With a bone-chilling roar, the Patriarch, its lower body gone, rolled across the ground.
The beam had struck its lower half, leaving behind a smooth, clean-cut wound.
"Hit!" Qin Mo sped up in delight, charging straight toward the wounded Patriarch.
Grey and Grot flanked Qin Mo on either side, using shotgun lasers to clear a path for him through the flood of rebels.
The other three followed behind, clearing out the rebels closing in from the rear.
As they advanced, they noticed tears streaming from the corners of every Rebel infantryman's eyes.
The Patriarch's pain was being transmitted through the Psychic Power network. Though the other individuals could not truly share its suffering, they were willing to pay any price to keep the Patriarch from suffering again.
While the rebels crashed against the Gravity Shields like a tidal wave, those on the outskirts began converging on the Patriarch. They stood between it and Qin Mo's group, serving as meat shields while pushing the Patriarch forward.
The rebels wept, wailed, and even begged.
But Qin Mo only wanted to deepen their pain.
"Meat shields? Why do you think I designed different firing modes for the Shoulder Cannon?" Qin Mo aimed his Shoulder Cannon at the Patriarch again and fired once more.
The beam plowed a straight line through the sea of rebels.
But just before it could strike the meat shields and the Patriarch, a Psyker suddenly stepped in front of it and unleashed a violet barrier.
The beam was deflected by the barrier, carving another straight path through the rebels until the energy contained within it ran out.
This Psyker was clearly not one of the other weakling Psykers among the Gene Stealers. She casually blocked the beam and stood before the Patriarch as though she could not be moved.
Qin Mo realized she was a Magus.
Six guards in purple robes, carrying longswords, stood beside the Magus, making Qin Mo even more certain of her identity.
The Gene Stealer guard was extremely formidable. They could kill their targets before those targets even noticed them.
But Qin Mo was not afraid of them. There was nothing they could do right now. What, were they going to charge directly into the range of the Gravity Shields?
The Patriarch extended a claw and rested it on the Magus's shoulder.
The Magus raised a hand and unleashed Psychic Power lightning. The lightning converged before bursting apart, and the Gravity Shields around Qin Mo and the others stopped functioning.
The sudden move caught Qin Mo off guard. He could not tell how the Psychic Power lightning had disabled the Gravity Shields.
But it did not matter. Purely material creations were still reliable.
After countless rebels pressed in around Qin Mo's group, seemingly intent on crushing them to death, the Gravity Shields restarted under the combat system's control and once again pulverized enemies who came too close.
The restart was astonishingly fast, not even giving the guards a chance to launch an attack. They still stood there with imposing composure, like an impassable line of defense.
The Magus was not the only one on the battlefield capable of unleashing lightning.
Qin Mo maintained his charge as he raised a hand.
A bolt of lightning struck the Magus's position, engulfing every enemy within a hundred meters of her.
For now, the lightning was not as powerful as the Shoulder Cannon, but it was the power of a god of the material universe.
The Magus's Psychic Power barrier was shattered, but the Patriarch shielded her with its body, taking the blow, which was not fatal to it.
Yet an emotion Qin Mo could interpret appeared on the Patriarch's twisted, horrifying alien face: confusion.
Both sides were confused by things they could not understand about the other. For instance, the Patriarch could not imagine why someone could cobble together so many terrifying weapons in the underhive, or even locate its presence.
Qin Mo also could not understand why the Magus had been able to disable the Gravity Shields.
But it no longer mattered.
Qin Mo had reached a point only two hundred meters from the Patriarch. That distance could be crossed in an instant with a Jump Pack.
The Jump Pack's nozzles rotated downward, launching Qin Mo into the air. As he descended, he could see the panic on every face around the target.
The Magus was rescued by the guards first, vanishing from the battlefield in the blink of an eye.
This seemed to have been the Patriarch's order. Otherwise, the Magus and the guards would have prioritized ensuring the Patriarch's survival.
Then Qin Mo landed.
Splat.
He made no attack, yet the enemies within a small area around his landing point still died because they were within the Gravity Shield's range.
Under the crushing force of the Gravity Shield, the Patriarch lasted less than three seconds before its massive body became a two-dimensional pattern on the metal floor.
The Patriarch was dead.
Objective achieved.
The rebels on the battlefield collapsed instantly. They either ran wildly in every direction or fell to their knees and sobbed uncontrollably. Some even slit each other's throats.
Only now did Qin Mo have the leisure to carefully consider his plan.
Achieving the objective had not been a matter of luck.
The Gene Stealer population in Hive Terra had not grown large. They had only launched their rebellion because they had been discovered and exposed. Otherwise, their numbers would not have been in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions, tens of millions, or even billions.
It was hard for Terminator Power Armor, trackers, and similar creations not to be effective against this handful of sneaky bastards.
"May whoever first discovers you bastards be safe and sound." Qin Mo deactivated the Gravity Shield, took a biological tissue extraction device from his pack, and extracted biological tissue from the Patriarch's corpse.
First came the first vial.
Then Qin Mo took Grey and the others' extraction devices as well, filling a second vial, a third vial... until all six of their extraction devices were filled with the Patriarch's biological tissue.
The samples included limbs and muscle, carapace and brain tissue, and of course, blood.
"We're running low on energy." Grey reminded Qin Mo while firing his Shoulder Cannon.
From the start of the battle until now, no one's Shoulder Cannon had stopped firing. While Qin Mo focused on dealing with the Patriarch, the others used their Shoulder Cannons to inflict widespread casualties on the rebels and reduce the overall pressure as much as possible.
"I know." Qin Mo nodded, then stood and summoned an unmanned transport.
"Should we shovel it up and put it on the transport?" Grot asked.
"No need. We have enough already." Qin Mo shook his head.
Amid the utterly chaotic rebels, the six of them quietly waited for the transport to arrive. Then they boarded it and returned.
"This war isn't over yet." Grey looked down at the rebels being pursued by their ground forces beneath the transport. "That Magus is still alive."
"Of course it's not over. How many rebels have we killed?" Qin Mo nodded and took out the biological tissue he had extracted. "But it'll be over soon. I guarantee it."
Qin Mo was confident that he could use the biological tissue to create a genetic weapon against the Gene Stealers, one that would spread through Hive Terra like insecticide.
When, far in the future, another Patriarch fell upon this planet and prepared to spread its bloodline, it would be killed by the genetic weapon lingering in the environment.
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