The rebel 120mm rocket launchers were relatively low-capability weapons — effective range around a thousand tres, optical sights, shaped-charge warheads that could kill a Chira. In urban terrain they were a serious threat. In open ground at fifteen hundred tres, with Kian's entire force outranging them significantly, they were mostly a concern to manage rather than a genuine tactical problem.
The Chiras held at standoff distance and suppressed. Old Kae and Little Kae worked the indirect fire grid, walking grenade rounds into the trench network on coordinates fed from the auspex. Aid indirect fire into prepared positions — the defenders couldn't return effective fire, and the arc of the grenades found them regardless of how deep they dug.
Fifteen minutes. Then a rebel officer's voice carried over the din: "We can't hold this! Get the Marshal!"
In the rear of the column, Silentium's eyes opened.
He had been sitting cross-legged on a cargo hauler, ditating inside his powered suit, when the sensation arrived — a psychic signature, strong and undisciplined, pushing through the warp-interface like a fist through paper.
He locked his attention on the rebel position. Another psyker. A powerful one.
He keyed his helt vox to Kian imdiately.
"Warning — strong psychic activity detected ahead. There is a psyker in the rebel force. Significant capability."
Kian's reporting rhythm broke. Then his discipline reasserted itself.
Psykers had no fixed ceiling. The upper end of what they could do ranged from battlefield-scale to genuinely apocalyptic. Even at moderate power levels, a trained psyker could wreck a Chira with a direct strike, suppress entire squads with ntal force, or tear through personnel without conventional weapons touching them.
Silentium himself could sustain a kinetic barrier against over a hundred autogun rounds, lift himself and several others in sustained flight, and produce a psychic shockwave that turned crowds into scattered debris.
He had just started framing a warning to the force when Little Joel's voice ca across the vox.
"Sir — there's sothing wrong out there, soone — we don't know what to do—"
Kian switched the screen to Little Joel's powered suit picter feed.
A man had risen from the rebel trench line. Pale-faced, dressed in worn military clothing, both arms extended — thin arcs of psychic lightning flickering between his fingers like current between contacts.
The mont he appeared, every weapon in the force engaged him simultaneously. Chira autocannons, Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubbers, lasrifles, autoguns — thousands of rounds in the first seconds.
Every projectile stopped dead approximately three tres from his body.
Solid rounds hung in the air as though caught in amber. Laser beams touched the invisible field and detonated against it, bursting in mid-air. The fire continued for over ten seconds — tens of thousands of rounds accumulating into a floating wall of suspended ordnance around the man.
The soldiers stared. The firing trailed off into silence.
The psyker lowered his hands. The accumulated rounds, shells, and grenade fragnts flew outward like discarded trash. Several grenades detonated on impact with the ground, sending dirt columns skyward.
He surveyed the force facing him with a hawk's unhurried assessnt.
"The Governor's dogs. You co to my ground and think you can make trouble."
He rose half a tre from the earth and accelerated toward the formation, staying low, moving fast — and maintaining the kinetic barrier as he flew. Soldiers fired continuously. Nothing reached him.
At three hundred tres out he stopped and raised both arms. Sothing began forming between his hands — a compressed sphere of warp energy, instability made visible, psychic lightning crawling across its surface.
Raw immaterium forced into the material universe, pressurised, given shape.
Kian saw it coming and accepted the loss before it happened.
The psyker aid at the nearest Chira and released.
CRACK.
The vehicle's front armour received the impact — a circular penetration, clean through the plate, the compressed warp energy continuing through the interior. Then the expansion. The Chira ca apart as though hit by a heavy artillery shell, crew and nearby infantry consud in the blast.
One attack. Equivalent to two hundred millitre artillery.
So soldiers fell back. Others kept firing uselessly. A lasgun-turret Chira locked its twin barrels on the psyker and fired at maximum output — the kind of sustained high-power las that burned through tank plate — without the operator considering what it would do to the barrels.
The psyker felt the threat. He reshaped his barrier into an angled geotry rather than a sphere, and the high-powered beams deflected off it.
He was already gathering the next strike, arms rising again, a second lightning sphere building.
"Insects. Every last one of you."
The sphere launched.
It stopped in mid-air.
Every witness saw it — the sphere simply halted, suspended, its energies beginning to conflict with sothing external. Then the contained warp energy collapsed inward and exploded in a burst of immaterium discharge, psychic lightning scattering across the ground harmlessly.
The psyker's expression shifted from contempt to sharp attention.
Soone in the force had done that.
At the rear of the formation, a powered suit had risen half a tre from the ground — Silentium, drifting forward at speed, coming to rest fifty tres from the rebel psyker.
The rebel felt the psychic signature.
His face changed entirely.
"The sa — you're the sa as ! A chosen one! Like !"
[End of Chapter 229]
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