"Blank? A man with no soul?" A balding old bastard standing mid-squad, dressed in rags and hung all over with strange runes and wax-sealed prayer scrolls, suddenly got excited. "That's heresy. A pretender. A deceiver. The litanies say it plainly: anything the God-Emperor's light cannot reach is an enemy. Let me purge him!"
As he spoke, he raised the roaring, chainsaw-like monstrosity in his hands like some kind of Texas Chainsaw killer, and lunged at me.
A wave of stench hit first. Cloying incense sweetness, sour rot from unwashed sweat, and the sharp tang of blood all blended into something nauseating. The blade came down toward my head.
"Enough!" At the last possible second, the black-armored SWAT-looking brute in front of me stopped the reeking madman. His voice was rough as granite and left no room for argument. "Our mission is to investigate cult activity in Donigaton, not to watch you pass sentence on a vagrant who looks mentally unwell. Psyker, are you certain there are no signs of Warp taint on him?"
"I'm certain, Arbitrator Kairen." The blindfolded woman shook her head, her tone full of confusion. "To be honest, I saw nothing at all. He's like… a stone. A vox-caster that can speak. I've lived a hundred and twenty years, and I have never encountered anything like him."
I listened to them in a haze. Judgment, cults, the Warp, the God-Emperor… what was any of this? I felt like the only sane person who'd wandered into a madhouse, surrounded by people speaking a private code I was never taught.
A soldier pressed a few inputs on some device on his wrist, then shook his head toward the leader.
"Local language variant not recognized. Abnormal affect. Disordered logic. No identity marks. Psyker feedback abnormal."
The man called Kairen fell silent for two seconds, then delivered his conclusion in a flat, emotionless cadence. He tilted his head. The narrow crimson visor-slits on his half-mask helmet swept over my face as if scanning me. Finally, he made his decision and pointed at me.
"Whatever he is, his presence here is suspicious. He may have witnessed something. Subject Ω-073. Execute standard containment protocol. Return him to the precinct-fortress for further examination and interrogation."
I hadn't even processed what "Subject Ω-073" was supposed to mean when two huge soldiers grabbed me, one on each side, and hauled me up. Their strength was terrifying. My struggle was like a chick flapping its wings, completely pointless. They wrenched my arms behind my back, and with a sharp click a metal shackle locked around my wrists.
My mind went blank. They moved with such speed and practiced professionalism that, for a law-abiding citizen of decades, I had this absurd illusion of being caught by some all-encompassing net.
"Hey! What are you doing? This is kidnapping! I'm calling the police!" I shouted, my courage weak but my reflexes stubborn, like a drowning man clinging to the last scrap of dignity a peaceful society gives an ordinary person. It meant nothing, and I knew it.
They ignored me completely and dragged me out of the great hall like a sack of grain. My shoes scraped uselessly against the smooth stone floor, the sound of friction echoing through the cavernous space in a way that felt especially pathetic.
It was over. The joke had gotten too big.
This wasn't cosplay, and it wasn't a prank show. These people were real, and I had been taken.
They carried me through a long, gloomy corridor. The walls were hung with tapestries and reliefs that praised war and death. Skulls everywhere, draining my sanity with every step. I tried to strike up conversation with the men beside me, but no one responded. In the end, I was hauled out of the suffocating cathedral.
The outside did not make me feel any better.
The sky was a heavy, dirty gray, and rain poured down. Lightning sometimes tore across the dim clouds. The air was laced with a faint, acidic rot mixed with the greasy stink of machine oil. We stood in a small plaza. In its center rose a statue that seemed to reach the heavens: a warrior in heavy armor, wielding a greatsword, his face twisted into a snarl as if raging at the sky, letting countless cold raindrops strike his features without moving a single inch.
Beneath that statue lay a city of gloom.
I had only ever seen a city like this in certain dark-themed comics. Countless spires and Gothic buildings spread like a black forest, packed so tightly together they looked fused. Between structures ran iron bridges, pipes, and cables in endless webs. The whole city felt like a vast, bloated steel beast suffering from some kind of diseased skin, being rinsed by an unfeeling curtain of rain. It was like a lifeless Gotham, or Yharnam after the Industrial Revolution, all darkness and the cold pulse of machinery.
The plaza was crowded. People with gaunt faces and dead eyes drifted through the streets like walking corpses, silent as they slowly converged toward the cathedral's front square. A suffocating hush hung over the crowd like a funeral shroud.
And among them were others who looked obviously malicious. Gray robes, broken helmets, face wraps. Guns, cleavers, saws, jagged bottle-glass. Some had smeared blood across their faces in symbols, eyes bright with something wrong.
