So much for good times lasting.
The moment our force pushed into an area known as "the Hive," the entire battlefield's vibe changed in an instant.
The situation briefing said this was Donigaton's oldest slum. Countless towering illegal structures tangled together like rotting tree roots, and between the buildings ran spiderwebs of skybridges and narrow alleys. Our armoured vehicles and flyers were basically useless in a place like this. With no other choice, the main force had to split into countless small combat units and enter this steel-and-concrete jungle on foot.
Which meant we walked straight into a massive trap.
Almost the instant we reached the Hive's central zone, every window and doorway around us, every manhole cover in the sewers, every mountain of piled-up garbage…
They all erupted.
Fanatics poured out like a flood.
They were completely insane. A lot of them were bare-chested, their bodies painted with blood-red symbols. They waved axes, nailed clubs, and sometimes nothing at all—charging barehanded. They roared like beasts, screaming "Blood for the Blood God," and launched suicidal rushes straight into our lines.
The cramped, labyrinthine terrain crippled our heavy weapons. Our formation was chopped into fragments. Combat instantly shifted from long-range pick-offs into a brutal, blood-soaked meat grinder of close-quarters chaos.
My good mood ended right there.
At first, I only felt that the enemies were suddenly far more numerous, and the difficulty had jumped up a whole tier. I kept firing at the wave, but it felt like they just wouldn't run out. The effect of our shooting dropped off hard. My instinct was to count on the professionals around me to carry—but then I realized something with sudden, sickening dread…
My friendlies had started losing their minds again.
The open channel in my earpiece was once more flooded with words I couldn't understand, but that sounded terrifying anyway.
"…Daemons of Chaos! Bloodletters!"
"…Sorcery! Watch the flames!"
"No! Don't come closer! Get away!"
Shrieks, furious curses, and dying screams blended into one continuous howl.
And I saw it.
I saw that absurd nightmare again.
A trooper in black armour was fighting the air with everything he had. His helmet was fully enclosed, so I couldn't see his face, but he was smashing his rifle butt into empty space, screaming wildly, "Die! Daemon!"
Then he stumbled like something had tripped him, suddenly grabbed the weapon with both hands, and drove the buttstock into his own abdomen as hard as he could. His knees buckled and he dropped to the ground. Before I could even react, he jerked the rifle upright, shoved the muzzle against his masked face, and pulled the trigger.
Boom.
My helmet blocked most of the sound and all of the smell, but the visual impact still hit like a hammer. The moment was bloody and shocking. It gave me that same spine-electrifying jolt I used to get playing F.E.A.R. and Dead Space.
I scanned the area in panic.
It's over.
These people were high again.
A lot of them were firing at nothing, or wrestling their own shadows. Some suddenly turned their blades on nearby teammates while screaming "Die, daemon!" More were rolling on the ground screaming, tearing at their own armour like they were trying to peel their skin off.
What made my blood run cold was the Inquisitor herself. After giving me the power armour, she was wearing a lighter set of white plate now. And even she was shouting something while swinging that sword of hers—its edge crackling with blue lightning—at an empty corner.
The blade cut the air with a sharp whistle.
A poor bastard nearby couldn't dodge in time. His arm came off at the shoulder in a clean slice. The cut surface was smooth like a mirror, steaming with scorched heat, and there wasn't much blood.
The Inquisitor didn't even glance at him. She just kept hacking at nothing.
I was completely at a loss.
"Hey! Wake up! What the hell are you all freaking out about this time?!"
I bellowed into the vox, but it did nothing except make my own voice explode inside the sealed helmet. Through the external speaker, my voice came out huge and distorted, but the friendlies trapped in madness either couldn't hear it—or rather, they didn't recognize this walking ivory mech as one of their own.
I tried to snap them out of it the way I had last time.
"Calm the hell down! There are no daemons!"
Useless.
Not a single person looked at me.
And that's when the fatal problem finally hit me.
