Debridement Surgery

"Buck!"

Rovi turned around and barked, "Notify Priest Alpha. Immediately seal off all water sources around the administrative building, including the rainwater collection pond!"

"Ah? But, Advisor, that's only rainwater..."

"Carry out the order!"

Rovi's voice was harsher than ever before.

"Have all Defense Force personnel put on their gas masks. No one is to take them off without my permission, not even to eat!"

His instincts told him the real attack had begun.

Not guns. Not poison.

Something more subtle, and more deadly.

Just as he finished speaking, a commotion rose outside the window.

Rovi rushed to the window.

By the rainwater collection pond, an Old Servitor who had been cleaning dropped his broom and clutched his throat in agony.

His body began convulsing violently.

His skin turned ashen before their very eyes.

Then—

His belly swelled rapidly, like an overinflated balloon.

"Bang!"

A dull thud.

The Old Servitor's stomach burst open.

There was no spray of blood and flesh.

What poured from his belly wasn't his entrails, either.

It was thousands upon thousands of... Greenbottle Flies.

Buzzing, they surged through the crowd like a black whirlwind.

Screams, sobs, and alarms instantly tore through the morning calm!

Rovi watched it all, his quill snapping in two in his hand.

"They're here."

He murmured under his breath.

There was no fear in his eyes.

Only the cold resolve of someone facing an inevitable fate.

"All personnel, enter First-Level Combat Readiness!"

He pressed the red button on his desk, and his voice rang through loudspeakers across the entire Granary.

"This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill."

"For the Emperor, for our survival... prepare to fight!"

The black whirlwind formed by the Greenbottle Flies didn't spread right away.

As if guided by some kind of collective intelligence, they hovered in midair for a moment.

The sound of their wings beat together.

It was no longer an irritating buzz.

It became a low murmur.

As if countless people were whispering in one's ear.

The sounds drilled into their eardrums, bringing not only noise but nausea.

Their stomachs began to cramp involuntarily.

Then the flies scattered.

They didn't flee in every direction. Instead, they "sowed" with purpose.

They rushed toward the nearest crowd.

The laborers had just been lining up to receive soup. Now, terrified, they stood with their mouths wide open, screaming.

Flies burrowed into their nostrils and ears, and slammed straight into their fearfully open mouths.

"Seal the doors and windows! Activate the positive-pressure ventilation system!"

Rovi's voice boomed through the broadcast system.

"All Defense Force personnel, fire at will!"

"Don't target the flies. Target the people they've infected!"

"Don't let them near the defensive line!"

In the plaza, a young laborer clutched his throat and fell to his knees.

Countless tiny insects writhed beneath his skin.

His once-gaunt body rapidly swelled, like it was being inflated.

He raised his head. The fear in his eyes had vanished, replaced by a vacant, blissful expression.

"Heh... hehehe..."

He let out a bizarre, foolish laugh as yellow-green pus dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

"Bang!"

A large-caliber bolt round precisely blew apart his upper body.

Buck stood on the second-floor terrace.

Smoke curled from the barrel of the Boltgun in his hands.

The One-Eyed Commander didn't hesitate for a moment.

His bionic eye spun frantically, locking onto every target showing signs of mutation.

"Don't just stand there! Open fire!"

Buck roared at the stunned soldiers below.

"Those are the Lord of Pestilence's Walking Dead! If you don't want to turn into rotting meat, pull the damn trigger!"

Roused by their commander's shout, the Defense Force finally opened fire with their Heavy Logging Guns.

"Rat-a-tat-tat-tat."

The heavy, rhythmic gunfire tore through the air.

The "Machine Spirit Appeasement" Rovi had spent the entire night performing proved its worth.

The old killing machines didn't jam or backfire.

They spat out half-meter-long flames, unleashing a storm of metal into the crowd.

This wasn't a war. It was a massacre.

And it was a necessary debridement surgery.

The Walking Dead that had just begun to mutate, their movements still sluggish, fell like wheat beneath the heavy machine guns' barrage.

Large-caliber bullets tore their swollen limbs apart with ease.

Eggs that hadn't yet hatched and pus were blasted into clouds of foul-smelling blood mist.

Rovi stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression grave.

He looked at the fallen figures—

Just ten minutes ago,

they had still been thanking him for that bowl of steaming hot Green Soup.

"Esteemed Advisor," Priest Alpha said in confusion, "the data model was off."

"According to the usual rate of corruption, these hosts should have lost the ability to move completely within thirty seconds of exposure and become sources of infection."

"But..."

The Priest extended a Mechanical Tentacle.

He pointed at several mutants below who had been shot down but were still struggling to crawl.

"Their bodies are tougher than expected. The transformation process seems to be meeting some kind of... resistance."

Rovi narrowed his eyes.

He had noticed it, too.

The laborers who had flies burrow into them were certainly undergoing physical mutations.

Yet in the first few dozen seconds, many of them managed to retain a shred of lucidity.

Some had even tried to dig the foreign objects out of their throats.

That didn't make sense.

For the impoverished masses, whose immune systems had nearly collapsed from prolonged malnutrition,

the Plague Virus should have killed them instantly.

Unless...

"It's the Green Soup."

Rovi quickly realized the answer.

"The Green Soup contains plenty of protein and calories, along with trace amounts of antibiotics."

"Even though they'd only eaten one meal, that 'full meal' had awakened their long-dormant immune functions."

"Even if it was just a last flicker of life, it gave them time to react."

For a moment, Rovi couldn't help feeling moved.

This was the strength of ordinary people.

No matter how lowly, even as insignificant as ants, give them the slightest nourishment

and they would struggle for a second of life in the face of destruction.

In truth, Fertility II, this agricultural world, was no pastoral paradise of golden granaries.

It was a colossal millstone forged from flesh and steel.

On the horizon, Hive City Spires towered like immense malignant tumors.

They belched poisonous smoke that blotted out the sky, staining it a sickly gray-yellow.

Beneath the shadows of the Hive Cities

lay endless farms and fungus cultivation chambers.

Like blood vessels, they pierced the planet's barren crust, drawing out its nutrients without pause, day and night.

Every inch of land here was forced into cultivation.

Every drop of water had been recycled and filtered countless times.

The harvest filled Imperial Tithe warehouses that soared into the clouds.

There was enough to fill the bellies of an entire sector fleet.

It was even shipped as far as the dining tables of Holy Terra.

Yet the laborers, who worked day and night in the depths of the Hive Cities, growing crops in poisonous wastewater, couldn't get even a single grain for themselves.

To them, it was an offering to the God-Emperor, the private property of the nobility.

Ordinary people were forbidden to touch it.

They could only huddle in the shadow of the harvest,

gnawing on recycled corpse starch, filtered industrial waste, and Green Soup.

They lived in a granary, yet starved in droves.

This was the mighty, holy Imperium...