Beneath the flickering emergency lights in the corridor.
Several rioters who had been preparing to storm the basement's alloy door stopped in their tracks.
Their cloudy pupils reflected Mary's figure.
"Star Child—obstacle. Die!"
A rioter in oil-stained coveralls let out an inhuman growl.
He raised a solid iron crowbar and lunged at the unsteady woman before him.
"Get away."
Mary whispered.
There was no physical contact.
The rioter froze in place, three meters from Mary.
He had collided with an invisible Air Wall.
Then came a series of bone-crunching snaps.
With no external force acting on him, his body began to cave inward and twist.
His elbows bent backward, snapping through his skin;
his spine twisted like a corkscrew;
his eyeballs could not withstand the sudden pressure inside his skull and burst into two clouds of blood.
Worst of all was his brain.
The gray matter boiled in an instant, as if in a microwave, then trickled from his orifices mixed with blood.
"Thud."
The body, twisted into a lump of meat, slammed onto the metal floor.
The frenzied rioters around him all came to a synchronized halt.
As puppets controlled by the Genestealer's collective will,
they should have been stripped of the emotion known as "fear."
But at that moment,
the biological instincts buried deep in their mutated genes began to tremble violently.
It was the primal panic of creatures at the bottom of the food chain, trapped in a narrow space with an apex predator.
This was a wild, chaotic force, brimming with a raw desire for destruction.
Wild Psyker power, untamed by Holy Terra and unscreened by the Golden Throne.
Mary paid no further attention to the trembling vermin.
Following the countless Purple Threads, she made her way toward the basement, one step at a time.
With