"Tap, tap, tap..."
Hurried footsteps rang out across the upper deck. As senior deckhands and crew hurriedly scrambled out of the way, Gaia tore through the corridor at full speed like a human-shaped hurricane.
Just moments ago, after witnessing something deeply strange, it had felt as though something had struck the center of her heart. Boundless unease had surged over her like a tidal wave.
At her ears, the arguments of the unseen things grew sharper.
Mad laughter and shrill mockery rose and fell without pause.
Grinding her teeth, she ignored the noise as best she could and poured all her strength into her sprint.
Her destination was the Navigator Sanctum.
Mitchell had shown no outward sign of anything wrong, and according to what he had said earlier, following the chart had indeed brought them through without encountering any obstacles.
But when everything that could be observed appeared normal, then the only remaining unverified possibility was the truth.
If neither the route nor the bridge had a problem, then the most likely place for something to have gone wrong was the Navigator Sanctum, cut off behind layers of psychic shielding.
She raced forward, fighting for every second.
If things really were as she suspected, then the Spear of Destiny might already be facing its greatest crisis...
...
The boy held the exquisite ship model high in his hands, letting it trace a graceful arc through the air.
The man in the shining clothes had given him the model, so he was sure the man had to be a good person.
He wanted to tell his mother, Look, I've become a captain.
But his mother gave him no chance to speak.
The gaunt woman was like a maddened lioness, dragging him by the shoulder blades, shoving people aside as she charged toward the dark corner that could barely be called home.
The boy was hauled along like a burlap sack, almost stumbling several times under the brutal force.
What confused him, though, was that his mother was not taking him home.
Where were they going?
He got his answer soon enough.
By the great recycled-water basin, the woman's bony hand suddenly shoved him down hard.
"Why? Why didn't you make him give me what I wanted?"
"You useless thing. You parasite. You filthy little bastard!"
The woman screamed hysterically, her sharp nails tearing open his shirt and leaving bloody marks across his frail chest.
The boy stared blankly at her.
He did not know why his mother was angry, but he guessed that she wanted something.
So with trembling little hands, he held out the finely crafted ship model to her.
The woman froze for a moment.
She stared fixedly at the small hand reaching toward her, her eyes like those of a beast.
With a shriek, she slapped the model away.
The boy watched as his ship made its final flight through the air, then plunged into the swirling basin nearby.
In the next instant, two hands clamped tightly around his throat.
A burning wave of suffocating pain exploded through him, as if his lungs had been set on fire.
"I wanted money! I wanted all the money that man could never spend!"
"You can't bring me wealth at all, you damned bastard!"
The boy looked at his mother as she screamed and tried to comfort her in silence.
I'll earn money... I'll earn lots and lots of money...
So please... don't look at me like that... Mother... smile... love me, just once...
His right hand stretched out toward the little ship model, trying to save it from the whirlpool.
But he could do nothing.
He could not save the little ship, could not save himself, and could not save the woman who could barely be called his mother.
He was not a noble, not a captain, and not Mordecai...
...
"Captain! Captain!"
Urgent voices broke out one after another on the bridge.
The abnormal uproar jolted Solomon awake from his drowsy haze.
He rubbed his temples and rose from the captain's chair with some effort.
"What happened? Why are you all yelling like this is a funeral?"
He yawned and asked irritably.
"Captain, something has appeared ahead that isn't on the star chart."
One crewman answered in a trembling voice.
"This is the Warp. A few minor changes are normal. Why are you panicking so much?"
"Fine, fine. Let me see what's going on."
He strode over to the auspex display, and the moment he saw what was on the screen, his eyes locked in place.
In the next instant, he threw himself at the controls, heedless of the risk of offending the machine-spirit, and frantically ordered repeated scans.
But no matter how many times he rescanned, the result did not change.
There were nine enormous red markers slowly moving around the ship.
According to the scan returns, they were nine asteroids.
Together they formed the shape of a fishhook, slowly circling the Spear of Destiny.
And at that moment, they had already reached the very end of the Path of Fate on the chart. Yet according to that same chart, there should have been nothing there at all.
"Captain, does this still count as a minor change?"
The crewman asked weakly.
"Minor, my ass! Why didn't you steer around them the moment they showed up?"
Solomon roared furiously.
"But... just like the ghost-ship graveyard from last time, they appeared all at once."
The crewman said in a low voice, cold sweat beading on his forehead.
That sentence plunged Solomon straight into icy dread.
This kind of phenomenon was clearly a case of overlapping spaces and scrambled positions.
A Warp fold.
He rushed to the cogitator displaying the star chart and stared at every line and mark with bloodshot eyes.
No matter how he looked, there was no indication whatsoever of a Warp fold at the end of the Path of Fate.
Then, under his trembling gaze, the dots and lines that had formed stars and Warp lanes, as well as the words that labeled them, began to writhe and shift as if alive.
They twisted and recombined, turning into venomous mocking phrases, and finally into grotesque laughing faces that filled the entire cogitator array.
A piercing laugh, painful enough to split open the skull, blared across the broadcast system and echoed through every section of the Spear of Destiny.
On the lower deck, the daemon watched the workers around it collapse one by one in agony. Even as it absentmindedly tightened a loosened relay bolt on a power cable, it threw back its head and laughed.
"Hahahahahahahahaha!"
At the same time, the Spear of Destiny drifted into the center of the nine asteroids.
Through the daemon's advance preparations, these celestial bodies from the far side had all been drawn from different regions of the Warp and pressed down upon the nine densest knots of fate in this place.
And every one of those threads was connected to everything aboard the Spear of Destiny.
Every object had reached the position assigned to it. At that moment, the ends of their fates overlapped.
Under the force of immense causality, the trembling of destiny triggered a resonance of vast psychic energy in the region, and a colossal formation like a giant spiderweb took shape.
The boundless power of fate crossed and wove through it, and beneath this nearly natural ritual array, the normally chaotic Sea of Souls began to undergo a shocking transformation.
A massive Warp vortex was taking shape.
In truth, with the power it possessed, there had already been countless ways for it to send the Spear of Destiny plunging into an endless abyss the moment it had boarded the ship, reducing every ignorant human on board to another fragment of the higher realm.
But in order to please the supreme being upon the Crystal Palace, it had to offer the sacrifice through a special ritual, through a perfect scheme.
"And everything is proceeding according to plan!"
The daemon threw down the wrench in its hand and spread both arms, ready to welcome the instant the sacrifice was made.
The process had met with a few setbacks, but the end result was now certain...
(End of Chapter)
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