Chapter 305: The Special Hundredth District (Patreon)

“They’re the Emperor’s Angels!”

“The Angels have descended!”

On the human lines, the fighters erupted into cheers the moment they saw the sleek attack motorcycle tearing across the plain, and the figures astride it.

Chen Ye guided the bike with practiced calm, its tyres biting into ferrocrete rubble and compacted waste as he circled the Genestealers at breakneck speed. With one gauntleted hand steady on the throttle, he drew the bolt pistol at his hip with the other and opened fire.

The bike was moving far too fast for the Genestealers to effectively strike it, and the rider showed none of the loss of accuracy that would plague an ordinary human at such speeds. His marksmanship was as precise and lethal as blade-work; every shot found its mark, and not a single bolt was wasted.

For an Astartes, this level of combat intensity was almost… beneath notice. Under normal circumstances, even if Genestealers had already infiltrated the upper hive, no Space Marine would be dispatched personally unless something on the planet was of extreme strategic value.

Yoan sat silently on the rear seat of the bike. As he observed the battle, he realized that Chen Ye was deliberately herding the Genestealers together.

One by one, the xenos died. Those still alive were no longer scattered among the collapsed habs and rusted manufactorum frames; driven by pressure, noise, and instinct, they were forced to cluster together.

Seeing this, Yoan understood Chen Ye’s intent.

When the majority of the Genestealers had gathered into a dense mass, Yoan raised his shoulder-mounted weapon and fired skyward.

[Mortar system. Anti-infantry configuration.]

A crimson orb launched upward, tracing a perfect ballistic arc through the polluted air. When it reached a point roughly one hundred metres above the Genestealers’ heads, it split apart with a muted detonation, bursting into a cascading rain of searing light.

Not a single Genestealer survived.

All were annihilated.

One detail, however, did not escape Yoan’s notice. He observed that these Genestealers were identical to those previously encountered in the Tyrone Hive City, possessing that unsettling blend of unnatural unity and sacrificial instinct unique to their kind.

Among those caught in the descending rain of light was a young Genestealer. Before the beams could finish it, every older Genestealer nearby threw themselves forward, interposing their own bodies as living shields, their deaths instantaneous, desperately attempting to preserve the younger organism at the cost of their own lives.

“Combat over!” A ragged human officer stepped out from behind a shattered bulkhead, his rebreather hissing as he waved one scarred arm. “Begin cleanup!”

The hastily assembled militia moved in, firing into every enemy corpse to ensure death, then stripping anything of potential value from the bodies.

The hastily assembled militia moved in at once. They fired into every enemy corpse at close range to ensure death, then set about stripping anything of potential value from the bodies.

The officer joined them. He recovered a laspistol from the rubble and tested the trigger, only to find the weapon pierced clean through by the light barrage, its power pack vented and useless. Still, he did not discard it. Instead, he turned and called over one of his soldiers.

The soldier was very young, around ten years old. He wore no armour beyond layered work-clothes reinforced with scrap plating and carried only a steel truncheon of the sort used by Adeptus Arbites auxiliaries for crowd control and riot suppression.

“Here,” the officer said, handing him the damaged laspistol.

The boy’s face lit up with unguarded joy. He snapped off a sloppy salute and then stared at the weapon in his hands, transfixed by the neat hole burned through its casing.

He didn’t even know it was unusable.

“You’re sending him to his death,” Yoan said coldly. He stepped forward, snatched the pistol from the boy’s hands, examined the damage, and activated the integrated fabricator unit built into his Thunderborn-pattern power armour. In moments, the weapon was restored to working condition.

Yoan placed the laspistol back into the boy’s hands.

“No need to worry,” Chen Ye said as he approached. “He won’t be fighting. Just running errands behind the officer.”

“But he is a soldier,” Yoan replied firmly, closing the boy’s fingers around the grip. “And he’s already here.”

In the end, neither Chen Ye nor the officer stopped him. Instead, the two turned their attention to more pressing matters.

“How long has this purge been going on?” Chen Ye asked.

“Three days,” the officer replied.

“Any other combat zones?”

“Of course, my lord.”

“Send me the coordinates. I’ll deal with them.”

After the exchange, Chen Ye received the data, entered it into the bike’s navigation cogitator, and accelerated away, carrying Yoan onward toward the next battlefield.

The Genestealers had not yet risen in open, full-scale uprising. As a result, the conflict raging through the underhive remained fragmented and relatively low-intensity, fought in pockets amid collapsed infrastructure and forgotten transit arteries. On the human side, every participant was a civilian militia member. Most didn’t even have uniforms, armour, or even proper weapons.

Their method of identifying the enemy was brutally simple:

If it had hair, it was human. If it didn’t, it wasn’t.

After repeating the same cycle, rushing to a battlefield, annihilating the enemy, then moving on, over a dozen times, only one combat zone remained.

This final battlefield was the most intense of all.

Nearly fifty thousand combatants had been committed on both sides.

Before heading there, Chen Ye stopped to prepare.

He parked the bike inside a long-abandoned structure of unknown origin. There, he cleaned his power blades and checked what ammunition he had left.

At the same time, he explained to Yoan what he had seen since arriving in the underhive of Beisu I.

“The militia you’ve seen weren’t organised by the Hive Governor,” Chen Ye said. “They’re residents of lower hive District One Hundred.”

Yoan listened in silence.

“It’s the only place down here where you’ll find real order,” Chen Ye continued. “In District One Hundred, children and the elderly manufacture ammunition in underground workshops. Able-bodied men and women undergo voluntary military training in their spare time. When enough munitions are stockpiled to fight a war, they descend into the underhive to purge Genestealers.”

As Chen Ye spoke, Yoan recalled an earlier moment, when Chen Ye had rescued a young girl and given her a gold coin, telling her to go to District One Hundred.

It hadn’t been to send her far away from her enemies.

It had been to send her somewhere safer.

Yoan thought for a moment, then shook his head, frowning.

“I don’t understand. Lower hive districts are dominated by gangs. Non-gang members might band together for food, water, or oxygen, but cooperation rarely extends beyond a single street. Any civilian group that grows too large inevitably tears itself apart over limited resources.”

Chen Ye smiled faintly and continued cleaning his weapon.

“In an environment like this,” Yoan continued, “it’s almost impossible for an entire district to act in unity. And especially not for conquest or survival against gangs, but to fight Genestealers in the underhive? From an individual’s perspective, what do the Genestealers have to do with the people of District One Hundred? Even the Adeptus Arbites aren’t even worried.”

“You’re right,” Chen Ye said, securing his weapon and mounting the bike. “But I’m proud to say that the lower hive where I was born produced exactly such a district.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.” Yoan remained where he was, not climbing onto the bike. His instincts warned him something was wrong. “An entire district united like that… I have reason to suspect District One Hundred is entirely composed of Genestealers. Otherwise, there’s no explanation.”

Chen Ye chuckled softly and asked in return:

“If there were someone in the hive who possessed advanced water reclamation and air purification systems… someone with followers willing to stand by him… someone with a certain personal charisma, would the unity and order of District One Hundred still seem so strange to you?”

“I met the Lord of Talon just yesterday,” Yoan said with a smile, shaking his head. “And he isn’t on Beisu I.”

“Unfortunately,” Chen Ye said, his expression turning deadly serious, the joviality vanishing as if it had never existed, “Beisu I doesn’t have another Lord of Talon. But it does have a young leader worth following.”

He lifted his hand from the bike’s throttle and pointed upward, toward the unseen distant spire where the Hive Governor’s palace loomed over the rest of the city.

“He’s far more fit to be Governor of Beisu I than that shameful parasite squatting at the top.”