campaign was not won by rage alone. Soldiers needed air, ammunition, power, medicae support, repair capacity, fallback routes, hardened command nodes, and somewhere safe enough to sleep for four hours without being eaten, possessed, shelled, or stabbed by a cultist with artistic ambitions.
The First Legion would not descend onto Talon III as a mob of heroes.
It would arrive as an army.
Once the orders were finalized and relayed, Qin Mo activated the teleportation matrix for a long-range solo transfer.
The chamber vanished.
For an instant there was only pressure, light, and the precise sensation of space being folded around a point of will.
Then Qin Mo moved from Talon II's orbit…
To the Underhive of Talon I.
The former stronghold of the 47th Regiment waited in silence.
Once, the place had been a battered refuge, then a fortress, then the beating logistical heart of the First Legion's survival. Now its corridors felt almost abandoned. Every soldier who could be spared had been deployed to the warfront, the orbital yards, Talon II's pacification zones, or the endless chain of supply and security posts holding the system together.
Lumen-strips burned low along reinforced walls. Ventilation fans hummed behind armored grilles. Automated sentry nodes tracked Qin Mo as he passed, identified him, and returned to standby. In the distance, fabrication systems continued their work without human voices around them, metal shaping metal in the dark.
Qin Mo strode through the corridors toward his research vault.
His subterranean laboratory lay deeper than the old fortress had ever needed to reach, sunk into black bedrock and hidden beneath layers of shielding, false heat signatures, and deliberately misleading structural returns. He passed through blast doors, security fields, and sealed corridors without slowing. Each system recognized him before he reached it. Each opened just long enough for him to pass, then sealed behind him.
At last, he stopped before a solid steel wall.
There was no visible door. No handle. No control panel. Nothing for a spy, saboteur, priest, or curious officer to misunderstand.
Qin Mo extended one hand.
Matter loosened.
The wall rippled around his fingers, its structure briefly forgetting the normal objections of steel. Qin Mo stepped forward and passed through it as though walking through deep water. The metal closed behind him without seam or mark.
Beyond the wall lay a secret chamber.
It spanned more than two thousand square meters, its walls lined with polished adamantium plates that reflected the chamber's cold lumen-light in muted bands. The floor was perfectly smooth, black and dense, marked only by hidden access lines and geometric seams too precise to have been cut by conventional tools. No incense burned here. No prayer strips hung from the walls. No Mechanicus icons watched over the machines.
This was not a shrine to tradition.
It was a place where Qin Mo built answers.
At the center stood a throne-like control seat, not ceremonial but functional: a command cradle fitted with neural interfaces, gravitic stabilizers, layered shielding, and hardline links to systems buried throughout the room. Before it rested a massive obsidian containment unit, its surface so dark it seemed to drink the light around it.
Qin Mo approached the unit.
He placed his hand over a hidden panel embedded in the floor. The panel did not open. It read him instead: energy pattern, command authority, dimensional signature, and the unique pressure of the power living beneath his human mind.
The chamber accepted him.
Locks released in sequence.
Heavy clamps withdrew with deep metallic thuds. Internal fields powered down one layer at a time, each collapse felt more than heard. Frost bled from the edges of the containment unit. The obsidian surface split along a vertical seam and opened.
Inside rested a smooth black sphere.
It was small enough, at first, to fit within both hands. Its surface showed no reflection. No light touched it properly. The chamber's instruments woke around it, not with alarm, but with the tense readiness of systems designed to stand near disaster and remain polite.
The sphere rose into the air.
As it ascended, it expanded. Slowly at first. Then faster. Its surface stretched outward like liquid night drawn across an invisible frame, widening until it filled the center of the chamber. It did not become smoke. It did not become a portal. It became a firmament: a black, seamless field suspended in the air, its edges curved with controlled gravitational tension.
Threads of pale light moved beneath its surface, faint and distant, like stars trapped under ice.
Qin Mo allowed himself the faintest smile.
"What a masterpiece."
The words were quiet, but they carried satisfaction deeper than pride.
He had begun developing this weapon long ago, when he first understood that Talon III might no longer be a world to save. Some planets could be liberated. Some could be rebuilt. Some could be purged and repopulated after the corruption was cut out.
Others became weapons in enemy hands.
Talon III was not yet lost beyond all value, but Qin Mo had prepared for the possibility. Preparation was not pessimism. It was respect for consequences.
The project had been completed for some time. Until now, it had remained unused, sealed away beneath Talon I, waiting for a war dreadful enough to justify its existence.
An Exterminatus-tier weapon.
Not Imperial Exterminatus, with cyclone torpedoes, virus bombs, and righteous paperwork written by men safely in orbit. This was his own answer: designed in secret, built without sanction, and refined with a precision that would have made the Inquisition, the Mechanicus, and several categories of xenos deeply unhappy for entirely different reasons.
Qin Mo stepped closer.
The black surface responded to his presence. Fine ripples spread outward from the point nearest his hand, then stilled. Deep inside the field, dormant systems aligned. Gravitic layers folded into place. Dimensional anchors acknowledged their maker. The weapon did not wake fully. Not yet. It merely recognized him.
He placed his palm upon its surface.
The field was cold. Not physically cold, but cold in the way a starless void was cold: absence measured as sensation.
Qin Mo whispered its name.
"The Nexus Firmament."