When Rovi walked out of the cold storage room, the eastern sky had already begun to pale.
He didn't head straight back to his office to rest.
There was one last item on the Balance Sheet, and it was the trickiest one: a "high-risk fixed asset" that needed maintenance.
His ride, Chimera Personnel Carrier Number One, sat quietly in a shadowy corner of the Transfer Station.
Something was very wrong with it.
Even after being shut off for two hours, the heat radiating from its front was still alarming.
Waves of heat distorted the dim air around it, making it look like a colossal beast wheezing its last breaths.
The "Wall of Gluttony," which had once been a deep, dark red, had now turned somewhat purple.
The fused metal-and-flesh texture of its surface had gone slack and swollen, oozing a greasy black fluid.
At a glance, it could have been leaking Machine Oil.
But Rovi knew it was actually "cold sweat."
The vehicle was "sick."
More precisely, the fragile ecological balance inside it had collapsed.
The birth of the "Wall of Gluttony" had been an exceedingly unlikely coincidence.
It was a terrifying product of Nurgle's plague power and the Tyranids' instinct to evolve reaching a dynamic balance on the microscopic level.
On its latest mission, it had devoured a hulking Plague Foreman, ingesting an excessive amount of Nurgle Biomass and tipping the scales.
Nurgle's laws were overpowering the Tyranids' laws, trying to assimilate the living metal into a lifeless lump of rotting flesh.
"Its logical core is burning up. The Machine Spirit has fallen into a frenzy."
Priest Alpha stood five meters from the front of the vehicle, clutching a portable Bird Down Device. He spoke uneasily.
"Its biomass energy levels are severely overloaded. The plague's energy is repelling the