The Price of Survival

The laborers surged forward.

Suddenly, Rovi felt the ground beneath his feet tremble.

It wasn't an explosion.

It was a writhing movement from deep underground.

"Alert." Kais's cold electronic voice sounded in Rovi's earpiece. "Detecting a high-energy biological reaction beneath Sector E4. Energy level: immense!"

Rovi hurriedly turned around.

In the middle of the square, the Rebel corpses—corroded by acid and riddled with bullets—weren't lying still as they usually did.

They were melting.

Flesh, bones, even their clothes.

Everything was liquefying at an incredible speed, turning into pools of thick, dark green sludge.

The pus didn't seep into the ground. Instead, it flowed toward a single point as if it were alive.

That point was exactly where several Rebels had just been electrocuted while trying to touch the Drop Pod.

"Is this... a sacrifice?"

Rovi's expression turned grave.

Perhaps looting the supplies was just a pretense.

Their deaths themselves were a ritual.

"Retreat! Everyone, retreat!"

Rovi shouted himself hoarse.

At the same time, he kicked a laborer in the backside. The man was still greedily searching the Rebels' pockets.

"Throw the stuff onto the vehicles and run!"

In the blink of an eye, the ground split open.

A giant hand made of countless rotting limbs and fungi reached out of the pool of pus and swiped viciously at the Harvester's tracks.

The hand was as big as a truck.

Eyeballs that were still rolling and drooling mouths covered its surface.

"A Nurgle Beast..."

Rovi recognized the creature.

It was only a low-level Warp daemon, but on a mortal battlefield like this, with so little heavy weaponry, it was invincible.

"Alpha, overload the boiler!"

Rovi leaped back into the Command Tower and gripped the handrails tightly.

"Release all the steam. Aim it at that hand!"

"Yes!"

The Harvester let out a pained shriek.

All the exhaust valves along its sides opened.

A stream of superheated steam with an eerie, pale-violet hue.

It burst out like a volcanic eruption.

The steam swallowed the rotting hand in an instant.

This was more than just water vapor.

It contained the "surplus vitality" released by the Warp Crystal.

Nurgle's blessing lay in "stagnation" and "slow cycles," keeping decay in a state of eternal symbiosis.

But this steam was an extreme catalyst.

It forced the Nurgle Beast's cells to accelerate their metabolism by billions of times in an instant!

For a Nurgle Beast made of decay and viruses, this runaway acceleration was more lethal than strong acid.

It shattered the balance of symbiosis.

Every cell exhausted all its energy in an instant, dividing frantically until it destroyed itself.

"Roar!"

The giant hand was engulfed by steam.

It let out a piercing shriek born not just of pain, but of extreme hunger.

The maggots and fungi inside it grew crazily under the steam's catalytic effect, swelling instantly into grotesque monstrosities.

Then, as their energy ran out, they withered rapidly and turned to carbon.

It was a biological short circuit: the creature burned itself out.

After a moment of frenzied growth, the once-resilient, moist flesh turned completely into lifeless ash.

The eyeballs burst with a succession of pops, like fruit ripened to its absolute limit.

The giant hand released the tracks.

It turned into a charred, withered stump.

"Move! Reverse at full speed!"

The Harvester roared, its tracks spinning wildly.

It flung mud in every direction, tore itself free of the mire, and raced toward the Granary.

Buck led the Defense Force in a fighting retreat, using concentrated fire to hold back the smaller offshoots trying to pursue them.

The laborers stopped fighting for loot, too.

The "happiness" in their minds vanished in the face of the giant hand's roar.

Clutching their boxes, they ran back like mad.

Rovi kept his eyes fixed on the giant hand.

It didn't pursue them.

It seemed bound to the area of the ritual circle by some kind of rule.

Or perhaps it had only come out to say hello, to tell humanity that the real war had begun.

By the time they returned to the Granary, it was already evening.

The rain had stopped.

The sky was still a suffocating purplish red.

They counted the casualties.

Forty-seven laborers were dead, and more than a hundred were injured.

Most had been hurt in the crush and chaos during the retreat.

Fortunately, the haul was substantial.

Three full tons of medical supplies and five hundred High-Energy Batteries.

That would be enough for Granary Seven to hold out for another month.

Rovi sat in his office, with the Silver Suitcase he had swiped from the Drop Pod resting in front of him.

He hadn't let anyone see the case.

First, he examined it.

He found no traps or biological locks.

"Click."

The case opened.

There were no gold or silver treasures, nor any classified documents.

There was only a vial of medicine and a note.

The medicine was deep blue, and glimmered with a faint, icy light beneath the lamp.

Rovi picked up the note.

The handwriting was graceful yet firm.

It was clearly written by Governor Alicia herself.

There was only one sentence:

"This is both an antidote and a poison. Give it to the person who most needs clarity."

Rovi knew what it was.

It was a high-purity mental stabilizer reserved for the nobles at the top of the Hive City.

It could instantly clear away hallucinations and euphoria caused by psychic contamination, restoring a person to absolute rationality.

