Chapter 153: The High-Born Audit
"My Lady! I've brought the military to retrieve you! Open the locks! Open them now!"
The House Steward lunged at the ornate mahogany doors, pounding on the polished wood with frantic, gloved fists.
Kian Voss and the rest of the squad fanned out, rifles leveled at the shadows of the hallway. The interior of the Nightingale Theater was a masterpiece of classical Spire architecture—gilded statues, heavy velvet drapes, and marble columns. But the setting only made the environment more unsettling. The dissonant laughter of the Pox-horde still echoed from the lower levels, clashing with the sterile silence of the upper balconies. It felt like a high-stakes horror pict-reel from the ancient archives.
"Lady Nightingale! It is I, your steward! Open the doors and we can extract to the Mid-Hive!!"
The man kept pounding, but there was no reply from behind the crimson-painted wood.
Kian narrowed his eyes, activating his Mental Clarity (40). He tuned his audio-receptors, filtering out the distant gunfire. He heard it: a faint, rhythmic rustling. There were people inside. More than one.
But despite the steward's cries, the locks remained engaged. Ash (the stocky Corporal) lost his patience.
"Throne's blood, you Spire-bitch! Open the gate! My brothers are dying in the foyer to keep the 'Laughing Ones' off your doorstep! Open up or I'll kick this door into splinters!"
Ash stepped forward, raising the heavy stock of his autogun to smash the lock-casing.
THUD.
The wood groaned. The impact seemed to trigger a panicked reflex from the other side.
Suddenly, the door didn't break—it erupted.
A series of fist-sized holes punched through the wood from the inside, the edges of the punctures glowing with a searing, white-hot heat.
Las-fire.
The sound was a staccato of sharp, electric cracks followed by the scent of ionized air. Someone inside was firing a high-power sun-gun blindly through the door.
The House Steward didn't even have time to scream. A beam caught him center-mass.
BOOM.
The thermal energy of the las-bolt flash-boiled the moisture in his chest. His torso didn't just bleed; it exploded outward in a spray of vaporized blood and bone fragments. He hit the carpet as a hollowed-out husk, his expensive silk suit charred black.
Ash, standing right behind him, took a second bolt to the chest.
CLANG.
The beam slammed into his Grade-4 Carapace plate. The ceramic layer shattered, absorbing the brunt of the kinetic impact, but the residual thermal energy bled through. Ash's lungs were scorched as the air in his chest-cavity was superheated. He collapsed into a fetal position, let out a wet, agonizing groan, and began to cough up flecks of singed tissue.
"CONTACT! FRICHTING CONTACT!" Kian roared, diving for the floor.
The soldiers scrambled to find cover against the marble walls as ruby beams continued to stitch through the doors, raking the hallway at head-height. From inside the room, a woman's voice shrieked—a high-pitched, primal sound of total mental collapse.
"AAAAAHHHHHHH! GET AWAY! STAY BACK, YOU BLOATED MONSTERS! AAAAAHHHHHH!!"
The shooter was hysterical, holding the trigger down on a military-grade Lasgun. Each beam that pierced the wood sent a shower of splinters and heat across the hallway.
Kian looked at Ash, who was twitching on the ground. He's still in the 'Red,' Kian noted. A Regen-Bolt will fix him, but I can't reach him while that lunatic is spamming sun-fire.
The woman inside kept screaming, the sound a continuous, ear-piercing siren of pure idiocy.
"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! EMPEROR SAVE ME! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!"
Kian's blood pressure spiked. His "Cringe-Resistance" was failing.
"Throne rot you... my 'Stupidity-Audit' meter is off the charts!!"
Kian didn't wait for a lull. He shouldered the Squad-Stub (the light machine gun he'd snatched earlier) and leveled it at the door.
"If you won't stop screaming," Kian snarled, "I'll give you a reason to be silent!"
He squeezed the trigger and didn't let go.
DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA!!!!
The 8.9mm full-power rounds chewed through the mahogany like it was wet cardboard. Kian didn't aim for a specific spot; he walked the stream of fire in a wide, horizontal figure-eight, saturating the room beyond.
The hallway was filled with the rhythmic clatter of brass casings hitting the carpet. By the time the hundred-round box went dry, the doors were a lace of smoking holes.
The Las-fire from the room stopped. The screaming died.
Kian tossed the empty LMG aside, drew his autogun, and spat. "Desperate times call for a 'Force-Reset'."
He sprinted forward and slammed his armored shoulder into the ruined doors.
CRASH.
The mahogany shattered. Kian burst into the room, his muzzle scanning the interior.
He was met by a dozen pairs of terrified, wide eyes. These were humans—men and women in the colorful, eccentric livery of theater staff.
Near the door lay the body of a woman. She was clutched around a high-tier Las-pistol, her chest a ruin of machine-gun hits. She was the one who had been screaming. She was dead before she could realize the "monsters" at the door were actually PDF.
As Kian swept the room, a male stage-hand scrambled across the floor, reaching for the fallen Las-pistol. He was acting on pure, panicked instinct.
"Drop it!" Kian barked.
The man didn't listen. His fingers brushed the grip.
POP. POP.
Kian put two rounds through the man's skull. His brains painted the white silk wallpaper behind him.
The survivors—the remaining ten staff members—let out a collective shriek that sounded like an air-raid siren. Kian felt his eardrums throb with the pressure.
"SHUT UP!!" Kian roared, his vox-augmented voice drowning out their cries. "EVERYONE SHUT YOUR TRAPS OR I WILL AUDIT EVERY SOUL IN THIS ROOM!!"
The threat of immediate execution worked better than any sedative. The shrieking died down into a chorus of whimpers and wet sobs. Several of them had lost control of their bladders, the scent of ammonia mixing with the smell of scorched ozone.
Kian lowered his rifle slightly, his face hidden behind his tactical mask. He offered a wide, terrifyingly sharp grin.
"Now then, ladies and gentlemen... let's have a polite conversation. Which one of you is the lovely, talented, and—most importantly—authorized Lady Nightingale?
"PDF Sergeant Voss is here for her extraction. But my patience is thin, and you lot just 'damaged' one of my favorite soldiers."
Kian stepped toward a shivering woman in a tattered evening dress, shoving the warm barrel of his rifle into her mouth.
"I'll give you three seconds to point out the Boss. One. Two. Three..."
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