Bang!
A shockwave flung Kain's body through the air, slamming him hard into a wall.
The wall had looked like it might collapse at any moment to begin with. After taking that hit, it did collapse outright, burying him halfway under the rubble.
This happened because Kain hadn't expected the company captain to already be fallen.
No daemon was riding the man, but his mind had been twisted and led astray.
The moment Kain revealed he was a Blank, the captain burst into wild laughter and started spouting words Kain couldn't understand.
He didn't understand the content, but he recognized the tone immediately. Religious phrasing. Cultist phrasing.
Danger alarms screamed in his head.
He reacted on instinct, putting everything he had into a single kick that sent the captain flying.
Why a kick instead of killing him? He didn't know. Some part of him insisted this was the right move.
And the facts proved it was.
The instant Kain launched the captain away, he twisted and sprang for the nearest cover.
He had barely landed when a deafening blast hit. Firelight and a pressure wave obliterated the cover and hurled him away like a rag doll.
As his consciousness nearly snapped, pain dragged him back.
His brain still rang like a struck bell. So this was what "seeing stars" felt like.
He shoved aside the weight pinning him and staggered upright. His vision swam, everything blurred into chaos.
Gunfire was everywhere.
Even behind him, bullets and beams slashed past, forcing him to drop his profile immediately.
When he managed to focus forward again, he saw the area where the captain had landed.
A crater had been punched into the line as if a heavy cannon had hit it, and in that single instant it had probably harvested more than a dozen lives.
The captain had been carrying a bomb inside his body and triggered it on purpose.
But it wasn't just one detonation.
Like a chain reaction, the entire stretch of the defensive line erupted with blooming light and heat, melting bodies, ripping bodies apart.
Under that harsh illumination, the lower levels—so close to being swallowed by darkness—were lit up as bright as day.
Looking out across it, it resembled a steel prison.
In truth, calling the bottom of a hive a steel prison wasn't much of an exaggeration.
A hive was built like that. Colossal hab-blocks and factories stacked and fused into an artificial mountain range of iron and ferrocrete.
That was why these towering cities were called hive cities. Their peaks and spires were often called the city's crown.
A cluster of tightly connected hives was called a hive cluster.
On a hive world, there were usually thousands of hive cities.
Each hive had countless layers, stacked, interlocked, crossing and winding, built upward until they reached the stratosphere.
The very lowest layer was called the underhive.
In that sense, a hive itself was a world.
Most people who lived inside one never walked beyond it in their entire lives. They never saw the outside world.
Especially those born in the underhive. Many of them would go through life without ever seeing the sky. The very concept of "sky" was alien to them.
The underhive was where the starving poor lived, along with those who had fled downward for political or criminal reasons. Everything and everyone mixed together in a filthy, vicious mire.
There were no guarantees of survival.
Food was largely corpse-starch produced by factories.
Power outages were common. In some areas, no one bothered repairing the systems, and the darkness could last for centuries.
The pollution was severe as well. Layer after layer of contamination sank downward until the air became poisonous by upper-hive standards.
Unless someone had lived here long enough to adapt—or had been born here—anyone from above who came down without a respirator mask would be poisoned quickly.
Violence happened here every day, countless incidents, a place almost abandoned by government.
The ones who ruled it were gangs, big and small.
A steel prison, wrapped in darkness.
And now, in this prison, most of the inmates were probably already dead.
Bang!
A heavy impact snapped Kain back to the present.
The line was collapsing into complete chaos. This was not the time to stare into space.
Under the tangled curtain of fire, he sprinted hard in one direction.
Boom, boom!
A low, brutal roar. Two .75-calibre bolt shells punched out of the boltgun in his hands, and the recoil made his arms tremble violently.
For a normal man, that kickback would have shattered bone.
These were rocket-propelled rounds packed with high explosives. Their exhaust flared bright as they drew laser-straight lines through the air, striking two chunks of building debris that had been blasted loose and were hurtling toward him.
The moment they made contact, both rounds detonated within milliseconds.
Shards from the adamantium-tipped penetrators and the explosive physical shockwave cratered both slabs of metal with deep, ugly dents.
They didn't break the chunks apart, and they didn't knock them away.
But the impacts bled off enough speed.
It was enough for Kain to drop low and slide forward, slipping under the falling mass and avoiding the crush.
A few more rolls and leaps carried him to his initial target.
The place where he'd first emerged.
He hauled a heavy metal plate aside with all his strength and jumped down without hesitation.
There was a ten-meter drop.
He hit hard, landing on the frame of a massive drill machine—an Imperial tunneller, a digging unit known as the White Ant.
He scrambled inside, moved fast, and slapped on the power armour mounted within.
He opened the public channel.
A piercing screech stabbed his ears, and then a torrent of overlapping, chaotic voices flooded in.
He needed more information. Anything usable.
[Channel connected. Please choose a name for yourself on this channel.]
"The display is busted? It keeps shaking… You want a name, right? Golden Toilet."
[Name confirmed: Golden Toilet.]
[Would you like to further complete your personal information?]
The power-helmet display was a mess, layers of images overlapping into unreadable noise. The channel audio was a tangled stack of voices. Now and then, he caught a word or a fragment of meaning, and irritation flared hot.
He slammed a fist against the side of the helmet.
In truth, if he focused, he could tell the difference.
One stream came through the helmet—sound and imagery transmitted normally.
The other acted directly on his brain.
He tried to shut the helmet's communications down.
It wouldn't respond. That was broken too.
Boom—!
Kain stopped caring about the voices.
He triggered the White Ant's engine, and the tunneller woke with a hungry mechanical howl as it began drilling upward.
Why not drill out of the hive entirely?
Because the power reserves were almost dry. It wouldn't get far. Not nearly far enough.
["A2" has sent you a world invitation. Accept?]
What invitation?
It kept flashing.
He couldn't see it clearly at all.
(End of Chapter)
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