On this planet, it looked like all the water resources had been exploited to exhaustion.
In reality, there was still some water on the surface—about seven percent of the entire crust.
That sounded small, but from orbit it was still obvious: a huge basin of water you could see with the naked eye.
And that basin—covering seven percent of the surface—was filthy beyond belief, like every factory on the planet had been dumping its wastewater into this one place.
This was the kind of toxic sludge that even a purifier couldn't handle. If an Astartes fell in, they probably wouldn't last.
Correction: they definitely wouldn't last. The only question would be how long they could hold out in the planet's largest "no-go zone" of filth—its ultimate forbidden mire.
Rumble, rumble, rumble…!
The explosions of sound never stopped. The ground trembled, as if the entire crust was groaning and the planet's veins were roaring.
In truth, it was the noise of colossal sewage conduits discharging wastewater—pipes so massive they bordered on the unnatural.
And it wasn't just one.
Centered on that enormous basin, eight primary discharge lines spread outward like spokes.
From the planet's geosynchronous orbit, you could actually see them—eight "blood vessels" exposed across the surface.
Like arteries, they were webbed with countless smaller "capillaries." All those minor lines fed into the eight main trunks, funneling wastewater into the same dead sea.
Right now, four of those main conduits seemed to have malfunctioned—wastewater had stopped flowing.
"Has this one been destroyed too?"
A worker stationed at an outflow facility muttered as he stared at the crimson warning flashing across the system display.
The line he was responsible for had gone down as well.
Right in front of him, the wastewater torrent—like a super-waterfall—had nearly stopped, reduced to a thin, intermittent trickle.
The screen flagged the approximate failure point: a rupture. Sewage was leaking outward, spreading, and would further poison the ground.
As the station lead, he immediately gathered the crew, grabbed repair tools, and prepared to head out for maintenance.
"Maintenance?"
"Are you sure you mean maintenance… and not a suicide run?"
Some of the crew openly resisted the order.
Because whatever caused the failure could have been Tyranid sabotage—or something worse.
Demons.
Yes. Demons.
Other crews had gone to fix the lines that stopped discharging, too. Almost none of them came back. No reports. No message. Nothing.
"Almost," because a few extremely lucky ones survived—claiming they'd encountered demons. Some people didn't believe it. They'd never heard of demons existing in this universe, and assumed the survivors had been so terrified they'd hallucinated.
After all, those alien bugs looked demonic enough.
But the station lead knew demons were real. You just wouldn't learn that unless you'd reached a certain level, seen a wider world.
It also wasn't intelligence the Imperium made public.
Which, on the surface, seemed like a terrible idea. If people didn't know demons existed, they wouldn't know how to respond—and they'd die horribly.
But the station lead understood why the truth stayed buried.
If you didn't believe in demons, you were less likely to draw their attention.
If demons truly existed, then the more humanity obsessed over them, the easier it was to invite them in.
"So… are you going or not?"
His tone was flat as he looked at the dissenters.
The pressure hit like a physical weight. In the end, they nodded.
He knew what this meant.
Once they left, there was a high chance they wouldn't come back.
They didn't have real weapons. If Tyranids were in the repair zone, they were dead.
If demons were there, same outcome.
If he had to choose between the two, he'd rather it be bugs than demons.
And even knowing he might die, he still went.
That was the responsibility on his shoulders.
As long as he hadn't received new orders, his current directive was still to keep the discharge network operational—so he had to execute.
As for how intense the war against the Tyranids was, or the war against the demons—he desperately wanted to know.
But that wasn't his job. He wasn't supposed to get distracted "caring" about it.
Tools loaded, they climbed into engineering trucks and drove out from the station.
As they rolled off the outflow platform, they could see the shoreline less than ten meters away—and five hundred meters below it lay the dead sea.
By all logic, with a discharge volume this immense—day and night, never stopping—the water level should have risen and the basin should have expanded.
But it didn't.
The level barely climbed at all. If anything, it was slowly dropping.
Because the water seeped downward into the ground.
And then the planet's factories simply pumped the filtered water back up and reused it.
They didn't build purification systems. They treated the planet itself as a giant filter, assuming it was more efficient that way.
The real reason, of course, was cost. Building proper treatment infrastructure was expensive.
They said there used to be purifiers, back when the planet wasn't this rotten.
But at some point—no one even knew when—it became an industrial world that squeezed everything dry, no matter the price.
Haa…
After exhaling, he inhaled again.
Even with a gas mask on, it still felt like the foul air outside seeped through.
The smell that entered his lungs was worse than raw sewage—so nauseating it could make your eyes water.
New arrivals almost never avoided vomiting for the first while.
He glanced again at that dead, black sea.
The discharge carried so many impurities that the seabed was layered with sludge—poison like a paste.
If you plunged your hand into it, it wouldn't take ten seconds before the flesh dissolved, leaving only charred bone.
And for a human body, even parts that never touched the sludge would be killed anyway—poison spreading through the system, bringing violent agony.
"Th-That… what is that?"
Someone in the convoy suddenly pointed at the sky.
The station lead looked up into the gray, choking clouds and saw a bright point approaching.
A meteor?
No—more like debris.
Wait… that wasn't debris.
That was an attack.
That was a missile.
In a single breath, the projectile plunged straight into the center of the dead sea.
There was no explosion.
It sank like a stone—quiet, eerily quiet.
So quiet that his heart tightened for no reason at all.
His pupils shrank.
Light blossomed at the impact point—then surged outward in a violent spread across the sea's surface.
From the instrument readouts, the luminous field had already covered roughly half the dead sea.
What…?
The dead sea began to churn—rolling and boiling. The water level dropped fast. Steam erupted into the air in thick, blinding fog.
By the time the station lead understood what was happening, his vision was nearly gone.
The sea was being evaporated.
The heat wave reached him.
His eyes felt like they were cooking.
And his body wasn't far behind.
…
In Tom and Jerry, they're always trying to kill each other—then somehow staying inseparable anyway.
They toss around those cartoonish spherical bombs, light the fuse, and when the glow flares at the edge of detonation, they shove it into the other's hands.
The other one doesn't have time to throw it back.
Boom—comedy.
But what stood before Yul right now looked exactly like that.
The "bomb" was the planet.
The fuse's endpoint was that dead sea.
And there was nothing funny about it.
This world was heading for its end.
(End of Chapter)
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