The side effects were obvious, too.

For the next few days, the user would feel pain and depression several times more intensely than an ordinary person.

It was the enemy of pleasure.

Rovi fell silent for a moment.

He didn't inject himself.

He put the medicine back in the case and locked it.

Then he tucked it into the secret compartment at the very bottom of his desk.

He didn't need it yet.

The faint "sweetness" from the Warp Crystal was dangerous, but it was also one of the things that helped him keep thinking at full capacity in this hellish environment.

He needed that euphoria.

At least for now.

"Advisor."

The heavy blast door slid open, and Priest Alpha walked in.

His mechanical limbs were smeared with oil that hadn't dried yet, and the Servitor Skull behind him emitted a faint buzz.

"The supplies have been stored. Also, while cleaning the Harvester, we found some phenomena that defy the laws of physics."

Rovi looked up from his stack of documents. "Tell me."

"The Harvester's front rollers and tracks were contaminated with a large quantity of the Nurgle Beast's bodily fluids during the battle." The Priest extended a metal tentacle and projected a holographic scan.

"According to the database, that highly acidic slime should be able to eat through three inches of plasteel in ten minutes."

"But..." The Priest paused, his voice betraying unmistakable confusion and fervor. "It didn't."

The hologram zoomed in, showing the microscopic structure of the tracks' surface.

"The metal wasn't corroded. On the contrary, a layer of carapace-like keratin formed where the slime touched the metal. It's incredibly hard, and it even deflected our sampling drill."

The Priest's voice dropped lower.

"It's as if... the machine is 'feeding.' It absorbed the Nurgle Beast's biomass and used it to evolve."

The machine was feeding?

Rovi stared at the image, his mind racing.

Ordinary Nurgle corrosion would make metal rust and decay. It would never make it harder.

The only variable was the steam released at the time.

It had been heated by the Warp Crystal and contained concentrated "vitality" and the concept of "forced ripening."

When that steam, brimming with vitality, met the Nurgle Beast's biomass-rich fluids and reacted violently on the metal's surface...

It catalyzed some impossible alchemical reaction.

The Crystal supplied the energy for "growth."

The Nurgle Beast supplied the "flesh."

And the Harvester's body became the vessel for it all.

This was no longer mere science.

It was a blasphemous miracle, a forbidden fusion of machine and flesh.

If anyone from the Martian cult saw it, Rovi and Priest Alpha would be turned into Servitors on the spot.

"Seal the information." Rovi made his decision at once, his gaze sharpening. "Drag the Harvester into the deepest isolation chamber. No one but you and me is to go near it. Format the memories of every Servitor that witnessed it."

"As you command." Priest Alpha bowed deeply, the red light in his eyes flickering unsteadily. "Is this... another revelation from the Omnissiah?"

"No. This is the price of survival."

After the Priest left, Rovi went to the window and looked outside through a narrow gap.

The square was full of boisterous activity.

The laborers were lining up to receive their "extra rations"—

Marching Rations stripped from Rebel corpses, not yet completely rotten.

And enormous rats killed in the crossfire, before they had a chance to mutate.

There was no mourning, no grief.

For those still alive, the empty bunk left by a dead comrade meant they could stretch their legs while sleeping tonight.

And the comrade's unused Green Soup ration meant they might live one second longer tomorrow.

This wasn't the excitement of celebration.

It was a near-animalistic greed, a ravenous grasping for the resources needed to survive.

Watching it all made the tension in Rovi's chest tighten further.

He had used the power of Chaos to produce food and feed these people.

Now he had inadvertently discovered that the same power could strengthen machines.

He was dancing on the edge of an abyss, with an endless drop beneath his feet.

But he had no way back.

Rovi drew the curtains, shutting out the suffocating purplish-red sky.

He sat back down at his desk and tapped on the control panel.

"Kais."

"Present, Esteemed Advisor."

The Wetware Server's cold, electronically synthesized voice rang out.

"Create a new simulation model," Rovi ordered calmly.

"What would happen if I ran high-energy steam heated by Warp Crystal through a conduit and injected it into the Heavy Logging Gun's cooling system, so it came into direct contact with the barrel...?"

The screen flickered with a burst of frenzied gibberish.

It was the overload produced by the logic circuits as they processed data that defied reason.

A few seconds later, a line of red text appeared:

"Simulation result: The barrel's metal structure will undergo irreversible activation. Expected lifespan reduced by 90%, but its rate of fire can increase by 200% before it becomes completely unusable."

"Additional effect: At the moment of firing, the projectile will be enchanted, carrying a trace amount of Warp heat energy and inflicting additional burn damage on organic targets."

"Warning: This action gravely violates Article 402 of the Adeptus Mechanicus General Scripture and constitutes Tech-Heresy."

As he looked at the red warning, the corner of Rovi's mouth curled slightly.

It was the cold smile of a gambler about to go all in.

"The Scripture can't save us, Kais."

He spoke in a low voice.

As if explaining himself to the Supervisor, who was already dead.

And as if declaring war on this mad universe.

"But more firepower can!"