I kept running with that woman on my back as she slipped deeper and deeper toward unconsciousness. My lungs hauled like a bellows, and every step felt like I was stomping on cotton.
But little by little, I realised I wasn't alone.
…"That's the Saint! That's our Saint!"
I don't know who shouted it first. The voice was hoarse and cracking with tears, yet it hit the chaos like a thunderclap, splitting the battlefield's noise clean open.
…"He's saving people! Even now, even like this, he's still saving people!"
…"Don't let those bastards get near him!"
I looked up and saw something I will never forget for as long as I live.
If the world above ran on faith and technology, then the lower district ran on something far older: raw blood and raw madness.
In the ruins around us, the counterattack was spreading.
Filthy, rag-wrapped beggars. One-armed cripples. Workers clutching wrenches.
They poured out.
They had no fine weapons, and no "blessings" from the God-Emperor.
They splashed strong acid into the joints of heavy armour. They jammed crowbars into the chain teeth of chainblades. They fired crude, homemade guns at the servo-skulls darting overhead.
A black-armoured woman's flamer could turn everything within twenty or thirty meters into charcoal, yet it accidentally ignited fuel barrels hidden in the rubble—some trap the guys from a fuel pump station must have set. The eruption was like a volcano, a blast of flame punching up so violently that even those black-armoured women—reckless as rabid badgers—staggered back. The fanatics unlucky enough to be caught in it could only scream and claw at their own burning skin.
And when the Sisters finally steadied themselves, steel rain suddenly poured down from above and drove their heads low again. A pipe-maintenance worker on a rooftop was working a pneumatic rivet gun, firing steel bearing balls like bullets. One black-armoured woman's faceplate took more than a dozen hits in a row, her visor shattered into powder, and then a massive iron grille thrown from above smashed her down and pinned her underneath, unable to move.
"For the Emperor!" someone was shouting.
"For the Saint!" far more people were shouting.
But I couldn't hear any of it clearly, and I couldn't afford to care. My lungs were a broken bellows running beyond redline, my throat full of rust. I could only keep moving my legs like a machine. The woman on my back grew heavier and heavier. If I didn't keep checking her breath now and then, I would have believed I'd been carrying a corpse for half the way.
Every corner on the road to the clinic was playing out another scene of defiance.
A grocer's wife I recognised kept hurling heavy objects—and even her own money pouch—down at the fanatics below. A few ghostlike children used slingshots, hand crossbows, and whatever other nonsense they had to shoot the Ecclesiarchy's loudspeakers to pieces. Even the beggars who usually squatted on street corners were heaving heavy metal drums into the enemy's path.
That cripple who used to sell fake relics, and now sold prints of my portrait—his mangled silhouette danced in the blue-white glare of plasma explosions, yet he still charged those black-armoured figures like a cannonball, as if he were imitating the martyrs in church murals.
In that chaos of flame and smoke, that familiar sheet-metal sign finally appeared at the far end of my vision.
"The Saint is here~"
A bellow came from a side alley.
It was the cripple who sold newspapers near the clinic—Tom. (In a place like this, selling newspapers is basically the same business model as selling clothes and cheap household linens.) He gave me a single nod, then raised a pistol shaped like a clarinet and charged toward the direction I'd come from, shouting at the top of his lungs.
I clenched my teeth, shoved past Spark slumped to the side and gasping, and slammed straight through the clinic door.
"Granny! Save her! Hurry—"
I wheezed, stumbling inside. My knees gave out, and I went down hard, tumbling to the floor with the wounded woman still on my back.
But what greeted me wasn't safety.
It was another layer of hell.
There was nowhere left to stand in the clinic.
The front hall that used to feel spacious was now packed with wounded—limbs blown off, bodies charred black, bellies opened by stray rounds. Blood made the floor slick and greasy underfoot. The air stank of scorched flesh, waste, and hopeless moaning. This wasn't a clinic anymore. It was a slaughterhouse that had just taken a direct hit.
"The Saint is here!"
Outside, the roar swelled louder, like dozens of people chanting in unison. Crude homemade bombs thumped and cracked, rattling the clinic's corrugated metal walls until they buzzed.
