Good news: my sphincter held.
Bad news: I'm currently sucking air like my life depends on it, heart hammering so hard it feels like a fully-grown xenos hatchling is about to burst out of my chest. My lungs burn, hot and raw, like I swallowed a whole brick of glowing charcoal. But maybe this is what "growth" looks like. These days, when I hear the thunder of gunfire, explosions, and bullets shrieking past, my first instinct is to roll and crawl for cover, instead of instantly soiling myself.
Of course, everything has two sides, so here comes the real bad news.
They're here.
Honestly, I should have seen this coming. In a world darker than the Middle Ages and more hopeless than any cyberpunk nightmare, the moment a crowd of desperate people puts you on a pedestal, it usually means you've already been nailed to a cross.
But… if I told you I'd been so busy treating the sick, so busy grinding medicine for Granny Marta, so busy trying to find the tiniest shred of what it feels like to be alive in this garbage heap that I ignored the implications, would you believe me?
Ten minutes ago, the world didn't look like this.
Back then, the day's fourth steam-burst had just passed. The air was soaked in that oddly comforting, stale smell of machine oil and moldy junk. The clinic had finally gotten a little quiet. I wanted to catch my breath, and I also wanted to check on how Little Snowball Eileen was recovering. I'd noticed the locals, Granny Marta included, seemed unusually fond of her.
So I had Little Spark lead the way. The two of us strolled through the tangled maze of alleys in No. 7 Depot like we always did.
"Big Guy, look over there! Auntie Adela must've scored big today!" Little Spark chirped like a happy sparrow, pointing ahead at a woman hunched under a massive pack.
That was Adela the scavenger, a tough woman with only one real arm. The other was a rough mechanical prosthetic. She was dragging an enormous sack of metal scrap from who-knows-where. When she saw us, her face—slick with grime and carved with wrinkles—split into a bright grin. She lifted that smoke-belching metal hand and waved at us.
"Yo! Healer! Not taking patients today?" she hollered, her voice full of that blunt cheer only the bottom-tier laborers seem to have. "I'll bring you something good later! Found a section of copper pipe that ain't rusted in Vent Shaft Three. I'll make you a proper pipe…"
Little Spark and I were smiling, about to answer.
And then, in that instant, without warning—
No air-raid siren. No declaration. Not even the usual underhive noise changed in any meaningful way.
Some nearby shouting and arguing abruptly spiked into gunfire and explosions. We both snapped our heads toward the rising fireball, and then a boom slammed into us like a sledgehammer, loud enough to punch straight through my eardrums.
"BOOM—!!!"
The shack behind Adela—stitched together from sheet metal and stacked cargo containers—vanished in an instant, swallowed by golden flame. The shockwave, hauling scorching heat and metal shrapnel with it, smashed into my chest and flipped me onto the ground like I was nothing.
I didn't even get to scream. The smoke and dust shoved up my nose and jammed my throat shut.
"Cough, cough—what the hell? Gas tank blew?" I lay there, dizzy, trying to crawl up.
But I realized almost immediately: this wasn't some industrial accident, and it wasn't ordinary violence. Not a routine shootout. Not gang turf-war noise.
The alley, normally dim and wet, was now lit up like midday by that golden blaze. But the light wasn't warm. It was cold. Fanatical. Cruel. My pupils shook.
I knew that color.
When I first arrived at Spirepeak City, up in that cathedral so huge it could scare a man into prayer, the flames that nearly turned me into barbecue had been this exact gold.
"This is blasphemy! All of you have been corrupted!"
A deep, high, almost cracking roar blasted from somewhere. It was clearly coming through some high-powered loudspeaker, and I couldn't tell who it was aimed at. There was no mercy in that voice. Only a kind of wrathful madness that felt like it could shatter souls.
My ears stung. Beside me, Little Spark reacted like she'd been hit over the head with a hammer. She clutched her ears and screamed, and blood streamed out of both nostrils. Around us, the survivors—those not torn apart by the blast—either dropped to their knees trembling, or went feral with panic, bolting in every direction.
But me?
All I felt was that the damn speaker was too loud. Loud enough to be infuriating.
"Hand over the false saint! We grant you peace!"
With that bellow, the empty end of the alley suddenly flooded with black shapes.
And Emperor above, what a parade of freaks.
They wore ragged robes draped with long strips of parchment covered in scripture. Some were bare-chested, but their skin wasn't marked with gang ink. It was packed with scars and bleeding brands. They carried burning torches and ornate fire-staves, as well as wooden clubs bristling with nails, cleavers, and even chainsaws still dripping wet. Worst of all, some of them dragged heavy chains, manacles, and yokes. Some had driven spikes straight through their own flesh like condemned prisoners mid-torture. As they ran, their meat stretched and tore, but their faces were lit with nothing but ecstatic frenzy, like this was the happiest moment of their lives.
The sight yanked up a memory of a crazy balding old bastard I'd seen back in Donigaton.
Zealots.
The word fell into my head like a chunk of ice.
"It's the Ecclesiarchy's mad dogs… run! To the wastewater plant!" someone screamed.
A powerful hand seized my collar and hauled me up like a chicken.
It was Adela.
Half her face had been blackened by the blast. Her mechanical arm was spitting sparks, crackling and whining. But her eyes were bright—too bright.
She shoved me and Little Spark into a narrow, pitch-black side passage, then turned back. With that stiff, clumsy metal arm, she fumbled through her sack and pulled out something that looked like a short-barreled shotgun cobbled together from scrap machinery.
"And you?!" I shouted back over my shoulder.
"Go!" Adela didn't even turn her head. Her voice was swallowed by the beastlike howling of the zealots. "Little Spark! Get the saint out! Don't let them catch him! He's our only hope!"
Bang, bang, bang!
Her crude gun coughed with dull, heavy blasts. Thick smoke and sparks belched out. The pellets carved dozens of smoky trails that swallowed the front line of pursuers, and where they struck bodies and walls they burst into orange-red flashes. Two of the lead zealots screamed and tore open their robes, exposing their blotched chests.
They had hooked chain links straight onto their ribs.
My scalp crawled.
They didn't go down. They didn't even slow. They surged forward like pain didn't exist.
More fire. More smoke.
A tide of chaos swallowed the one-armed woman.
"Don't look! Run!" Little Spark snarled, yanking my hand so hard her nails bit into my flesh. I didn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything.
She dragged me stumbling through twisting alleys and choking smoke, relying on her knowledge of the routes. Again and again we flirted with death, skimming the edge of it so closely I could taste metal.
This wasn't an arrest.
This was a purge.
Those lunatics weren't going to sort heretics from civilians. To them, No. 7 Depot itself—this filthy, poor, forgotten underhive—was a stain. A huge stain full of heresy, mutants, and rot.
And now that they had an excuse, they meant to burn it clean with the fiercest fire they could bring.
(End of Chapter)
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