The steel sky was torn open by the Imperial warship's laser—its lance-beam ripping through metal like paper.
A portion of the structure was vaporized outright. The adjoining sections were then caught by the pull generated by the strike—like the suction you feel when a high-speed train blasts past and anything too close gets dragged toward it. That tearing force, combined with the fact that a critical "support piece" had been erased, made the whole thing collapse like a finished block structure losing its keystone.
The steel sky began to disintegrate.
It began to fall.
Kain drew a deep breath.
There was no running from this.
His situation was like an ant clinging to the corner of a building—only for the entire high-rise to suddenly collapse. There was no time to escape the collapse radius.
Running outward now would only make you die faster.
At a time like this, you had to go against the flow—like a carp leaping the Dragon Gate.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught another flare of violent light to the side. A shell had punched through that same warship, and the ship's hull started to fold as if it were about to snap—stern and bow pitching upward while the center buckled down.
That hit had been just a fraction faster than the lance-beam.
If it had been a fraction slower, Kain would already be dead.
No—worse than dead. He would have been vaporized.
Because the only reason the lance-beam hadn't erased him was that it arrived a heartbeat late, shifting the firing angle slightly—so the beam tore past over his head instead.
If it had followed the original trajectory, he would have been directly on the line of fire, guaranteed to be reduced to nothing.
Boom—!
The platform beneath him shook like a magnitude-10 quake—violent enough to fling a person off their feet. That was not an exaggeration.
Kain moved instantly, jumping to a position he had already calculated.
There, a massive metal plate had flipped up like the raised end of a seesaw—except it wasn't someone stepping on the other end. It was the other end being smashed by a falling section of structure.
He landed on the lifted end and used the upward kick of the plate to launch himself even higher.
In that moment, his grappling claw shot back and forth through the storm of metal debris, pulling him upward again and again.
One tiny mistake—one misjudgment—or one weak point where the grappling claw latched onto something too brittle to hold, and he would be swallowed instantly by this rain of steel.
His only way out was up.
Up, until he cleared the floors affected by the lance-beam's collapse.
But the crumbling architecture wasn't his only threat.
There were also the falling people—and the Tyranid creatures.
Some people, driven by raw survival instinct, had already lost their minds like drowning swimmers. They lunged at him, trying to cling to anything that might save them.
And the bugs—once they spotted him—didn't hesitate. They slashed with claws or fired their weapons straight at him.
This was no less lethal than being cornered on a cliff in the Underhive—trapped between daemonic monsters and a Chaos Space Marine.
Boom—!
Explosions, too.
Shrapnel shrieked through the air. Kain heard a piercing scrape of metal on metal across his power armor.
He was lucky.
It had only grazed him.
All around, countless falling humans and bugs were caught by the blast, shredded by fragments into vast clouds of blood mist.
…
At a dojo, a girl with deep purple hair sat quietly, eyes closed as if meditating.
Look closer, and you'd see the hand resting on her thigh—once relaxed—slowly tightening, fingers digging into her leg.
Busujima Saeko hadn't witnessed the fight against daemons.
She hadn't witnessed the descent into the Tyranids' hatchery-nest either.
When she logged in, the livestream had shown her the exact moment an Imperial warship's beam tore open the steel sky above the steel-nest city.
What followed was so brutal that her mood grew heavier by the second.
She was human.
A human with emotions.
Seeing people—humans from another parallel world—suffer like this, the normal response was sympathy.
So the carnage made Saeko's heart climb into her throat.
She was tense for the one on the stream—tense for his survival. Tense that falling debris might smash him. Tense that blast fragments might rip him apart. Tense that those insect-like monsters might ambush him.
And beyond that—
All those lives falling.
Those were humans.
That kind of despair made Saeko feel like she couldn't breathe.
From what the camera showed, she couldn't count them precisely, but it was clearly at least tens of thousands.
From this height, with this scale of collapse, it felt impossible for anyone to survive.
Some of the people who swept past near him—if you looked at their faces, their bodies—how should she put it?
They looked like they were sick with everything at once. Emaciated to the point of horror.
Some were malformed, too—like the kind of deformities you might see after the widespread use of biological weapons, where later generations were born twisted by contamination.
As far as the eye could see, most of them looked worse than the homeless Saeko had ever seen.
It seemed that the people falling here were almost all from the very bottom rung—slum poor.
Suddenly, as if sensing something, Kain forcibly altered his trajectory mid-flight.
In the next instant, a thick square steel slab—four meters across—split neatly into two.
The cut was straight.
The cross-section was smooth.
It had been cleaved by a force beyond imagination.
The camera caught what did it—and Kain saw it too.
A mantis-like monster, its most distinctive feature being those scything forelimbs—like a praying mantis's arms, scaled up into weapons.
In the next moment, it vanished.
Gone.
It had blended into the chaos of falling wreckage again.
Soon Kain was nearly cut a second time, and Saeko's nerves tightened until they hurt.
That creature was viciously patient—strike once, vanish if it failed, then reappear the moment it found a better angle for assassination.
But as Kain kept climbing and the open space widened—once the falling debris was no longer quite so dense—the creature stopped hiding.
It began to leap at a terrifying speed.
It was going for a direct kill.
Just as it prepared its final pounce—
Something fell from above, dropping between them and blocking the attack.
A fighter craft over thirty meters long.
It didn't just wedge itself into the gap.
It slammed into the monster as well—dragging it down with it into the abyss below.
So the lethal crisis was finally about to—
No.
The camera swung upward.
And at last, the true sky came into view.
The sky was burning—set alight by war.
(End of Chapter)
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