Granny Marta, who had been treating a patient laid out on a table, snapped her head up.
She saw me—caked in blood and sludge, a complete wreck—and there was no tearful gratitude in those cloudy old eyes. What erupted instead was a rage so fierce it was almost physical.
"Are you brain-dead?!"
She flung the hemostats from her hand and stormed at me like an enraged old hen. Her bony finger jabbed so close it almost hit my nose, spittle spraying across my face.
"You should've run! Taken Spark and run as far as you could! Why did you come back?! Huh?!"
She pointed at the room full of wounded, then at the outside where the killing noise shook the air, her voice sharpening into something warped and shrill.
"This 'famous' broken little clinic is a target! The Ecclesiarchy's mad dogs were going to find this place sooner or later! The clinic doesn't have legs, but you do! You walked right into the noose! You idiot! Moron! Imbecile!"
And I just stayed half-prone on the floor, dragging air into my chest in ragged gulps, answering her with something slurred and meaningless.
Then I looked up with a grin that probably belonged on a lunatic, and stared at her, and at the woman in front of me—still soaked in blood, still making that faint huffing wheeze.
I was probably insane.
"The Saint is here!!"
Outside, it wasn't dozens anymore.
It was hundreds.
It was everything in the whole district that could still breathe, roaring together. There was no fear in that sound—only a terrifying certainty and fevered zeal, as if they meant to shout the Emperor's judgement itself back into the sky.
Granny Marta's scolding cut off mid-breath.
She froze, still holding that finger in my face, then turned her stiff neck toward the clinic door that hadn't been fully shut.
Through the crack, firelight surged.
Those two Red Scorpion Gang sentries—who were only ever meant to keep order—were still at their posts, their thick bodies blocking the mouth of the alley. Beggars who would normally crack each other's skulls for half a ration were charging fanatics with sharpened scrap metal. Thugs who would do anything for money were pouring burning fuel from high windows.
They weren't rats anymore.
They weren't cockroaches.
They weren't mud.
"Saint…" Granny Marta muttered, her eyes unfocused. "Mad… they've all gone mad…"
I seized the moment and eased the woman off my back, laying her on a patch of floor that was marginally cleaner. Panting hard, I forced the words out through a shredded throat.
"Granny… curse me all you want… but she's got an open pneumothorax… if you don't treat it now, she's dead…"
Granny Marta snapped back to herself. She looked at the woman on the floor, then at me—blood-smeared, practically hollowed out—and then at Spark, who was clinging to the window frame and sobbing as she crawled in.
"The Saint is here!!!"
This wave of sound drowned out the distant loudspeaker's bell-like preaching. It drowned out the thunder of those oversized guns.
All of Warehouse 7 was shaking, as if this rotten, shadowed iron jungle itself was answering the slogan. Even the rust on the great filthy steel shell of Spirepeak City seemed to be trembling loose and falling in dusty sheets.
The anger on Granny Marta's face slowly ebbed away. What replaced it was something far more complicated: the absurdity of witnessing the impossible, and the hard resolve of someone forced into a corner.
"You really were sent by the Emperor to test me…" She spat a wad of blood-tinged saliva. She didn't look at the door again, and she didn't curse me again.
She turned to the room full of wailing wounded and bellowed with everything she had left:
"Anyone who can still move, get up and crawl! Barricade the door! If you've got even one breath left in you, don't let those bastards who don't come here for treatment walk in and interrupt an old woman while she's operating!"
Then she yanked the woman toward her. Her scalpel flashed cold, her hands moving so fast my eyes couldn't even track them.
"What are you still staring at? You're the 'Saint,' not a useless lump! Get over here and press down on her chest!"
I froze for a heartbeat.
Then I crawled over with a stupid grin on my face.
On one side: war and fire without end.
On the other: the meat grinder.
And on this razor-thin line between life and death, I—an impostor saint—was kneeling in a pool of blood, fighting like hell to snatch one insignificant life back from Death's hands.
Outside, that mountain-splitting chant had already rolled across Spirepeak City's lower district, shaking the underhive so hard it felt like the rust raining down from the iron ceiling of the world.
"The Saint is here!!!!"
(End of Chapter)
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