Qin Mo drifted through the void.
Beyond the material universe, beyond the constraints of time, he existed as something vast and formless. He siphoned energy from dying suns, devoured the sentient life that worshiped them, and drifted endlessly through the void.
For eternity, this was his existence—until he reached the fringes of a distant galactic sector.
And there, he saw the light.
A blinding radiance tore through reality, warping the fabric of space, collapsing entire star systems into a singularity. The sheer force of the warp-born detonation shattered him, crushing his consciousness like brittle glass.
A pain beyond death consumed him.
Qin Mo's eyes snapped open, the vision dissolving into grim reality.
The stench of promethium and cordite hung heavy in the air, mingling with the burnt-meat scent of charred bodies. The smoke of battle was beginning to thin, revealing the enemy's approaching ranks—
Heretical Tyranid-human hybrids, an unholy fusion of stolen genetics and hive fleet monstrosity.
They came in a swarm, chittering in their corrupted tongue, their twisted, malformed faces barely recognizable as once-human. Behind them, the thunder of armored treads rumbled through the trenches. The cultists had brought tanks.
But Qin Mo barely noticed them.
His hands instinctively searched his pockets—
Only to find nothing.
His pockets were gone.
His entire uniform had been shredded by the explosion.
Lying prone in the trench, he desperately sifted through the debris, pushing aside molten metal shards and ruined ceramite plates.
He whispered a silent prayer to the God-Emperor, a plea to the Master of Mankind—
Let me find it. Let me find my journal.
And by some divine providence, he did.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The once-thick tome was obliterated. Only a single, tattered page remained, half of it reduced to scorched cinders.
"No… no… NO!" Qin Mo's grief was absolute.
The words could be rewritten. The knowledge could be preserved.
But the journal itself—the final relic of his past life—was irreplaceable. It had been a gift from his mother when he was seven years old. A fragment of home, a tether to a life long lost.
"For the Master of Evolution!"
The heretics' battle cries echoed across the trenches.
The ground trembled beneath the march of tanks.
Qin Mo clenched his fists.
He carefully rolled the last surviving page into the remains of his trousers, then rose to his feet.
He did not feel fear.
The Genestealers had taken everything from this world. They had stolen the bodies of its people, twisted them into monstrosities, defiled the sanctity of the human form.
Now, they had taken his journal.
They would burn for it.
A figure moved toward him.
The old psyker strode across the battlefield with unnatural speed, his power warping the air around him. Incoming lasfire and autogun rounds veered away from him at the last second, deflected by invisible force.
His eyes locked onto Qin Mo, and with a flick of his wrist, something glinted through the smoke—
A key, flying toward him.
"Hurry!" Kalon shouted. "Unlock your psy-dampening collar!"
Before the key could reach him, the heretics were upon him.
A dozen hybrid soldiers charged at once, screeching in frenzy, their claws and chitin-bladed weapons raised to strike.
The world erupted in flame.
A pillar of fire exploded outward from where Qin Mo stood, incinerating everything within a thirty-meter radius.
The Genestealers never had the chance to scream.
Their bodies turned to cinders in an instant.
The psy-dampening collar around his neck, marked with the sigil of Prisoner 444, began to burn.
Cracks formed along its surface.
Qin Mo floated above the battlefield, two meters off the ground.
His eyes blazed like twin suns.
Lightning crawled across his skin, arcing from his fingertips. His body radiated heat, warpfire licking at his tattered clothes.
The heretics saw him.
Their tanks halted, turret servos whining as they adjusted their aim.
One wreathed in fire, the other crackling with lightning.
With a mere thought, he unleashed hell.
Where the flames touched, the enemy was reduced to ash.
Where the lightning struck, bodies exploded, mutant flesh bursting apart as the sheer voltage cooked them from within.
A Leman Russ battle tank attempted to fire—
But its turret warped before the shot could leave the barrel, the metal twisting and screaming as if crushed by an invisible hand.
The ammunition stored within was ripped from its housing, yanked into the air—
Then struck by lightning.
The detonation was cataclysmic.
The tank exploded from within, its turret blown skyward, a column of fire spewing into the heavens.
From the trenches, Burr watched in horror.
Kalon, beside him, could only stare in shock.
A psyker—still wearing a suppression collar—was ripping apart an entire battlefield with raw, unchecked power.
Even the crude anti-psyker collars used in the Talon System had some effect on Beta Grade psykers.
But Qin Mo stood defiant, obliterating his enemies as if the collar had never been there.
"Fall back!" Burr bellowed.
Kalon hesitated. "We must hold the line!"
"The line is already gone!" Burr roared back. "We need to—"
He never finished his sentence. A deafening blast cut him off.
For an instant, Kalon was there. The next, he was gone—reduced to a mist of blood and charred flesh.
A heretic suicide bomber, unnoticed in the chaos, had crept too close. Struck by a stray bolt of Qin Mo’s lightning, its body had detonated in a chain reaction of explosives.
As Kalon’s remains scattered across the battlefield, Burr wasted no time.
His personal Chimera Armored Carrier was parked nearby.
As he reached it, he wrenched open the hatch—
There was someone inside or...something.
At first glance, it resembled a man.
But its legs were too long.
And it was crouched over the pilot's corpse—feeding.
For a single, agonizing moment, their eyes met.
Burr barely had time to react before the nightmare was upon him.
And in that moment, as the battlefield descended into total chaos, Qin Mo knew one thing.
He couldn’t hold out alone.
"The central bunker!" he roared. "Regroup at the bunker!"
His voice was drowned by gunfire and Artillery.
He cut a path through the enemy, rallying the survivors—
Over two hundred PDF soldiers stood behind him.
And together, they charged toward the half-built bunker—
Their final refuge in the storm of war.