The nuns continued to pray, but the words seemed to be growing hollow.
At this moment, slowly, slowly, a certain emotion that should not appear slowly flowed out of them, as if the darkness around them had a mouth full of sharp teeth.
Fear, this emotion is slowly injected into their psychology like poison, but few people can detect it.
Velez's hand tightened around the bolter, and soon she began to hear other noises - it sounded like some kind of sound, like the echoes of hymns and poems in her memory, like this boundless blackness. Water splashing.
Once she thought she heard gunfire and immediately ran towards the source of the gunfire.
But the sound died away before she could run away, and things in the water bumped into her again and again, and she had to stop and kick them away, pushing them aside.
"team leader?"
Behind her, the rest of the team hurried to catch up.
Velez shook his head, indicating that he didn't find anything.
Sometimes, the lights emit a strange glow beneath the water, as if there are many eyeless cave-dwelling creatures beneath the surface baring their hungry fangs.
There seems to be no end here, which is natural. After all, the space station is as big as a city, so there must be...
Then Velez saw something.
It was a pillar, a strong, wide, riveted steel column that stretched all the way up into the darkness.
The appearance of the pillar is completely dark and completely smooth, and there are no ladders or signs on it. There are only glistening frosts as cold as ice and snow.
And some words were engraved on it.
What is it?
Velez blinked, wondering if the darkness was starting to play some trick on her or start teasing her.
But no, she could see nothing in the darkness, the words were like pale, cold shadows, and they felt like they were real.
It read in slanted High Gothic:
The Emperor's light has been extinguished—
Pure, harsh cold ran down Velez's back.
She turned around, instinctively raising the weapon in her hand because of those words, but she couldn't see anything.
Under the weak searchlight illumination, it felt like there were a thousand pairs of eyes and a thousand questions hidden in the darkness, and a thousand invisible tentacles were reaching towards her like ruins hidden in the water.
What's going wrong here?
They found no sign of any crew, no signs of fighting, not even bodies.
Velez tried to tell himself that these words must have been written by some lost crew member, scared and alone, without a pillar of faith.
But what if not?
What if these words were written by something else?
Velez stood there, his heartbeat began to accelerate, and the ripples on the path he had just walked on had returned to calm.
She stared at the water, alert for any waves or ripples on the surface, and then she used the radio channel to contact the other teams, but there was only a crackling sound - a static murmur occupied her head and chest, and the adrenaline in her body began to affect her. Scream, tell her to hurry up!
The nun instinctively felt that there was something near her——
Something that knew exactly where she was.
But Velez is not afraid, for she has sisters at her side to guard her back and bolters to destroy her enemies.
Because the Emperor would never abandon them.
Suddenly, there was another sound of splashing water, and it was getting closer and closer.
It’s an unmistakable sound…
There really is something else here!
The blood flowing through her ears began to boil. She nervously raised her ears and listened carefully. She was very sure that the sound this time was definitely real. It was not those suspicious sighs or the conjectural sounds in her mind.
Holding the bolter like a talisman, she prayed to the Emperor's Light and His Mercy.
"keep alert."
The procession of nuns paused, all nerves trembling.
Suddenly, there was another splash, a tiny ripple of water, like a windless whisper across the surface of the black water, mocking the narrow range of illumination provided by the nun's armor.
【You cannot forgive them...】
The litanies came back to Velez like a flood, filling her mind with the light that symbolized courage. Only strength and courage are the best weapons in the darkness...
Wow——
The voice came again, coming from her right.
"I am a servant of the eternal light. I have no fear, no fear of alien species, no fear of heretics, no fear of creatures from the depths of destruction..."
Reciting the war prayer silently, Velez clenched the weapon in his hand and moved forward.
Soon she found a second beam, also engraved with words, but this time the words were jagged with anger and pain, and shorter.
Save us – that’s what it says.
Save you from what?
She turned around again, once again confused by those words, and the darkness tried to invade her mind like a plague.
What happened to this empty space station?
Velez tried to stay calm. She reviewed the team's status information again. Everyone was fine, but their breathing and heart rate were generally faster.
They haven't found any bodies so far, at least not here.
The nausea returned, the back of her throat stung again, and images of rotting corpses floating on the water without eyes flooded into her mind, those exposed bones, tangled piles of wires, and clumps of rotten and bloated flesh. Again and again.
She could see the ripples rising in the water for a moment, and could hear them gently lapping against the beams made of cold steel.
No matter what it was, the other person was very close to her.
Then, finally, she saw the extremely faint glow of the light.
The light came from above, from some channel, at an incredible height above her head, but it did not shine directly on the water in the bilge. There was something else in its path—something very large.
At first she couldn't make it out, it looked like a blurry image of something huge and bulky, but as she got closer she realized what it was.
It was a pile of things, roughly in the corner of her head. She stopped, her mouth filled with nausea and discomfort.
Then the armor's light illuminated something grotesque: corpses, bloated, expressionless, decaying corpses, hundreds of them.
"Oh my God!"
The young nuns all screamed in surprise, some covered their mouths, and looked at this scene with pale faces.
Velez stood still, she could see the broken and rotten badges on the corpses, and her heart tried hard to pray - for them, for herself.
But she couldn't speak.
Then, she stepped forward. Wherever the armor's illumination reached, she could only see a few barely intact faces - young officers, almost only older than boys, men wearing torn imperial robes, many Servitor, rusty and motionless.
What was left of their flesh and blood was rotten and they had been dead for some time.
Suddenly, a deep and loud laughter made her turn around.
It was a woman, but she didn't have the breath of a living person. She was wearing a tattered officer's uniform, but now it looked more like a dirty rag.
Velez noticed that the other person seemed to have a collar around his neck, and that his whole body exuded a cold, hateful aura.
If I had to describe it, I can only say that it is like the soul being sealed in ice - but this description is not suitable.
Velez couldn't express in words what she really felt. She had captured many witches, but none of them felt as threatening as this woman did.
