Zerita is the fifth hive city in the Farr Agricultural World. It is also the current capital of this world after the previous four generations of hive cities were abandoned due to disrepair.
Flood zone, number 11-72-18-19.
A living area that was once used to serve the middle-level skilled workers of the hive city. With the construction of the hive city, this small town less than two kilometers from the surface has long been filled with more and more pipes from the upper levels.
When the operation time of the entire hive city reached the second millennium, the complexity of the pipelines here exceeded the maintenance capabilities of the administrators.
Pipes that have been in disrepair for a long time have begun to rust and break, and sewage and filth are everywhere.
Rotten maggots and anaerobic fungi gradually took over everything here, and those losers who continued to fall from the bottom of the hive, together with mutants of unknown origin, occupied the living space that once belonged to humans.
All production materials here come from the garbage above, and the monthly large-scale sewage discharge becomes a carnival for scavengers.
Feces, sewage, food residues, discarded living materials, all the garbage you can think of will appear in the dark brown "flood" after the gate is opened.
Under the deliberate management of the "indigenous residents" here, most of the pipelines here have been destroyed and blocked.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of sewage flowed to the seaside hundreds of kilometers away without plan, and the valuable materials in these sewage and garbage became the source of life for people here.
The Flood Area is also named after this, but unlike the literal complimentary meaning of the name, the "Torrent" here is obviously filthy beyond the imagination of the upper-class residents...
torrent area, torrent...
This word is full of wonderful irony in the land of the hive city - it not only describes the source of life of the people living here, but also describes the people here who live and die but continue to flow.
Just like all dark corners where the sun cannot shine, the order of the hive city is destined to be unable to touch this lawless land.
But does order really not exist? The answer is no.
In a sense, order is also a necessity for intelligent creatures, and when one order cannot fill the space, another order will naturally be born.
Therefore, it is in accordance with the "proverb" of ancient Terra: "Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes."
When the "order" represented by the human empire in the upper levels of the hive city could not spread here, violence, the most primitive and effective force, became the most stable order here.
So the family emerged, because the violence of one person can never be equal to the violence of a group of people.
Then very quickly, the family-style violent group, which had not yet reached its peak in less than a century, was replaced by gangs with greater mobilization capabilities.
Because compared with the original "family" system, although the gang is slightly less stable, it can be used as a group with the same purpose and planned violence (without harmony patch). Its mobilization ability is far incomparable to the former.
of.
Deserters, criminals, bankrupts, contraband dealers, heretics and even more dangerous people...
Gangs are constantly looking for these dangerous people who cannot survive in the sun. And driven by the same or temporarily the same interests, the power possessed by these people is destined to eliminate the family.
But the same reason can be used again - when an organization with more mobilizing capabilities than a gang appears, the former will be destined to be destroyed by the same reasons as the "family" it eliminated.
Corruption is always born in dark corners, and so is heresy.
There are thousands of worlds in the Empire, and they are all different.
In these worlds separated by hundreds of millions of light years, hive cities, which are standard building complexes for human settlements, always have striking similarities.
The underbelly of every hive city is filled with criminals, if the local legal department and inquisition do not perform their duties faithfully.
Then another thing will also be born here - a cult.
Yes, plenty of cultists.
Although the local inquisitors of Zerita have worked hard enough and even gone to great lengths to increase the frequency of cleaning the bottom layer of the hive city from once every few hundred years to once every hundred years.
But when alien civilization invades and the connection between the galaxy government and the star region is lost, those heretical beliefs that are as full of vitality as weeds will always resurgence after losing the fierce elimination methods of the Inquisition.
The seeds of corruption arise from nothing, from one to ten thousand.
From residing dormantly in a corner at the bottom of the hive city, it spread to the bottom of the entire hive city in just a few months.
Nearly a million people were quietly corrupted in silence.
And among these people who are already standing on the opposite side of the Empire and humanity, there are also a variety of extremely dangerous characters including mutants, Ogryns, veterans and even wild psykers.
They wander aimlessly on the bottom of the hive city like rotting corpses, and will surge to the surface like a tide at the first command.
They are undetonated bombs that will erupt at the right time and cause pain to the entire world.
What the Death Watch is facing today is just such a threat.
The alien war on the ground has achieved a decisive victory. The galaxy governor and his guards also completely lost their command in the first wave of decapitation strikes.
The Death Watch that arrived later was of little use in facing this situation.
However, a transfer mission related to "holy objects" from the National Church and the Battle Sisters prevented the originally prepared whirlpool torpedo from being dropped.
As a result, a death watch team was dispatched.
Their mission is to cooperate with the Battle Sisters to find the sanctuary and then safely transfer the holy objects.
The second half of this mission was not difficult for an Astartes team rich in combat experience and determination.
But if a search is added to the original "transfer" of the task, then the time-consuming and executability of the task becomes a question mark.
But Sulla had no choice, or in other words, the Astartes had always been a back-up plan when the empire faced critical moments.
In most cases, they do not have the right to choose the battlefield, and this mission is nothing more than countless "passive choices" plus an unremarkable resume.
But the battle didn't go smoothly from the beginning.
The first problem Sura faced after making contact with the ground was how to safely enter the ground under the watchful eye of the alien civilization fleet.
The battle barge he was riding on was modified from a frigate.
Its hardness was obviously not strong enough to support such a mission, so after experiencing a surprise attack that could be called a "crash landing of death".
Sulla and his team members finally reached the upper level of the hive city at the cost of the death of the frigate and all members on board.
Who am I? Where am I? What should I do?
Sulla, who was dizzy due to the impact caused by the deployment of the airborne capsule at an ultra-low altitude, obviously had no time to think about it.
He and four Astartes warriors hurriedly searched in the public channel and downloaded the structural diagram of the hive city, and were driven away by the alien civilization pursuing them from orbit.
The situation of the Battle Sisters and the location of the holy objects were a fog in his eyes, and what he didn't know was the even more outrageous "tide" he would face on the way to the mission...