For some reason, this flyer, which looked like little more than a child's crude doodle, gave Gaia a strange sense of familiarity.
She reached out, ran her fingers over the wall for a moment, and then tore the flyer down.
Gaia did not know why she was doing it, but when that rough-textured sheet of paper rested in her hand, she could faintly feel the psychic energy around her rising and falling in waves.
It was as though some unseen voice was telling her that this flyer was tied to something extremely important.
Solomon caught sight of what she was doing and curiously stroked his pointed mustache, giving this powerful battle-sister a quick up-and-down look before asking in confusion,
"Do you have something that needs fixing?"
Gaia folded the flyer four times and slipped it into an inner pocket of her cloak.
She did not bother explaining herself. Instead, she simply pointed a long finger at him, then at her own head.
"My... head...?"
Solomon froze for a second, then quickly understood what she meant.
"By the God-Emperor, my head is the smartest thing to ever come out of the voidship where I was born. It just happens to get distracted by things of value sometimes."
He rolled his eyes dramatically and spread his hands.
Gaia had neither the time nor the energy to argue with this man, who seemed to exist in a permanent state of quantum uncertainty between reliable and completely hopeless, so she ignored his excuses and continued walking toward the boundary between the city and the outskirts.
The possibility of a lurking cult pressed heavily on her mind, filling her with unease.
Gaia knew all too well what people could become under the influence of such forces.
After all, she had clawed her way out of that kind of hell herself.
Come to think of it, she found it strange that she kept ending up tangled with one cult after another.
Sure, in Warhammer, cults were everywhere, heretics were practically street vermin, and the Age of Apostasy was a heavyweight among heavyweights, but even so, this felt excessive. It was not normal to take one step and find another.
Could it be that some invisible thread linked her to these sects, drawing them together the way Stand users were said to be drawn to one another?
Lost in that thought, Gaia had already left the outer city behind and formally stepped into the outskirts of Hecius.
Although the outskirts of a knight world were usually nowhere near as monstrous as those of a hive world, they were still dangerous places.
For knights and nobles who ruled through divided fiefdoms, as long as the commoners beneath them paid their taxes on time to fill their coffers, and as long as their family's absolute rule and honor remained unshaken, then a few minor outbreaks of violent crime on their lands were of no real concern.
So outskirts like these, effectively belonging to no one, easily became gathering grounds for thugs and criminals.
"And even so, compared to the underhive, this is still a good place to live."
Gaia looked out over the broad green plains dotted with sparse residential clusters and sighed.
Swuvi had a mild climate. Though the small size of its oceans made rainfall uneven, it was still a rare kind of grassland world.
The grass here had undergone slight mutation because of the star's harsh radiation, with tough silica crystals covering much of its surface, but its green color still stirred a deep sense of familiarity within Gaia.
Other than orks, how long had it been since she had last seen green vegetation?
Solomon, too, was shocked by the grass of Swuvi, though unlike Gaia, who was captivated by the landscape, he was more concerned by the fact that the blades of grass here could actually pierce the soles of his sturdy boots.
While admiring the grasslands, Gaia also noticed the strange ruins scattered across the area.
Though only broken bricks and fragments remained, one could still tell that these ruins had once belonged to some vast and towering complex of buildings.
The weight of time seemed to have become something tangible, settling over them in layers.
If Gaia's guess was correct, they had once been built by the Men of Gold who had lived on Swuvi in ages past.
After all, this world had been cut off from the rest of humanity for several thousand years during the Age of Strife, only reconnecting to the wider network of human worlds under the Emperor's light during the Great Crusade.
That monk might not have seemed quite right in the head, but the direction he had given them was correct. In a place like this, filled with traces of Old Night, there was indeed a very high chance that one might run into a grease-monkey from the Mechanicus.
Just as Gaia was about to move closer to one of the ruined structures near the Mechanicus training base to see what she could find, her enhanced senses picked up vibrations running through the ground from far away.
She frowned and looked into the distance.
What kind of thing could possibly shake such a wide stretch of land this clearly?
Very quickly, the tremors grew stronger, until even Solomon, who had been mourning the condition of his boots, noticed them.
"That's weird. Is the ground shaking?"
At the same time, Gaia pinpointed the source of the tremor.
To her surprise, it was coming from exactly the direction they were approaching:
a ruin shaped like the abandoned side hall of an ancient castle.
"Looks like we're not getting around this. Be careful as we move closer. This place isn't as safe as we thought."
Gaia warned Solomon, then began moving in a wide arc with the towering ruined castle as the center of her path.
On a knight world, anything capable of making the ground shake like this was not going to be easy to deal with.
Following behind her, Solomon felt his heartbeat rising in rhythm with the strengthening tremors beneath their feet.
He could not help smacking his tongue.
Though his life had not exactly been short on strange experiences, ever since meeting Gaia, he had begun to feel that the first half of his life had been a little too peaceful.
As the two of them moved, the scene that had previously been hidden behind the towering castle ruins gradually came into view.
Gaia's gaze passed over the old frost-scarred walls and fell on the endless grasslands beyond.
On the far horizon, the star, partially blocked by the giant gas planet and thus appearing as a glowing ring, cast fierce light over the plains in the late afternoon.
And within that scorching radiance, a towering black silhouette strode across the line between heaven and earth.
It looked like a giant god of war marching against the light, as though it alone upheld the boundary between sky and land.
Gaia's pupils reflected the immense figure beneath the halo of the star, and the sheer majesty of its steel body made her heartbeat quicken.
This was the signature creation of a knight world:
an Imperial Knight.
But what made her heart race even more was the fact that thick smoke was pouring from its body.
As a black column of smoke rose from the Knight, Gaia's earlier excitement at the sight of such a machine rapidly sank to the bottom.
That was not just an Imperial Knight.
It was a badly damaged Imperial Knight.
(End of Chapter)
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