It had been a fortress in planetary orbit, built to defend the world.
Now, it was punching through the planet's atmosphere.
If you looked closely at the fortress's space-facing side, you could see its thruster arrays firing.
They weren't trying to keep the fortress from falling, trying to push it back into orbit.
It was the complete opposite.
This was accelerating the collision between the fortress and the surface.
And from the brilliance of the exhaust plumes, it was clearly being driven beyond safe limits—as if whoever commanded it wanted the fortress to hit harder, faster, more violently.
That meant one thing.
The fortress hadn't been knocked out of orbit by enemy fire.
It was very likely being driven into the planet on purpose.
Anyone would assume that only rebels would do something like that.
But the truth was the exact opposite.
This order had been given by the PDF (Planetary Defence Force) commander in the fortress's core control chamber.
He wasn't being controlled by the bugs.
If anything, he wanted nothing more than to purge them from existence.
But the fortress was being seized—bit by bit—by the enemy. It was falling, section by section, into hostile hands.
If this continued, the fortress would be captured.
So he would destroy it himself.
Not by detonating it in space.
By ramming it into a hive city on the surface.
That hive city was beyond saving. It could not be allowed to become super-fertilizer for the swarm.
And according to intelligence reports, the hive might contain a special Tyranid organism—if it could be killed, the swarm would descend into chaos.
It might even prevent the Tyranid bioships elsewhere in the void from receiving a proper "beacon," delaying—or outright preventing—them from arriving here.
As the ground grew closer, as the hive city rushed up to meet him, and as aircraft still fought and died between heaven and earth, he let out a long breath.
"For the Emperor, for the Imperium—your sacrifice has meaning!"
As the words—half praise, half judgment—fell from his lips, every weapon system still under his control was driven past maximum output, firing without regard for friend or foe.
The rebels were using the same weapons and the same aircraft.
There was no reliable way to distinguish them.
So everything became a target.
And he knew, as one of the people responsible for the chaos that had brought the fortress to this state—one of the men now forced into becoming the butcher of countless lives—his guilt was unforgivable.
His death would mean nothing.
He had also thrown away his family's honor entirely.
He was a shame upon the Imperium.
But he did not regret it.
Not even if he could "redo" his life and return to the days when he still carried lofty ambitions.
Because he understood himself.
If he went back, he would still be shaped by this era, drifting with the current—because, at his core, he was a hedonist.
He would gradually become the kind of person he once despised.
He could not change an age like this on his own.
No—thinking he could was arrogance.
Who did he think he was, to compare himself to the Emperor?
He couldn't even change this planet.
All he could do was sink into the times, sink into the pleasure-soaked aristocratic circles of this world.
He would indulge.
He would neglect defense.
He would fail in his duties.
But there was one thing he would never do.
He would never collaborate with the xenos.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
Couldn't they have waited until he'd had his fill, until he was dead, before they started all this?
Why did they have to shatter his paradise now?
Die, you bugs!!!
…
Crack.
A crisp sound came from the neck—then a corpse was thrown aside.
The noble hadn't been knocked fully unconscious. He had crept up, trying to drive a dagger into Kain's throat.
That was the result.
Kain gained a decent knife.
He tossed the body away, and something slipped out from inside the clothing, tumbling free.
Kain's pupils constricted.
He stepped half a pace away from the controls and snatched it out of the air.
It looked exactly like the STC hard drive he'd dug up this time.
What technology was stored inside?
A fine haul.
The next instant, that brief flicker of satisfaction vanished, replaced by a sickly pallor.
Because countless laser beams poured down from the colossal fortress like a curtain of rain.
This was indiscriminate fire.
And it wasn't just beams—missiles as well, launched in such numbers it felt like someone had decided to empty every rack in one breath.
It was like stabbing a supermassive hornet nest and watching the swarm boil out, attacking everything without discrimination.
Blazing light, black smoke, shockwaves, shrapnel—everything churned through the sky in frantic, lethal chaos, so dense there wasn't even a mosquito-sized gap to hide in.
Many of the soldiers still descending from the sky were either vaporized on the spot or turned into red mist.
