"What exactly are you?"
Ky'ei's piercing gaze locked onto Qin Mo, but all it could see was an emptiness that defied comprehension. A void, an absence where something should exist but did not.
For a daemon of Tzeentch, Lord of Change and Architect of Fate, such an absence was blasphemy in its purest form. The Empyrean was shaped by thought, by will, by the great weave of fate, but this... thing? He stood apart. Outside the grand design. A blind spot in the infinite tapestry. It was heretical in its own right.
The daemon felt something it had not in eons: fear. It longed for banishment, an escape from this losing battle, but before that, it had to understand the anomaly before it.
Yet Qin Mo was not the only enigma in this cursed place.
Ky'ei turned its gaze to Yoan, and in doing so, saw his past, his present, his future, and therein lay the horror.
Yoan's past burned into its mind's eye: Betrayed by bounty hunters. Devoured by mutants in the underhive, his final scream swallowed in darkness, his flesh torn apart by tooth and claw.
Yoan's future: A mere photograph clutched in his widow's trembling hands, his body long since reduced to bleached bone in a forgotten corner of the hive.
But here he was. Alive. Breathing. Standing in the doorway, an affront to fate itself.
Ky'ei's feathers ruffled in unease, iridescent plumes shivering as though caught in an unseen wind. The strands of fate were fraying, threads unraveling before its eyes.
It spoke aloud its findings, each syllable like the unraveling of a prophecy, describing Yoan's contradictory existence.
Then, with a voice that was part hiss, part choral lament, it demanded an answer from Qin Mo.
"Do you understand how terrifying this is for me?"
Qin Mo merely nodded, his expression unreadable.
"I do." A pause. Then, with a smirk, he added, "You should be grateful you can still perceive the present. If Kairos, that two-headed fool, were here, he'd be as blind as a newborn."
Ky'ei's pupils contracted into pinpricks of incandescent light. Its twin hearts seized in shock.
"Wait… Kairos… How do you know my master's name—?!"
Panic. Real, visceral panic.
Qin Mo had spoken ofKairos Fateweaveras if he were nothing, a name that should have been unknowable to mortals, spoken with casual irreverence.
Ky'ei had always been a fragment of Kairos' will, an extension of its master's boundless sight. It could glimpse past and future, albeit only a short distance.
But this man. No, this being, how did it know?
"You talk too much, daemon."
Qin Mo raised his weapons and opened fire.
Yoan's Null-field aura weakened Ky'ei, disrupting the unholy energies that sustained it in the Materium, but it was not enough.
He was no strong Untouchable, no paragon of the Pariah gene, but it was enough to unbalance the daemon.
Still, the scatter-lasers tore through daemon-flesh, sizzling holes into its form, burning, searing, rending chunks from Ky'ei's transdimensional flesh.
The air reeked of ozone and immolated Warp-matter, yet the daemon refused to die.
"This is why I told you to use melee," Qin Mo said as he fired again.
"I know. Because ranged weapons alone can't fully kill them, right?" Yoan tightened his grip on his chainsword and grav-hammer.
Ky'ei's right eye flicked to Archon's liquefied corpse.
Its left eye tracked Yoan's incoming attack.
The graviton shield flickered and failed, but Yoan had never relied on it.
In that frozen moment, Yoan saw everything: Ky'ei's eyes still moving.
It was aware. Calculating.
Qin Mo stepped through the wall without hesitation, phasing effortlessly, his uncanny perception of Warp entities locking onto the fleeing daemon like a hawk to prey.
Both warriors sprinted down the twisting corridors, following their prey until they emerged in the training hall.
Dozens of charred corpses littered the ground, burnt husks that had once been soldiers.
Ky'ei stood waiting, its body smoking, hunched over like a gargoyle at the gates of damnation.
It glanced at its mutilated flesh, then raised a claw.
A wall of Warp-flame erupted, blue and hungry, a desperate gambit to stall for time.
Instead, the battlefield warped.
Ky'ei's own ground distorted beneath it, dragged forward through its own fire and pulled directly into Qin Mo's waiting strike.
"EAT THIS, WARP-SCUM!"
The Aquila Staff swung like a thunderbolt-turned-warhammer.
Yoan moved in tandem, chainsword screeching as it descended.
Ky'ei's skull cracked, the blow sending a shockwave through its form.
The chainsword bit deep into its wing, rending sinew and bone, while the Staff's strike launched it ten meters across the hall, crashing against an adamantium wall.
Before it could react, Qin Mo attacked again.
The ground had warped again.
It was not simple teleportation, the training hall itself had been shrunk, twenty meters compressed into nothing.
The battlefield itself was being rewritten.
Then, it saw the Aquila Staff.
The impact had left a mark.
Its head was caved in, a deep, festering gash across its form, its substance corroding where the Aquila had touched it.
Not a relic. Not a mere symbol.
But ten thousand years of worship made manifest.
It had become a Divine weapon in truth.
Ky'ei had no time to reflect, Qin Mo's Staff rose again.
Ky'ei and the entire wall were dragged forward, twisted like cloth in a storm.
The Staff shattered its beak.
Yoan's grav-hammer crushed its leg, bones pulverized into ectoplasmic sludge.
Qin Mo swung upward, like a golfer teeing off.
The Staff connected, surge of luminous energy detonated upon impact. Ky'ei's body burst into light, fragments torn from reality.
The force of the impact sent Ky'ei hurtling through the air. It should have stopped against the wall.
But Qin Mo willed the wall away.
It flew one hundred meters before crashing.
Before it could recover, Qin Mo pulled it back.
A mere gesture of his hand and it was dragged before him once more.
Then the final strike.
The Staff crushed its throat.
Yoan drove the chainsword into its belly. The weapon screamed, a roar of mechanical teeth grinding through Warp-flesh.
Ky'ei spoke despite its ruined mouth, words wet with blood and unreality.
"You have bested me. But remember, this only happened because I was weakened. The Null. This weak mortal shell. The Materium. The constraints of reality."
"Oh? Then tell me... can you ever enter the Materium without being weakened?"
Because it knew the answer.
"Unless the Eye of Terror swells a hundredfold…"
"No. It is impossible."
"Then this is farewell, daemon."
His hand closed over Ky'ei's skull.
"In the name of humanity. I BANISH YOU!"
White-hot flame erupted.
Not normal fire. Not Warp-fire.
But the flame of a Star God.
Ky'ei screamed as its form melted, body unraveling into flickers of myth and madness.
In its final moment, it uttered one last whisper.
"This… was part of the plan."