Right now, I was sealed inside a two-meter-tall metal can. They couldn't see my face. They couldn't hear my actual voice, the one that apparently carried some kind of "materialist positive energy." And there was no way I could do what Kairen did last time—physical contact, forcing someone awake.
To them, I was just a combat machine that could walk and shoot.
My "sanity aura" was perfectly blocked by the thick shell of the power armour.
My one and only "superpower" had stopped working.
Panic clenched my heart.
I stumbled around in the chaos, clanging and thudding through alleyways, trying to grab a soldier who was hurting himself, trying to wedge between two teammates hacking at each other. But I realized with despair that beyond walking and firing a gun, I had no idea how to operate this four-times-more-complicated excavator well enough to do delicate actions like "supporting" or "breaking up a fight."
As for Turnip and Potato, one only knew how to walk, and the other only knew how to fight. Neither of them could help me use the armour for anything else.
I felt like a driver locked inside a cockpit, forced to watch people outside fall into panic and trampling chaos, unable to do a damn thing.
Just as I was starting to lose it, on the verge of being driven insane by this hellscape, I accidentally caught sight of the far end of the street.
Over there, a group of enemies was still firing nonstop. And while they shot, they were dancing and cheering like lunatics. The scene was so exaggerated it was honestly worse than anything I'd seen in war documentaries.
What are you celebrating for?! Our side is the one going insane—why are you getting a morale boost out of it?!
Then I noticed someone in the middle of their group.
His outfit was clearly far more elaborate than the bare-chested maniacs around him. He wore brass-coloured armour covered in spikes, and on his head was a vicious horned helm. He wasn't fighting directly. Instead, he stood atop a platform built out of piled corpses, waving and gesturing like the conductor of a third-rate band, doing some kind of ritual dance.
He pointed and gestured toward our side as he capered.
And every time he swung the massive axe in his hand downward, a fresh wave of screams erupted from our lines, and the chaos worsened by another notch.
It made my blood boil.
Damn it, not this again!
Last time at the crossroads, it was the same thing. This time, it's the same thing again! Can people in this world fight a war properly—just line up and trade fire like decent human beings? Why is it always this occult, ritual nonsense, these cheap off-the-board tricks?!
Anyone would understand that kind of rage. Even in video games, nobody likes randomly eating a beyond-visual-range missile and dying without knowing what happened, right?
So it's you pulling strings, huh?
Fine. I'm killing you today.
"Warning! Warning! Warp-energy corrosion detected on right arm and right chest plate. Psychic puncture has caused fractures in the structural layer!"
That flat, emotionless mechanical voice sounded in my ear again—my "loader and engineer," the servo-skull I'd nicknamed Chestnut.
This idiot had been malfunctioning too. It kept screaming alarms. One moment it said my leg had been cut off, the next it said my back was being roasted, and now it claimed there was a hole in my chest.
But I was obviously fine. The armour-status schematic on my display was also perfectly fine—green across the board.
If you believed its warnings, I should've been a pile of scrap metal ready for recycling by now. In reality, aside from the hail of light rounds and las-fire clattering against my armour like someone was composing industrial percussion on my plating, none of it was doing any real damage.
"Shut up, you idiot!" It was annoying me so badly I snapped and yelled into the link. "Look properly—where is the armour damaged?! Huh?!"
My roar seemed to pass through some kind of data connection.
"Order received. Recalibrating cognition matrix… updating armour status… update complete. Armour integrity 97%. No structural damage detected."
I barely had time to breathe before it started screaming again.
"Warning! Left leg joint subjected to daemonic brute-force tearing. Power lines damaged! Warning! Left waist cleaved by rune weapon. External armour shows delamination!"
If my hands could move freely, I'd be covering my face right now.
I get it now. It's not just my friendlies who've gone insane.
The entire damn world is insane.
Even a machine skull can fall into hallucinations and never claw its way back out.
(End of Chapter)
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