For them, the greatest mercy was that there was barely any pain to feel.
Down below, the hive city was even more hopeless.
There were roughly one billion people living there.
Under this kind of indiscriminate bombardment… Kain couldn't bear to watch.
And he had no time to watch.
He had to evade the storm.
The modified Thunderhawk he was flying became like a dancer forced to perform atop countless blades—one mistake, and it would be pierced into scrap, riddled through with holes.
Splat.
The windshield smeared crimson as it collided with an unidentifiable chunk of flesh.
The aircraft, once modified into something sleek and flamboyantly "sci-fi," was now being painted in the colors of hell.
Suddenly, a shrieking alarm blared.
The world spun violently—Kain nearly got flung out of the pilot's seat.
A high-yield warhead had detonated nearby, and the shockwave had caught him.
When he finally stabilized the Thunderhawk, the alarms still hadn't stopped. Warning panes continued to flood the display—damage reports, maintenance requirements, system faults—warnings that it would be unable to operate normally in void conditions unless repaired.
He hadn't planned to punch straight out of the atmosphere anyway.
Even though a Thunderhawk had the capability to boost from surface to space, going up there right now would be suicide.
This modified craft had had much of its firepower stripped out, and even its armor had been weakened.
In space, there were no convenient shelters.
A hit meant death.
Besides—if he fled into space, where would he even go?
Good.
This angle.
He didn't keep veering away.
Instead, he climbed straight up, forcing the aircraft into a vertical ascent—and slipped past the plunging fortress at knife-edge proximity.
Even that near pass was catastrophically dangerous.
It was like standing beside a railway track as a high-speed train screams past—the pressure differential can drag you in.
Same principle here.
The fortress's mass and the violent airflow tried to pull the Thunderhawk into it, wrenching it sideways until the hull groaned and shrieked, as if it might tear apart at any second.
He kept climbing.
Then, an even harsher alarm screamed.
The sensors detected an unimaginable energy release.
There was no need to guess.
The fortress had struck the hive city.
On the monitor feed, the moment of impact looked like the planet's crust had been punched through—as if hell itself had been opened.
Molten "hell-lava" surged up, swallowing the hive city whole.
Infernal fire devoured everything around it in an instant, then erupted upward, blasting toward the sky—and rapidly closing in on Kain's position.
…
Dr. Yuuko Kouzuki had never felt her emotions fluctuate so violently.
Because this time, she was watching countless people—people who should have been human—die.
Now that he was climbing higher, the perspective made it easier to see the steel metropolis.
Its sheer scale exceeded even Yuuko's imagination.
A rough estimate put it at about the size of the Greater Tokyo Area.
Magnified, it looked like a steel ant nest.
Humans were the ants.
And that ant nest was being annihilated.
How many lives were inside?
It was impossible to calculate precisely.
But judging from the densities of people and buildings he'd encountered along the way, Yuuko reached a horrifying conclusion:
At least 200 million people would die in the shock of this impact.
And as he climbed higher still, she saw the truth.
That steel hive-nest metropolis wasn't the only one.
There were several more.
Like satellite cities around the central hive, scattered across the surrounding region and forming a ring—some even seeming to be in the process of linking back toward the core.
Now, the crust-shockwave—carrying "hellfire," like a volcanic tsunami of molten rock—looked certain to sweep into those satellite cities as well.
And the fire surging upward into the sky—mixed with scorching, superheated sand and soil at thousands of degrees—resembled an inverse rainfall of molten metal mist, capable of melting anything it touched.
It looked like it would punch into the stratosphere.
Everything about it was too shocking.
Too brutal.
And in the end, the hellfire caught up to him.
The livestream turned into a sheet of red, layered with one shrieking alarm after another.
After ten seconds of that, the livestream abruptly vanished.
Everyone was kicked out of the stream.
And among the IDs currently online in the group chat, "Mr. Golden Toilet" was gone.
Yuuko froze, about to let out a sigh—
Oh?
This is…
Yuuko stared in disbelief.
A system message had appeared in the chat channel.
Interesting.
So who had sent the invitation?
(End of Chapter)
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