"Army rations are like this?!" My voice cracked, sharp and shrill, almost a scream, sticking out like a knife in the canteen's din. "I swear to God… even the armies back home that I used to make fun of wouldn't feed their soldiers this kind of crap, right?! Is this even food for humans? Th-this-this… this is slop! It's garbage!"
That shout drained nearly every last bit of air from my lungs, packed with the absolute peak of fury at being toyed with and disgusted.
The entire canteen felt like someone had hit a mute button.
Every soldier who'd been wolfing down their tray froze, slowly lifting their heads. Hundreds—no, thousands—of eyes turned toward me in perfect unison.
My heart dropped.
Oh no. Did I just trigger the wrath of the crowd? Insulting their food as pig feed in front of this many people? This was social suicide. Worst case, I'd get jumped.
But what happened next was far beyond anything I expected.
The young man in front of me—his expression went from blank confusion to something else entirely. He lowered his head and looked down at his own tray.
His eyes lingered on that sticky, greasy, unidentifiable mass for a full three seconds.
Then the muscles in his face began to twist violently. The earlier look of enjoyment vanished, replaced by sheer shock and nausea, like he'd just seen a ghost.
"Urgh—BLAARGH!"
He clapped a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. A mouthful of half-digested filth burst out of him, splattering across the table.
And that was only the beginning.
Like the first domino tipping over, a plague called "waking up" spread through the canteen at terrifying speed.
One soldier after another followed my gaze and looked down at their own trays. Then, almost without exception, the same haunted, sickened expression bloomed on their faces—identical to the one in front of me.
"W-What… what is this?"
"Throne preserve me. What did I just… eat?"
"Ugh…"
Gagging rose everywhere, quickly merging into a single rolling wave. In the blink of an eye, the canteen transformed from a roaring feast hall into a massive group retching club. Soldiers threw down utensils and vomited into trays, onto the floor, into bins—anywhere they could. The spectacle was, in a word, grand.
Others who didn't vomit chose a more direct method of release.
"Bastard cook! What the hell did they feed us?!" a big brute roared, kicking over the long table in front of him.
"Grab them! Hang them from the flagpoles!"
Furious howls erupted. Dozens of soldiers, burning with rage, snatched up trays and chairs and charged the serving counter. They dragged the greasy, mountain-like cooks out of the back and slammed them to the ground, raining fists and boots down on them.
I stared at the chaos, dumbstruck.
I was almost speechless. When you were shoveling it down, what were you thinking? Starving ghosts reborn? You didn't even look at what you were eating?
Still… corrupt cooks, in any era, deserve what they get.
Just as the canteen's riot swelled toward the edge of a full-blown mutiny, a shrill, ear-splitting alarm suddenly screamed through the fortress.
The lights on the walls snapped to a glaring red and began to pulse.
"Combat Alert Level One! All units, suppress the riot immediately! Repeat! All units, suppress the riot immediately!" A cold electronic voice blared over the public address.
A heartbeat later, heavy blast doors at the entrances slammed down with a metallic crash. Dozens of fully armed troops surged in with riot shields and batons, trying to force the chaos back into order.
And then, at the very peak of the uproar, a set of footsteps came from beyond one of the newly opened gates—so heavy the floor itself trembled faintly.
Thoom… thoom… thoom…
That wasn't the sound a person made. It was the sound of a siege engine—an assault walker—advancing, one unstoppable step at a time.
The rioting crowd fell quiet without meaning to. Everyone's eyes were dragged toward that weighty rhythm.
Then the gate—already broad—was forced open wider by a strength beyond it, shoved apart to either side. Warped metal shrieked in protest, like two crumpled sheets being torn.
A colossal silhouette filled the doorway, blotting out the light behind it.
It was an ivory-white, humanoid war-suit—at least two meters tall, closer to three.
It stood there like a war god stepped out of some ancient myth. A scent of scorching steam, ozone, and some high-grade spice rolled off it, instantly overpowering the sour stink of vomit and spoiled ration-mash. The pressure of pure strength and technology made the canteen feel several degrees colder.
I felt my breath stop.
The towering white giant took one slow step forward. The motion was unhurried, yet carried an unquestionable authority. The greasy metal floor whined under its weight.
