Chelast raced after the squad through the violently writhing chamber. The thunder of Bolters, the roar of Chainswords, the dull tearing of flesh, and the shriek of vines scraping metal mingled into a mad symphony.
Amid the overwhelming chaos and tension, the relentless pressure seemed to send his mind into a momentary daze.
In that fraction of a second, he abruptly looked back at the army of replicas surging behind them like a tide.
Among those numb, distorted faces, some already sprouting vines, a figure suddenly caught his eye. It was the young adjutant!
He stood quietly amid the frenzied crowd. The painful struggle on his face was gone, as was the replicas' vacant stupor. Instead, his expression had regained an almost normal, human calm, and he looked toward Chelast with complicated emotions in his eyes.
But it all vanished in an instant.
In the space of a single breath, that distinct figure disappeared like a drop of water into the sea, swallowed once more by the surging tide of replicas threaded with green veins. He vanished without a trace, as though he had been nothing but a hallucination born of Chelast's utter exhaustion.
"Chelast! Move! What are you standing there for?" Lucius's furious roar lashed across Chelast's nerves like a whip, snapping him out of his brief daze.
Chelast shook his head hard, cast the eerie image from his mind, and continued racing for his life after the squad, following the route flashing across his Tactical Lens.
Yet the whispers did not disappear. Instead, they grew clearer.
They were no longer indistinct noise, but countless individual voices: the desperate roars of men, the piercing sobs of women, the feeble groans of the elderly, and even the frightened cries for help of young children.
The voices intertwined like countless icy