Bad news, the author quitted T.T
I will be back with a better WH40K fic!
I probably really have gone insane.
Ever since I showed up in this place for no reason at all, nothing has felt normal anyway.
Every inch of the clinic was packed with people, or people who used to be whole. Blood—so much blood—had turned the floor into a red skating rink. The air was thick with the stench of scorched flesh, the stink of waste, and that nauseating, metallic tang of exposed organs.
A blind man slumped in a corner, pressing his treasured tinplate fiddle hard against the blood-soaked bandage on his chest. Two of the strings had snapped, and dark red fragments of alveoli clung to the wire like rotten garnish.
A little girl, maybe four or five, was curled beneath the medicine cabinet with her mother's charred head clutched in her arms. Her wounds had been wrapped in a messy hurry, but if anyone came near, she snarled like an animal. No one could pry that blackened lump from her grip.
A bald bruiser with a scorpion tattoo on his arm—Red Scorpion Gang, maybe even one of the sentries outside—had a wooden stick clenched between his teeth as he fought to splint his broken leg with bandages.
And what he was using as the splint was, unbelievably, a homemade pipe bomb without the pin pulled. The fuse just hung out in the open like it owned the place…
Same thing as before: this wasn't a clinic anymore. It was a slaughterhouse with terrible hygiene—fresh off the holidays.
All the wounded kept staring at me. Those eyes—cloudy, bloodshot, or already drifting apart—tracked every move I made, like drowning people watching the last piece of driftwood.
Spark bounced through the crowd like a fluffed-up orange cat, yelling herself hoarse as she directed the injured and tried to keep some kind of order. The overalls that had never quite fit her were now nothing but a blood-soaked shroud.
The back door kept swinging open and shut. People were carried in dripping blood in thin rivulets, and others were carried in smoking and smelling faintly like roasted meat… The treated were hauled out with groans, or helped each other limp away, just to clear enough space for the next wave to have even a single foot's worth of room.
I helped Granny Marta with one, then another, and another…
As she efficiently gathered a man's stringy, blood-slick intestines and shoved them back into his belly, she glanced up and shot me a glare. Her brows knitted, clearly unhappy that I was still here.
"Boy, you should—"
I didn't even have the bandwidth to process what she was saying. I just braced both hands and hauled the man's torn abdomen together with brute force.
The pressure inside the abdominal cavity was no joke, and the skin and flesh were slick with blood and fluids, sticky and sliding. I looked up and bared my teeth at her in a grimace that was half pain, half plea—hurry up and stitch it before my cramping fingers gave out.
Granny Marta sighed, dropped her gaze, and began stitching at speed with steel spider-silk thread.
By the time we finally closed him up, my lower body looked like I'd waded straight out of a blood pool. Every step made a wet slapping sound. My fingers were twitching on the edge of spasm. They didn't feel like mine anymore.
And then someone at the back door screamed, breathless and terrified.
"Run… everybody run! The line collapsed over there! The Battle Sisters… they've… they've surrounded this place!"
The words hit the room like a bucket of water thrown into boiling oil.
I looked up and saw the crowd panic, stumble, and surge toward the doors—only to surge right back in moments later. Forward, then backward, like some grotesque farce.
I didn't laugh.
Because the sound from my nightmares reached my ears.
Heavy metal boots striking the ground. Hard, crisp, perfectly synchronized. The hum of servos. The sharp clack of weapons being readied. The hiss of flamers heating up.
Many. Far too many.
In front of the clinic. Behind it. Left. Right. Everywhere.
In just a few breaths, the vibration through the floor made counters, tables, and chairs begin to rattle like teeth. Glass bottles in the medicine cabinet clinked together, ringing like tiny bells—then crack, a precious bottle of antibiotics slipped off a shelf and shattered on the floor.
A hand on my arm yanked my attention back to Granny Marta.
She didn't even lift her head. As if she hadn't heard anything at all, she kept her focus on wrapping gauze around the stump of a young man's severed limb. Her movements were still efficient, but there was something new in them—something I'd never seen from her before.
Solemnity.
She must have read my thoughts, because she spoke first.
"Looks like this is as far as we get," she said, tightening the bandage and tying a neat, perfect knot. "But they came later than I expected. The kids of Warehouse 7 did well…"
She raised her head and slowly swept her gaze across the clinic: ruined, filthy, overflowing with blood and grief, and yet somehow… steeped in tragedy.
"But thanks to those fools, the name of my little clinic has probably made it into the salon gossip of the Spire District's noble ladies by now. If the Ecclesiarchy didn't come to stomp on this place, that'd be the real surprise…"
My throat tightened. A deep, poisonous dread settled over me.
"Granny… you knew this was coming? Then why—"
She lifted her head and glared at me like she could read minds. There was no fear in her eyes. Only the calm of someone who had seen too much.
"This old woman isn't going anywhere. This is my home. Why would I leave?" She helped the young man sit up, then looked at me with a complicated expression. "You… sometimes you're clever like a prophet. Sometimes you're as stupid as a Grox."
She seemed like she wanted to say more, but the noise outside cut her off.
Singing.
It sounded like a sacred cathedral choir, vast and magnificent. Dozens—no, countless—female voices. Clear, soaring, deep. A layered chorus in perfect harmony, the kind of resonance you only get after endless rehearsals and endless indoctrination. The melody was solemn, grand, and so holy it made your spine want to bow.
"…The God-Emperor's light, scouring all corners…"
"…The heretic's blood, smeared upon the holy walls…"
"…With this flame, we forge glory…"
The hymn seeped through the thin sheet-metal walls, and the contrast with the filth and chaos inside—this bloody hell of groans and sobs—was absurd beyond words. Like playing Mozart's Requiem in a slaughterhouse.
I was listening, stunned, when Granny Marta's face abruptly twisted into something ugly—no, it changed in an instant, as if she'd been forced to relive a lifetime of pain in a heartbeat.
"'The Ophelia Purification Canticle'…" she ground out through clenched teeth, her voice cold enough to cut. "They're going to burn us."
She spun, sweeping her gaze across the room: the weak and wounded, some whispering prayers, some ash-faced, some seething and ready to die fighting.
"On your feet, all of you! Enough of that dying-man look!" she barked. "Hmph. Putting on that act in front of me? Those stupid little girls out there aren't qualified to send you to see the God-Emperor!"
She strode to the clinic's front entrance and shoved hard.
With a thunderous crash, the wooden counter that had shared so many of our days and nights toppled onto the floor. Medicines and instruments spilled everywhere in a clattering mess. The things she usually treated like treasures—things she'd mourned for half a day if even one pill fell—she didn't spare a glance now.
She bent down behind the fallen counter and slapped a few inputs on an exposed control panel in the wall. The panel looked ancient, half-rotted, practically rusted into the metal itself, fused with the wall like it had always been there. I'd always assumed it was some useless leftover circuit board from when this abandoned carriage had been repurposed.
Then she did something I will never forget for as long as I live.
(End of Chapter)
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