It walked through the crowd, and the crowd parted like the sea before Moses. Two deep blue lenses—cold as distant stars—swept across the mess and the people with clinical indifference. Then its gaze passed over everyone else and locked onto me with perfect precision.
My mind went completely blank.
"'Object Beta-073,' hmm?"
A cold, electronically filtered female voice poured out of the suit's vox-grilles. It carried not a trace of emotion, like it had crawled up from beneath a ten-thousand-year glacier.
"I've only just finished speaking with the fortress commandant about your 'custodial ownership,' and you've already made this much noise. It seems you're even more interesting than the reports suggested."
With a soft hiss that sounded almost like a sigh, the giant's head plating began to move.
Precision latches clicked free one by one. The helm unfolded like a steel lotus blooming outward. White steam billowed out in thick waves, shrouding the upper body of the towering figure.
I held my breath, staring into the vapor.
As it thinned, a face appeared where the giant's head had been—like a pearl revealed inside an opened shell, like the heart of a steel flower.
For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
It was a woman.
A woman so impossibly beautiful—and so impossibly cold.
Her platinum hair was arranged into a severe, intricate classical updo I couldn't name, with only a few curled strands left at her forehead. Her skin was pale as fine jade, carrying a faint sheen beneath the flashing red alarm lights. Her features were as if a master sculptor had spent a lifetime carving perfection into stone. A shallow scar ran from above her right eye down toward her cheekbone—yet instead of marring her, it added a sharp, martial edge.
And her eyes—
Ice blue. Like a frozen layer over an abyssal polar sea. Beautiful and pure, yet carrying a chill that could freeze everything to the bone.
Her gaze wasn't like the burly Arbitrator Kairen's steady resolve. It wasn't like that balding fanatic's feverish madness. It wasn't like the soldiers' simple earnestness. It wasn't like the servitors' emptiness.
It was scrutiny, stripped down to its purest form—unmixed, unsoftened, unmerciful.
She looked down at me from above, her expression perfectly flat. Her lips were pressed into a hard, strict line. A beauty like an iceberg—distant, absolute, refusing anything that came near.
If that war-suit was a general forged from absolute power, then the woman inside it was the goddess who held the right to divine punishment.
"I am Inquisitor Ireya Serafield-Vigran," she said. Her voice was no longer mechanically filtered; it was low and resonant like a cello, yet the chill embedded in it didn't lessen by even a fraction. "Ordo Hereticus of the Imperial Inquisition, the highest-ranking authority on this region."
She introduced herself with the calm of someone stating the weather.
I opened my mouth, only to realize I couldn't produce a single word. Her presence—her aura, her beauty—pinned me in place.
The Inquisitor didn't seem to care about my reaction. She tilted her head slightly and issued a cold order to the soldiers who'd gone slack with fear.
"Seal this area. Isolate all personnel. Audit the full food supply chain. Secure the kitchens and detain all relevant individuals. I have more important business to attend to."
"Yes, Inquisitor!" The soldiers moved at once, as if they'd been granted salvation.
Very quickly, the space around me emptied.
Soon, only I remained, facing a white steel colossus like a statue of a god.
And the floor was still littered with foul-smelling ration-sludge and vomit, but no one cared anymore. The stench didn't matter, because the atmosphere had already crushed everything else.
With the rasp of moving machinery, she extended a hand.
It was enormous, wrapped in layered, complex heavy plating. Those metal fingers—each as thick as a cucumber—traced lightly across the place on my chest where I'd been wounded. The motion was gentle, but the sensation of a thick, cold, rigid column brushing my skin still made my whole body shudder, hairs rising.
"A very interesting body," she said, as if evaluating property. "Capable of perfectly resisting Warp corruption, yet possessing no resistance at all to purely physical harm. Like pure glass: it ignores any 'contamination' poured over it, yet can be shattered by even a single stone."
She withdrew her hand. In those ice-blue eyes, something flickered for the first time—something almost like curiosity.
"Tell me."
She didn't ask my name the way any normal person would. She simply stared straight into my eyes, word by word, precise and cold.
"When my acolytes and Arbitrators were being torn apart by sorcery and fighting daemons, what, exactly, did you see? And just now, in this canteen, what did you see that triggered all of this?"
(End of Chapter)
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