With a puzzled mind, Gaia slowly walked toward the house that now seemed to radiate an ominous presence in her eyes.
Since the front door had already been destroyed, she entered without difficulty.
Most of the furniture inside had been smashed to pieces. The plates and food scattered around a shattered dining table showed that when the tragedy struck, this family had apparently been preparing to enjoy the food granted by the God-Emperor.
Sadly, what should have been a warm and ordinary moment had now been stained crimson with blood.
In the hallway beside the dining room, a man in a yellow-brown linen shirt lay in a pool of blood. The knife that had slipped from his left hand proved that he had tried to resist to the bitter end.
But the smooth wound across his neck had taken both his head and his life.
She continued down the hall, and at once an overwhelming stench of blood and organs rushed into her face, while that disgust from the deepest part of her soul surged like a storm.
She took the warhammer off her back and quietly stepped into the room at the very end.
The instant Gaia entered, a shrill scream pierced her ears.
And then came something she had not felt for a very long time.
Silence.
The discordant whispers like swarming insects, the absent-minded murmurs from unseen things, the hollow echoes from another plane, all of them vanished from beside her ears.
That silence was so sudden that for an instant it left her feeling strangely at a loss.
At the same time, a suffocating pressure on the soul crawled up her spine like a bone-clinging parasite, weighing on her with an unprecedented heaviness.
That sudden shift in sensation made Gaia dizzy for quite a while, though thankfully she was not attacked during it.
Once she gradually adapted to the feeling, the miserable sight inside the room came into view.
The first thing she saw was the floor stained red with blood.
A huge amount of blood had sprayed outward from the center of a female corpse, and what made the sight even more revolting was that her abdomen had been cut open, with every organ inside removed.
She lay there with both arms spread wide, legs bent and tangled together, her face frozen in agony. It was obvious that she had been gutted while still alive.
Gaia's gaze sharpened. For some reason, she could sense something strangely wrong about the corpse.
She crouched down and looked into the empty abdominal cavity.
Then she found herself staring directly into a pair of eyes filled with fear and unwillingness.
The missing head of the man from beside the dining table had been stuffed into the woman's chest cavity.
Just as Gaia felt a flicker of anger at that brutality, her enhanced hearing picked up a faint scraping sound.
It was coming from beneath the corpse.
After murmuring an apology in her heart, she gently shifted the woman's remains and revealed three hidden hinges beneath her.
Only then did Gaia notice that a concealed door had been built into the cracks of the floorboards.
That also explained the strange sense of wrongness she had felt earlier.
The corpse's posture showed that when she was killed, she had neither been pinned down nor lost the ability to move, and yet she had never tried to leave that spot.
Clearly, she had used her own body to conceal the hinges of the trapdoor.
Or in other words,
to protect whatever lay behind it.
Breathing a little more heavily now, Gaia slowly opened the hidden door that the two of them had guarded with their lives.
As the hatch rose, light from outside reached down into the cellar below, a place shrouded in lonely darkness, and fell upon a young face full of fear and unease.
It was a little girl, around six years old. Her golden hair had clearly come from her mother, while her green eyes came from her father.
Spots of blood were scattered across her cute little face and the teddy bear in her hands.
They had come from her mother.
Only now did Gaia understand that the mother's superhuman endurance, and the father's fight to the very end, had all been for the sake of protecting their child.
She took a deep breath, then forced a gentler smile onto her face and held out a hand to the little girl.
"It's okay. Take my hand."
The girl stared at Gaia blankly for a long time. Then she slowly stepped out from the darkness of the cellar, clutching the teddy bear stained with her mother's blood, and reached out her slender little hand toward the strong hand extended from the light.
The moment the two touched, a stabbing pain struck Gaia's soul.
At that instant, the girl before her seemed to transform into a roaring abyss, tearing at and disrupting the Warp-tides around Gaia's soul.
And at last, Gaia confirmed the girl's identity.
An Untouchable.
Just as a coin has two sides, a living being's affinity for psychic power can also be positive or negative.
And there exist some extremely rare individuals who are born completely severed from the Warp, and who never produce any reflection of themselves in the Sea of Souls throughout their entire lives.
While they possess immunity to and suppression of psychic power, they also affect the soul-reflections of normal beings in the Warp.
That effect is often described as "misfortune," and in the end it usually brings about irreversible tragedy.
Because of that, such beings are feared and rejected by people, and are called Untouchables.
Enduring the discomfort, Gaia pulled the little girl out of the cellar with all her strength.
Once they reached the surface, the girl looked around blankly, and then, when she saw the corpse lying not far away, her body trembled.
To Gaia's surprise, she did not cry.
She simply walked over to her mother's remains, sat quietly beside them, and gently held her mother's cold hand against her chest.
That toughness, far beyond what should have belonged to a child her age, made Gaia a little curious.
So she decided to use Emotion Visualization and look at the fluctuations of the girl's soul.
Then something happened that deeply shocked Gaia.
She could not see any soul fluctuations from the little girl standing right in front of her.
That had never happened before.
And in that confusion, she suddenly realized something else.
Ever since entering this room, the things that had disappeared were not only the sounds of the Warp at her ears.
The system pop-up windows that would normally appear in her mind while she moved had also vanished.
That discovery struck the calm surface of her heart like a boulder, sending up towering waves...
...
In the village square, Solomon frowned as he watched Commissar Horne direct the conscripts to bury the villagers' bodies.
Some of what he had said earlier had indeed been half true and half false, but one thing had been absolutely real: as a free captain, he understood greenskins unusually well.
Those things did eat people, yes, but they would not waste them like this. And they ate while relieving themselves, usually leaving disgusting filth behind in whatever hellish dining hall they turned a place into.
That being the case, this square seemed a little too clean.
As he thought that over, he carefully scanned the surrounding area.
Then suddenly, something caught his attention.
"Interesting..."
With a faint smile, he bent down and slowly picked it up from the ground.
(End of Chapter)
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