The storm owned the city.

 

Rain fell sideways, thick with ash, turning lumen-globes into sickly halos that barely touched the ground.

 

MASON split the squad without words. Hand signals. Eye contact. Black-Net stayed quiet except where silence would kill them.

 

They moved through the slums like a rumor of violence.

 

Doors opened before hands reached for locks. Shapes folded before mouths could open. No one screamed long enough to matter. Bodies hit ferrocrete, then were ignored. Identification came later—if it came at all.

 

The Administratum building waited at the end of a dead avenue, upper floors collapsed from Ork shelling months old. The war had passed through and moved on. The ruin remained. Reinforced doors bore fresh welds over old Imperial seals, hurried and crude.

 

KILN was already kneeling.

 

The charge erased the entrance in a clean white bloom.

 

They were inside before the echo finished dying.

 

Hallways vanished under practiced violence. VESPER marked targets that never saw him. SABLE’s pistols coughed twice at a time—bored, surgical. HEMLOCK burned through a barricade and stepped through the cooling metal without breaking stride.

 

Only after the structure was theirs did they look down and count the dead.

 

The wrongness crept in near the central chamber.

 

Auspex returns lagged. Sound flattened, as if the room swallowed echoes whole. Outside, the storm pressed against the walls and slid aside, rain refusing to cross an unseen boundary.

 

At the center stood the Tech-Priest.

 

Black robes. Hood drawn low. Flesh and augmetics carved with binaric script etched directly into skin and steel. His vox-grille screamed machine-cant, but his movements didn’t match—gestures trailing the chant by a fraction of a second, as though reality itself was hesitating.

 

He wasn’t praying.

 

He was calling.

 

MASON inhaled.

 

PRAXIS fired.

 

Plasma tore through the room, sun-hot and absolute. Flesh vaporized. Augmetics sloughed away in molten ribbons. The Tech-Priest collapsed mid-gesture, the chant severed on a single unfinished note that scraped the air raw.

 

Silence slammed down too hard.

 

Consoles around them flickered. A low whine rose from machinery that should have been dormant for decades. The air tightened, pressure without weight.

 

“Search,” MASON ordered.

 

They found it behind a dead field generator, wrapped in layers of shielding that hadn’t been powered since before the Ork attack.

 

A shard of black stone.

 

Two feet long. Matte. Featureless. Light bent away from it like it knew better. The auspex refused to register its existence. No heat. No reflection. No warp echo.

 

MASON knew what it was the moment he saw it.

 

“Package secured,” he said. “Exfil. Now.”

 

The explosion came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

 

The building convulsed inward. MASON felt weightless, then crushed, then nothing at all.

 

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

 

MASON woke choking on dust and ozone.

 

His helm scrolled error runes. His body lagged behind command by a heartbeat too long. Pain arrived late and distant, filed away for later accounting.

 

The chamber was gone. The roof had peeled back, leaving a jagged crater open to the storm. Wind screamed through broken ferrocrete, but at the center of the ruin stood a circle the weather refused to touch.

 

Something small rested there.

 

Metallic. Plain.

 

Silent.

 

ARGONAUT's torso rotated, locked, and froze—machine-spirit trapped in a logic spiral, classification subroutines eating themselves alive.

 

Rain struck the air around the object and slid aside.

 

No sound crossed its boundary.

 

ECHO’s voice came over the vox, thin and shaken.

 

“I remember this.”

 

MASON forced himself upright and followed ECHO’s stare.

 

The device wasn’t glowing.

It wasn’t humming.

It simply existed... an absence pressed into the world.

 

Understanding settled in his gut like cold iron.

 

Teleport homer.

 

Active.

 

“I’ve seen them before,” Echo said, barely audible. “Silver. Halberds. Everyone burns and no one knows why.”

 

The air grew tighter. Cleaner. As if something vast was aligning far above them—not forcing its way through the Warp, but overriding it entirely.

 

MASON looked down at the black rock locked in his gauntlet.

 

He felt exposed. Hunted.

 

“Vultures,” he said, voice steady by force of will alone, “scatter. Delay actions. We run.”

 

High above the city, reality prepared to give way.