Midtown, the temporary gathering place for the third batch of recruits.
This place was originally several abandoned machine shops, which were temporarily converted into an isolation camp for recruits.
Several huge factory buildings housed over a million young people of working age. The area was guarded by Vanguard who patrolled day and night, and heavy machine guns were mounted at the entrances, so the security was not lax.
Night had fallen, and the factory was quiet. Most people were fast asleep, with only the footsteps of the patrolling guards echoing in the corridors.
The mutation occurred without warning.
In the northwest corner barracks, a young soldier lying on his bed suddenly opened his eyes.
Deep within his pupils, a point of eerie blue light was rapidly expanding, eventually filling the entire eye socket.
He sat up silently, a strange smile playing on his lips.
Immediately afterwards, one person after another stood up. In the barracks, more and more soldiers opened their eyes, all of them flashing the same Chaos blue light.
Not only those in quarantine, but also nearly half of the soldiers in the garrison have noticed a subtle change in their gaze.
"Who?!" The guard at the end of the corridor heard the noise, and just as he turned around with his Lasgun raised, a cold hand gripped his neck tightly.
His "companion" wore a sinister smile as he stabbed his heart with a dagger without hesitation.
"Change is paramount."
A deep, somber prayer echoed in the darkness.
One sentry post after another was quietly eliminated.
The corrupt guards and recruits, like a well-trained army, methodically and systematically wiped out the remaining resistance forces, armed themselves.
Some tried to resist, but were overwhelmed by a vast number of mutants and stabbed to death.
The screams lasted only a few minutes before completely subsiding.
The entire factory fell completely into the hands of the Chaos Cultist.
They did not stop.
The believers dragged the corpses and piled them all on the open ground in the center of the factory, along with the bodies of all the guards, civilians, and rebels who had been killed.
Unify by peeling away, decomposing, and reconstructing.
Flesh, bones, and internal organs were piled up layer by layer, quickly forming a small mountain.
Several leading wizards stood beside the mountain of corpses, slashing their palms with daggers and smearing their blood, imbued with the power of Chaos, onto every part of the pile of corpses.
The obscure prayers echoed through the factory, and the pale blue runes slowly lit up along the outline of the pile of corpses.
A simple yet blasphemous altar of flesh and blood is rapidly taking shape, using the lives of the living as sacrifices.
The same scene was playing out simultaneously at nine recruitment camps in the Midtown.
Bloodshed, darkness, and silence.
In the northwest corner of Factory Building No. 8, on the innermost communal bed, a young apprentice Kyle suddenly opened his eyes.
He should have been sleeping soundly, exhausted, like millions of other young men awaiting conscription, waiting for the physical fitness test and identity verification the next day.
But at this moment, there was no trace of sleepiness in his pupils. A faint blue light rose from the depths of his eyes, like two dancing will-o'-the-wisps, and quickly spread to the entire white of his eyes.
Without making a sound, he silently sat up and stepped barefoot onto the cold cement floor.
The young man sleeping in the upper bunk of Kyle was woken up by the noise, rubbed his eyes and poked his head out:
"What are you muttering about in the middle of the night? Can't you even let people have a moment to breathe...?"
He froze in place halfway through his sentence.
By the dim light of the streetlamp shining through the window, he could clearly see that in the open space in the center of the factory, a dozen or so people were chanting incantations around a small mountain made of piled-up corpses.
He recognized the bodies: some were guards who had patrolled the corridor half an hour earlier, and others were his companions who had received nutritional supplements with him during the day.
Their chests were ripped open, their ribs folded outwards like pairs of deformed wings, and dark brown blood meandered down the cracks in the ground, drawing twisted runes.
Several people cloaked in dark blue stood near the mountain of corpses, their daggers still dripping blood, and the crystals at the top of their staffs gleaming with a chilling light.
"What are you doing?!"
The young man was so frightened that his whole body went cold. He tumbled and scrambled off the bunk, his voice distorted with fear.
His shouts woke up more people; some rubbed their eyes, some cursed, and some sat up in a daze...
Hundreds of eyes turned to the flesh-and-blood altar in the center of the factory.
But they only glanced at it, and a nightmare began.
There were no screams, no slaughter, and not even the believers turned around to look.
The blasphemous energy of the Warp has already altered everything around it as the ritual is performed.
The few bolder young men in the front row who were closest to the camera were the first to react.
They first clutched their heads and groaned in pain, then dark red blood flowed from their seven orifices, and under their skin, it felt like rats were scurrying about, and they swelled up with winding lumps.
The person with the lowest tolerance for stress had their head explode on the spot with a "bang".
There was no blood splattering; instead, grayish-white brain tissue mixed with tentacles emerged from the neck cavity.
A dozen or so white, fleshy tendrils, each as thick as a finger, flailed wildly in mid-air, while blood-stained bone fragments clattered to the ground.
His body swayed, but instead of falling, more tentacles covered with suckers grew from his severed neck.
It sprouted fleshy, suction-cup-like feet and wobbled as it lunged toward the nearest crowd.
"Monster! Monster!" A scream erupted instantly.
But the panic lasted only a few seconds before being replaced by an even more terrifying anomaly.
More and more people began to become distorted and deformed.
Some people's arms were stretched out of control, their skin split open, revealing the bone tissue growing inside.
Some people's bodies swelled into bloated balls of flesh, their skin covered with pus-filled sores, and they emitted inhuman roars.
Several others, completely losing their minds, roared and lunged into the pile of corpses on the ground, their bones cracking and their flesh and bones frantically merging together.
In just over ten seconds, it expanded into Chaos Spawn three to four meters tall.
Sticky tentacles, twisted mouthparts, and wildly waving fleshy claws.
These newly born monsters roared as they charged into the dense crowd, their claws splattering blood as they swept across, and their tentacles tearing people in two as they wrapped around them.
The factory was in complete chaos.
Some people ran desperately towards the door, some cowered under the bed trembling, and some tried to fight back by holding up stools and iron bars, but in the next second, Chaos Spawn pounced and bit off half of their head.
But many more people slowly lose themselves under the corrosive influence of the whispers of the Warp.
They crouched on the ground, heads in their hands, muttering syllables that no one could understand, their eyes gradually becoming vacant, and their skin turning an unnatural bluish-green.
No one knows whether they will regain their sanity or completely transform into new monsters in the next second.
What's more despairing than monsters is the confined space.
Just as the ritual was about to begin, a pale blue magical barrier spread along the factory walls, ceiling, and floor.
The already heavy alloy door became even harder, and twisted runes appeared on its surface.
Several young men who rammed the door together suffered broken arms, but the door only trembled slightly and didn't even leave a dent.
The walls became as hard as if they were cast in Adamantium; ordinary steel pipes and crowbars could only leave a white mark when struck.
The communicator, signal transmitter, and emergency distress device all malfunctioned, leaving only dense static on the screen.
The sound was also sealed off inside the factory.
The people inside shouted themselves hoarse, but the patrolling guards outside couldn't hear a sound.
The barrier, like an airtight coffin, trapped tens of millions of recruits and the spreading Chaos corruption within the nine factories.
No one will come to rescue them, at least not within the next two hours.
The previous patrol had just ended, and the next patrol wouldn't begin for another two hours.