"What's going on? A cutscene?" One player froze for a moment and instinctively tried to skip it.
But this was no cutscene. The crowd really did surge toward them.
Caught off guard, the players who normally killed without hesitation, who dared charge Nurgle daemons with entrenching shovels, now seemed at a loss. They stood stiffly as the NPCs pressed what little synthetic food they had into their hands, along with homemade charms that seemed utterly worthless.
A little girl in a tattered floral dress struggled through the crowd and ran up to a player. Standing on tiptoe, she raised a flower crown woven from scrap metal and exceptionally rare real flowers over her head.
"Uncle, this is for you!" Her voice was bright and childish, but her words had an unmistakably Hive City flavor. "The Emperor blessed this flower! Make sure you chop those damned traitors into eighteen pieces! Pull out all their guts!"
"Ah—right, sure. Eighteen pieces, not one less." The player took the flower crown in a daze and fumbled to hang it on his Carapace Armor, an absurd yet warm feeling welling up inside him.
On the other side of the formation, an old man with a deeply wrinkled face held another player's hand in a death grip.
"Sir, uh, we're about to move out—" Embarrassed, the player tried to pull his hand free, but the old man's grip was astonishingly strong. Those hands had spent a lifetime doing hard labor and were as rough as bark.
"Go on, lad. Give them hell!" The old man's eyes were red, and his voice trembled as he began to ramble. "My grandfather used to tell me about the old days—back then, when the heretics came, we were like animals waiting for
slaughter. Countless people he knew were butchered, eaten,