Let me tell you something. I haven't distilled many life lessons in my lifetime, but one of them is absolutely a truth among truths:
Never argue doctrine with believers on their own turf.
Remember what I'm saying. Any believers. It doesn't matter whether they worship a sky god, a dark god, a man-god, or an ape-god. Faith is not a matter of logic in the first place. It's a matter of position.
Trying to reason them into changing their minds is like trying to reason your boss into giving you a raise. Completely futile. Debating doctrine is pointless, and the risk is enormous. If you're unlucky, you'll get branded a heretic and mobbed on the spot, and then the fun really begins.
I never, ever expected that one day I'd be playing a battle royale against a pack of religious lunatics screaming "The God-Emperor is Supreme!" inside a superbuilding so huge it made no sense.
What's even more cursed is that the beautiful Lady Inquisitor—my golden thigh, the kind I'd planned to cling to until the end of time—suddenly lost all her power. Like a GM whose permissions had been switched off. Other than her personal combat skills, which relegated her to being a high-end bodyguard, she was basically useless.
And all of it started with a city called Spirepeak City.
Honestly, before we went, I thought it would be a good place.
I mean, the name sounded cool, didn't it?
But the moment I saw it with my own eyes, I was so stunned I couldn't even speak. I knew for a fact I wasn't dreaming, because my poor, pathetic dream budget—always looping around school districts and apartment blocks—could never render a scene this absurdly unreal.
Let me put it like this. You've seen the horizon, right?
Sure you have.
But have you ever seen a vertical horizon?
From the window of the bento-box-shaped flyer I was riding in (I genuinely refuse to call it an airplane, because its aerodynamic profile was offensive enough to make every pioneer of aviation claw their way out of their graves and jump into a river together), the distant skyline looked as if an invisible creator's knife had carved the world open from bottom to top.
A building—so tall it was impossible—erupted from the crown of a vast hilly region, rising straight upward, spearing through the clouds, reaching for the sky.
At first, from far away, it was only a black silhouette, like a thorn stabbed into the earth.
But as we drew closer, my sense of awe toward that thing grew exponentially. It wasn't just tall—tall enough to snap your neck if you tried to look up at it.
It was also impossibly wide. My rough estimate put it at several kilometers across.
Once you approached within a certain distance, it became like the final wall that held up heaven and earth in some myth. Like the literal end of the world. Without asking permission, it blotted out the entire forward view, to the point where you almost felt as if your direction of motion had rotated ninety degrees and you were diving toward the ground.
That jagged metal exterior was riddled with countless windows, chimneys, pipes, rails, roads… a dense, crawling anatomy of industry. Lights flickered everywhere. Vehicles swarmed over it like gnats.
It didn't feel like a dead building.
It felt like a colossal beast, slowly breathing, filling the whole world.
The pressure and shock of it could kill a man.
Looking down, the thing resembled a red-hot steel spike driven straight into ice, smashing the hilltop beneath it into endless branching fractures.
Those "cracks" spread outward in all directions, full of lights and drifting smoke…
Later I learned they weren't cracks at all.
They were the immense outer districts that had grown around the tower: countless blocks of buildings, manufactoria, roads, and rails, all clustered together and radiating outward.
Looking up again, the details and lights of that terminal wall gradually blurred and vanished into industrial smog and high clouds. You couldn't see where it ended.
And at the highest point my eyes could reach, I saw a row of enormous black voids—like passenger-plane windows scaled up ten thousand times—stacked in a vertical line. They protruded outward from the "wall" by some distance, like sideways chimneys.
Or like…
"Gun ports."
I snapped my head toward the Lady Inquisitor beside me so fast I swear I heard my neck go crack.
"Those are macro-cannon muzzles," she confirmed calmly.
Then, in the same casual tone someone might use to introduce a backyard garden, she told me something even more outrageous.
This city—this "building"—was, in truth, a starship.
A starship.
To be fair, after being baptized by every sci-fi work out there featuring kilometer-long, ten-kilometer-long, even hundred-kilometer-long voidships, I'd developed at least a basic concept of these steel leviathans of the deep void.
Or to put it another way, I'd developed aesthetic fatigue.
But those things were always floating alone in empty space, with no reference points, so the sense of scale never truly landed.
This was different.
Take a ten-kilometer warship, stand it upright, slam the stern down into the planet like a bamboo shoot, and then build a megacity-tower around it that could house tens of millions of people.
That kind of move genuinely made my brain overload.
I had only one thought at the time.
City people really know how to have fun.
It was hard to imagine what kind of madness—what kind of perverse logic—could have driven people to build something like this in the first place.
According to the Lady Inquisitor, Spirepeak City was founded during the Great Crusade era, when Grandtale was brought into the Imperium's domain. From that day onward, it had remained one of Grandtale's most important military-industrial strongholds and military bases.
And—this part struck me as especially telling—it was also Grandtale's largest pro-Imperium power base, and a holy city of the so-called Imperial Cult.
I could taste the pattern immediately.
This was a textbook military–industrial complex, plus a religious center.
Planting a "retired" (or maybe not retired at the time) gargantuan voidship here wasn't just practical.
It was a monument.
A fortress.
A massive political symbol.
Yes. This line of thinking was extremely "Imperium."
The destination the Lady Inquisitor planned to take me to visit was an Ecclesiarchy cathedral located on the eastern side of the megatower, at roughly three kilometers in altitude.
Three kilometers.
That was already the kind of height where, on some high plateaus, you'd start thinking about acclimatization. And the sheer visual shock of that straight-up, straight-down verticality made the back of my skull go numb.
More ridiculous still, this cathedral wasn't sitting neatly on a larger base structure like a sensible stack of blocks.
It was jutting directly out of the eastern wall of the "building," extending outward by several hundred meters, with nothing underneath it but empty air.
The Lady Inquisitor said that section had originally been the starship's bridge.
Right.
Turning a ship's bridge into a cathedral, with three thousand meters of open air beneath it.
These zealots would rather die than stop trying to look cool, huh?
Or maybe the materials science and structural engineering of this world had advanced to a stage that simply didn't need to respect common sense.
When our bento-box craft set down with a mild bump on an open-air landing platform outside the cathedral, the hatch opened and a blast of freezing wind poured in—thin air mixed with cold.
Luckily, before we came here, the Lady Inquisitor had thoughtfully provided me with a compact oxygen mask that only covered the tip of my nose, so I didn't immediately get altitude sickness.
Unfortunately, Spirepeak City had clouds and smog so thick that sunlight was weak. I didn't get to experience the kind of spiritual, hollow clarity you feel on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. No romance here. Only industry.
Outside, a group of clergy in white robes had already formed two lines to welcome us.
Their robes didn't look thick at all, yet every single one of them wore the same solemn expression, utterly unbothered by the cold, the wind, and the lack of oxygen, like immortal sages.
That is, if you ignored all the clinking golden skull ornaments and the metal trinkets of unknown purpose hanging all over their bodies, which made them look less like sages and more like cult villains.
As for the cathedral itself…
How do I put this?
At first glance, it really was magnificent.
It had that towering, airy, old-European gothic style—endless spires and flying buttresses pointing toward the heavens.
But because it had been rebuilt from a voidship's bridge, every structure was saturated with rough industrial metal textures and exposed conduits. Thick armor plates and rivets remained on the walls, giving it a brutally steampunk feel.
This bizarre fusion of classic and sci-fi, sacred and engineering, left me not knowing whether to call it awesome…
Or to call it creepy.
(End of Chapter)
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