Warhammer: In the Name of Ashes

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 managers.

Pipes that had been in disrepair began to rust and break, and sewage and filth were 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 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 River area is also named after this, but unlike the literal praise 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.

Like all dark corners where the sun doesn't shine, the order of the hive 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 ancient Terran "proverb": "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 violent family groups, which had not had time to reach their peak in less than a century, were replaced by gangs with greater mobilization capabilities.

Because compared with the original "family" system, although the gang is slightly less stable, it can be an equally purposeful and planned violent (harmony patch-free) group, and its mobilization ability is far incomparable to the former. of.

Deserters, criminals, bankrupts, contraband dealers, heretics and even more dangerous people...

Gangs are after these dangerous people who can't 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 emerges, the former will be doomed 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, the hive cities, which are the standard building complexes for human settlements, always have striking similarities.

The underbelly of every hive city is filled with criminals if the local Advocate and Inquisition are not doing their job 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 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 resurface after losing the fierce elimination methods of the Inquisition.

The seeds of corruption arise from nothing, from one to ten thousand.

From being dormant in a corner of the hive city, it spread to 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 roam aimlessly on the bottom of the hive city like rotting corpses, and will surge to the surface like a tide at the slightest command.

They are undetonated bombs that, at just the right moment, will erupt with scars that wreak havoc on the entire world.

What the Death Watch is facing today is 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 came later was of little use in facing this situation.

However, a task from the state religion and the sisters of battle about the transfer of the "holy object" delayed the launch of a vortex torpedo that had been prepared.

So, a team of death watch was sent out.

Their task was to cooperate with the sisters of battle to find the sanctuary and then transfer the holy object safely.

The second half of this task was not difficult for an Astartes team with rich combat experience and will.

But if a search was added to the original "transfer" task, the time-consuming and practicability of this task would become a question mark.

But Sura had no choice, or the Astartes had always been the backup plan for the empire in critical moments.

In most cases, they did not have the power to choose the battlefield, and this time's mission was nothing more than a mediocre resume among countless "passive choices".

But the battle was not smooth from the beginning.

The first problem Sura faced after getting in touch with the ground was how to enter the ground safely under the watchful eyes of the alien civilization fleet.

And the battle barge he was riding was converted from a frigate.

Its hardness was obviously not enough to support the intensity of such a mission, so after a surprise attack that could be called a "death landing".

Sura and his team members finally reached the upper level of the hive city at the cost of the death of the frigate and all the members on board.

Who am I? Where am I? What should I do?

Sura, who was dizzy from the impact caused by the deployment of the airdrop pod at an ultra-low altitude, obviously had no time to think.

He and four Astartes warriors hurriedly searched and downloaded the structural diagram of the hive city in the public channel, and were driven away by the alien civilization chasing from orbit.

The situation of the battle sisters and the location of the holy relics were a mist in his eyes, and what he didn't know was the more outrageous "tide" he would face on the way to the mission...

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