"This… where is this?" I murmured. My heart sank all the way to the bottom. A sense of looming catastrophe began to spread through my chest.
Were we surrounded?
"Throne's sake…" A trooper near me adjusted his rifle. It made a crackling, charging buzz.
"Looks like we don't need to investigate anymore," another black-armored enforcer said coldly, then raised the door-sized riot shield in his hands. The floodlight mounted on its face snapped on, blasting harsh white glare into the rain.
"...Recon action interrupted." The burly leader tilted his head, speaking in a low voice as if into a radio. "...Cathedral long abandoned. Icons dust-covered. Anomaly. One unknown subject secured. Anomaly. Under attack by mob and cultists. Request emergency extraction..."
A crazed scream ripped through the silence.
Then, from every direction, more screams answered it. Footsteps thundered. The crowd surged, howling, the voices blending into a single, grinding roar like countless saws dragging across bone.
Before I could even react, ragged figures with crude weapons were already charging. Rusted pipes. Sharpened sticks. Cleavers and hatchets. Their eyes glittered with madness.
I froze. My brain turned to white noise. A person who'd lived through decades of peace does not have any frame of reference for this. Mass hysteria? A new kind of plague? I couldn't comprehend it.
"Form a defensive line! Activate warning beacon!" The squad leader barked. For the first time, his voice carried emotion. "Damn it! This is a blood rite! It's earlier than predicted!"
The soldiers moved instantly. They packed tight around me, raising their long guns and sidearms, eyes sweeping the advancing crowd with cold focus. They looked used to chaos like this. I couldn't see many of their faces behind masks and visors, but I could feel it all the same: there was no panic. Only a killing, clinical readiness.
Several of the black-armored enforcers planted their shields. The shield-wall slammed shut with a heavy clang.
Their guns began to roar. Muzzle flashes stuttered. The noise hit me so hard I nearly went blind and deaf. Through the glare I only barely saw the front ranks of the mob burst into red mist. I didn't even see how the big squad leader fired, but a man across from us suddenly had his entire upper body blown apart, meat and organs splattering across the stone.
I was crushed in the center of the shield-wall, surrounded by gunfire, screaming, and the sound of flesh tearing. In the chaos, someone leapt onto the shields. The line jolted. Something serrated scraped across the shield-face, sparks flying. Then the burly leader smashed the attacker's jaw with the butt of his weapon. Blood and teeth sprayed.
My stomach lurched violently. I wanted to vomit, but terror cinched my throat so tight that nothing came up.
The balding old bastard in rags was the most eye-catching of all. He bellowed some lunatic slogans like "For the God-Emperor!" and broke from the formation, charging straight into the mob with that screaming chainsaw weapon.
Its power was a thousand times worse than I'd imagined.
Every swing tore through bodies and bone like paper. Blood and shredded meat fountained into the rain.
In an instant, the world around me became a hell of blood and fire.
My mind emptied. Everything I'd believed, everything I'd learned from living in peace, was smashed apart in seconds. All I could do was stare as these soldiers slaughtered the frenzied mob with an efficiency and calm I couldn't begin to understand.
A shotgun thundered again and again, each blast wiping out everything in a wide fan in front of it. I collapsed where I stood, cringing in the middle of them, shaking so hard I felt like I would come apart. Gunfire. Explosions. The chainsaw's howl. Dying screams. Mad, ecstatic shrieks. All of it braided together into a symphony designed to drive a person insane.
Warm blood splashed onto my face. The thick, metallic stench made my stomach convulse.
This was real.
This was not a movie, not a video game.
This was real killing.
The chaos kept escalating. In the distance, black smoke rose from high buildings. Explosions rolled one after another. The whole city began to burn, began to scream. Our small squad was a leafless boat in a sea that wanted to swallow it.
"Bring Subject Ω-073. We move to the extraction point. The aircraft will pick us up. Move!"
At the leader's order, a soldier yanked me up from the ground and shoved me under his arm, rough and indifferent. My feet left the ground. I dangled like a rag doll as he ran.
I felt bullets, or something like bullets, whip past my ears and strike the soldiers' armor with sharp, ringing clinks.
My vision bounced wildly. All I could see were blurred shapes, splattering blood, and burning flame. A woman with a twisted face lunged at us and was met with a heavy baton that crushed her skull in one brutal swing.
A child—maybe only in his teens—charged with a shard of broken glass in his hand, eyes filled with a kind of hatred and madness no one that age should possess. He screamed as he rushed forward, and a red beam cut him in half.
I shut my eyes.
I couldn't bear to look anymore.
This was hell.
I had no idea why I had come here, but I knew one thing with absolute certainty.
I had arrived in a real hell.
(End of Chapter)
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