Welcome to the Bottom Hive

Although New Kato had already been established and most people had their own jobs, there was never any shortage of bounty hunters in the Bottom Hive.

Thanks to their performance in the previous war, the bounty hunters had received a reward from Qin Mo: they could still operate as bounty hunters, but anything they acquired during their operations had to be handed over.

What they turned in would be converted into Throneys, which could be used to buy more food, weapons, or equipment.

Seven hundred kilometers beneath New Kato, a seven-man bounty hunter team was fighting.

Both sides were in a narrow corridor.

The bounty hunters huddled behind an energy shield, exchanging fire with Rebel xenos and a Psyker crawling toward them from afar.

"Is the Bolter warmed up yet?!"

"Her name isn't Bolter. Her name is Lena."

"Fine, fine. Is Lena warmed up yet?"

"She is."

A bounty hunter carrying a multi-barreled heavy weapon squeezed from the rear of the team to the front. When he aimed "Lena" at the Rebels, a support brace automatically extended from beneath the weapon and planted itself on the ground.

After the barrels spun rapidly for two seconds, a barrage of bullets poured toward the other end of the corridor.

Every bullet exploded on impact, blasting the xenos clinging to the corridor walls into scattered pieces. The occasional bone shard or fragment flew their way, but the energy shield stopped them all.

The xenos on the walls could not advance even a single step under such firepower.

But the main reason was that their bodies had swollen. Huge blisters bulged out from beneath their hard bone armor, and some of the xenos even had swollen limbs, leaving them able to hobble forward only with difficulty.

They were a group of weaklings, already close to death. The bounty hunters merely hastened the process.

"Die... die..." The Rebel Psyker limped to the front line, raising a blister-covered hand to unleash Psychic Power.

"Yao En!" At the captain's shout, a raggedly dressed young man squeezed forward from the back of the team. He knew what to do without further orders.

Yao En moved ahead while the others advanced and covered him.

When the group had covered Yao En's approach to within twenty meters of the Psyker, she could no longer even maintain the psychic spell around her. Her arms burst first, then her entire body rapidly dissolved into liquid.

After the Psyker died, the xenos screamed and burst into puddles of liquid as well.

"Run!"

"Hurry up! We've already wasted too much time fighting the Rebels!"

Once the battle ended, none of the bounty hunters rested or searched for loot. They sprinted down the corridor as though something terrifying were chasing them from behind.

After running for ten minutes, they could finally see the end of the narrow corridor.

At that moment, Yao En could not help looking back.

"Don't fucking look back!"

Amid the captain's furious, worried roar, Yao En, who had already turned around, saw a xenos.

It was a bloated spider. Its body, covered in bristles like steel spikes, was crammed into the corridor, yet it still moved incredibly fast.

The instant he saw the spider, terror and horror struck Yao En's mind so hard that it shut down, leaving him standing motionless.

The Rebels were no longer the bounty hunters' greatest enemy in the Bottom Hive. The true threat was the mutated creatures born from the pollution that had plagued the Hive City for thousands of years.

"Forget him! Run!"

"Move!"

The captain roared as he sprinted, leading the team ever closer to the exit. They could even see the light beyond it.

But the light was quickly blocked, as though someone had shut a door.

That "door" immediately opened, except what appeared was not light from outside the corridor, but a huge dark green eye.

Fear, horror, strangeness... these feelings left the bounty hunters frozen in place, as if they had been turned to stone and could no longer move.

The giant eye blinked, then rose upward.

Outside the corridor, a gigantic mutant creature had pressed its mouthparts against the exit. Rings of fangs extending deep into its throat were clearly visible.

Then a beam pierced the mouthparts blocking the corridor exit, and the violent energy made the entire passage scorching hot.

A bounty hunter equipped with an ancient temperature-regulating device silently activated its cooling function.

Soon after the beam pierced the mutant's mouthparts, two people wearing Terminator Power Armor passed through the breach blasted open by the beam. As they walked, the shotgun lasers mounted on their hands blew apart any fangs or other obstacles in their way.

Until their feet stepped onto the metal floor.

Some of the bounty hunters had taken part in the war, and they recognized the symbols on the two suits of Terminator Power Armor, as well as their wearers, at a glance.

They were Grey and Anreda.

All the bounty hunters except Yao En scrambled toward Grey, then hid behind his Terminator Power Armor.

Grey continued forward expressionlessly. He passed the terrified Yao En, then walked ten meters ahead and activated his Gravity Shield at the approaching mutant creature.

The corridor was crushed and warped by the Gravity Shield, while the mutant creature was pulverized beneath its force.

Grey deactivated the Gravity Shield, turned to the group, and asked, "Why is there such a huge spider in the Bottom Hive? That thing I saw outside was as big as a building!"

"Ancient ruins and relics have... there's nothing strange about what you might find in them."

"We... we even found female xenos in one ruin..."

The bounty hunters were so excited they were nearly crying as they all spoke at once to explain.

"Grey." Anreda walked over to Grey and said with a smile, "Welcome to the Bottom Hive, officially."

Grey nodded, suddenly recalling the stories about bounty hunters he had read as a child.

The Bottom Hive held not only danger, but also ancient technological relics and other valuable things.

Only after seeing it with his own eyes did Grey understand why people in the Underhive loved stories about bounty hunters, yet so few were willing to become bounty hunters themselves.

"I advise you not to come here again next time." Grey warned them, then turned and walked over to Yao En, intending to pull him up.

But as he approached Yao En, Grey felt disgusted. To him, Yao En looked filthy and smelled foul.

Though disgusted by Yao En, Grey still pinched his nose and reached out to pull him up.

"Were you sent by the gods to save us?" Yao En asked excitedly.

"No. Your wife came to find us." Grey shoved Yao En. "Now get the hell home and buy something nice to reward your wife. If she hadn't reported it in time, we wouldn't have been able to arrive in time."

"It's all right. In my eyes, you're still messengers of the gods." Yao En said with a smile.

Grey did not like the look of Yao En, so he said nothing more and merely turned toward the end of the corridor.

As he boarded the transport and departed, Grey looked down at the building-sized giant spider below and thought, How much scrap did this thing have to eat in the Bottom Hive to grow this large?

Inside the corridor, as the bounty hunters prepared to leave, Yao En stood blankly at the exit, gazing up at the transport in the sky with immense excitement.