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Being carried by a nearly two-meter-tall brute like a briefcase is not a pleasant experience. My head bobbed up and down with every stride.
Stomach acid and fear rolled together inside me, and I nearly puked all over his expensive-looking black armor.
I swear, if my hands hadn't been wrenched behind my back, I would've grabbed onto something. Otherwise it felt like my organs were going to bounce up my throat and fly out.
Still, I had to admit it: these black-armored Arbitrators were terrifyingly professional. With me at the center, they formed a tight moving fortress.
The shield-bearer led from the front like a walking iron wall. The others alternated cover on both flanks, their oversized weapons spitting lethal fire in steady bursts. Their movements flowed like a drill routine. No wasted words. Every shot was precise, like it had been calculated by a machine.
Madmen bursting out from the alleys on either side, whether they were swinging cleavers or raising iron pipes, usually got shredded the moment they showed their faces. Flesh and blood exploded. Most didn't even have time to scream once.
Aside from cursing the city's designer and the lunatics at the top of my lungs in my head, I basically had no presence at all. I was like some unlucky idiot strapped into a roller coaster. Other than screaming (I didn't dare make a sound) and enduring it, there was nothing I could do.
Sometimes stray rounds, or whatever else was flying, struck the armor around me with a dull clang. Every single impact made me flinch hard. I kept thinking some bolt wasn't seated right, some plate had a gap, and the next shot would punch through and split my skull.
We pushed through corpses and firelight like that for maybe seven or eight minutes. It felt longer than every road I'd walked in my entire life. And just when I started to believe we might actually butcher our way to the extraction point, our luck ran out.
We charged into a crossroads so wide it made my heart sink.
It looked like a small battlefield. Burned-out car wrecks everywhere. Bodies scattered across the street. Worse, deep within the streets in every direction, I could see heads and shadows shifting. A crawling dread spread up my spine. It felt like we'd stepped into a hunting ground, or an arena, or something like that.
And then I heard it.
A strange chanting drifted from deep down the street, like a choir of hundreds of tone-deaf amateurs singing in some church basement. The sound was sticky and grotesque. It made my scalp prickle and my stomach churn. I saw Captain Kairen and several soldiers jerk their heads up toward the sky, their faces turning ugly. Even the always-raving balding chainsaw lunatic stopped shouting his "For the God-Emperor" nonsense. For the first time, he looked grim.
"What's going on?" I couldn't stop myself from asking.
The trooper carrying me didn't answer. He only tightened his grip on his gun.
I looked up too. The sky was just heavy clouds and a thin drizzle of acidic rain. Nothing else. What were they seeing? A shared hallucination? A mass psychotic break?
Then I saw the "conductor" of that choir.
On a second-floor balcony of a three-story building near the intersection, a figure appeared: an old bastard in a tattered robe, drenched in blood. He was thin as a bamboo pole. His face was smeared with chaotic symbols in dried crimson. In his hands he held a broken staff that looked like it had been ripped off a park fence. His mouth gaped in a silent scream, matching the chanting like some failed performance artist having a public breakdown.
What was this guy supposed to be now? A cult leader? If so, he looked pathetic.
But I didn't even get to finish the thought before the situation flipped on its head.
The moment the old man raised his staff high, the mob below, which had been merely fanatical, snapped into something worse. It was like they'd been injected with a supercharged stimulant. Their eyes bulged wide like rabid dogs. Their throats spilled inhuman roars. And with no regard for their own lives, they surged from all directions toward our tiny formation.
The whole shape of the fight changed.
It was bizarre.
Before, they'd been mad, sure, but they were still a rabble. Loud, numerous, frightening to look at, but they folded like paper in front of the disciplined squad around me.
Now, though, we started to lose ground.
Yes, the cultists were crazier. Some took rounds through the chest, a hole blown clean through them, and they still lurched forward for several more steps, snarling and trying to bite the shields with their teeth.
But what the hell was happening to our side?
Based on what I'd just witnessed over the last few minutes, there was no reason these professionals should suddenly be getting pushed back like this.
"Suppressive fire. Pin them down!" Captain Kairen's shout carried real urgency for the first time. "They've been 'blessed'! Damn it! It's a witch!"
"A witch?" I froze.
What century was this? Who the hell still believed in witches?
But everything I saw made my throat tighten. The squad around me was clearly slipping into something wrong. They were retreating. Their fire became messy, uncoordinated. The shield-wall began to shake violently, nearly buckling several times under the pressure of the mob.
"It's sorcery! Sorcery!"
The blindfolded woman suddenly staggered out of formation like a sleepwalker, screaming in a pitch no human should be able to make. One hand clutched her forehead. The other flailed her staff wildly. Then she was hacked down, pinned, dragged away by frenzied cultists, swallowed into the crowd like a piece of meat.
The balding chainsaw lunatic still roared and carved, his chainsword screaming, but somehow his strikes kept missing. What had been an effortless slaughter turned into a desperate, cornered struggle.
"By the Golden Throne, they've already summoned daemons!" Some trooper was screaming, voice cracking on words that meant nothing and everything at once.
What the hell was happening?
We were losing. Fully losing.
I still didn't understand what had changed, only that the squad had inexplicably turned cowardly, or unstable, or both, and we were being driven back into a building at the edge of the intersection. This didn't feel like a breakout anymore. It felt like the final flailing before a wave swallowed us whole.
I stole one last glance at the old bastard on the balcony. He stood there like a cold conductor, waving his "baton," enjoying the bloody, frenzied symphony he'd orchestrated.
And we were the most miserable note in his composition.
We stumbled backward into what looked like an abandoned shop or bank. The brute carrying me slammed a fist into the control panel by the doorframe. With a grinding screech, a thick steel blast door descended and sealed shut, cutting off the mob's howls outside.
The squad had a moment to breathe.
The tension in the room, however, was stretched like a bowstring pulled to the limit.
And the truly bizarre part was only beginning.
"Damn it! There are daemons in here too!"
Someone shrieked.
I watched, dumbstruck, as Captain Kairen, the same man who had been granite-calm the whole way, suddenly opened fire into an empty corner of the room like a lunatic.
His rifle thundered. Every shot blew fist-sized craters into the wall, stone dust and smoke choking the air until I coughed violently. As he fired, he shouted in a hoarse voice.
"Purge the filth! Give your life for the Emperor!"
But what was he shooting at?
I couldn't see anything.
All I could see was that our squad had gone insane.
One trooper curled up on the floor, clawing at his own face until his fingernails tore skin and blood ran, screaming in a voice that didn't sound human anymore. Another jammed his bayonet into his own thigh over and over, cursing through clenched teeth, blood soaking his trousers in seconds. Even the balding chainsaw lunatic turned his weapon on a load-bearing pillar, carving into it in a shower of sparks, bellowing his litanies as if dueling an enemy that existed only in his mind.
Fear and absurdity clamped around my heart like two freezing hands.
What was this?
Mass hysteria? Some kind of infrasonic weapon from the cult leader? A hallucinogen in the air?
"Daemons! It's going to break the door!" Another trooper wailed in despair. He threw away his gun and braced his whole body against the heavy steel door.
Several more piled onto him, layers of armored bodies pressing together to hold the door shut.
"Witchfire! Ahhh! It's setting everything alight!" Someone screamed.
I saw him leap up and start slapping at his own body, frantic, as if he truly were burning. His panic spread instantly. Within seconds, the whole room was filled with people who believed they were on fire. They rolled on the floor, tore at each other's gear, and screamed for someone to put the flames out.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
(End of Chapter)
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