Traveling through time, I'm making pancakes in Warhammer

Chapter 152 Survivors

The rescued people gathered around Howard, constantly calling out the titles imposed on him.

"Messiah."

Howard was so worried that his head was about to explode. He couldn't help but get angry and said, "I told you I'm not the Messiah! Don't call me that!"

After Howard yelled at them, the people around him fell silent.

"Mm...Mr. Howard, it's very dangerous here..." After a long while, someone finally mustered up the courage to say, "Please follow us to a safe place."

"If there is a safe place, how did you get caught?" Howard immediately found the loophole in the man's statement.

"There are too many people in the safe area. There is not enough food and water. People have to go out every day to search for supplies... We are the ones who were sent out today."

"Who sent you out, and who is leading you now?" Howard asked.

"It's Reverend Mr. Francis." The man answered truthfully.

Howard didn't continue to ask where Char or Ivan had gone. Perhaps he already had a rough guess in his mind, but he just didn't have the courage to verify or face it yet.

"Take me to the priest," said Howard.

The rescued people looked at each other and soon they made a division of labor - the little girl Howard met first took him to find the pastor, while the rest of the people dispersed and continued to collect supplies needed for survival.

The little girl led Howard through the crevices of the collapsed ruins like a mole. Several times they had to stop because of the sounds of the Astra Militarum's movements outside the ruins. Several other times, gunshots and screams were heard not far from them.

The girl led Howard all the way and finally climbed into a ventilation shaft.

The ventilation shaft twisted and turned, and went all the way down. After climbing for about half an hour, Howard suddenly smelled a damp stench.

But after smelling this smell, Howard felt a little relieved because it was the smell of a living person, just like the closed classroom in winter when he was in school. The smell inside was also damp, smelly and turbid, but it was precisely because of the large number of people crowded together that the exhaled gas produced this smell.

This at least shows that there are still quite a number of people alive, and his current location is not far from these people.

Sure enough, after Howard smelled the stench, the girl took him to climb more than a hundred meters and they came to the end of the ventilation duct, which was a ventilation grille that was nailed shut.

The girl moved close to the ventilation grille and stretched out her hand to knock rhythmically: short short, short long, short short long, short.

After the knocking ended, about half a minute later, a teeth-grinding friction sound was heard, and the heavy ventilation grille was lifted a little. The girl jumped down first, then stretched out her hand to Howard and said, "Mr. Howard, be careful, it's very high here."

Howard took the girl's hand and carefully stepped on something that was solid but unstable.

It was only after his entire body came out of the ventilation duct that Howard realized he was standing on stacked wooden boxes. The opening of the ventilation duct was about three or four meters above the ground, and piles of wooden boxes were stacked under the ventilation duct as temporary stairs.

It was only at this time that Howard realized that he had come to Ivan's underground laboratory. This laboratory was the place where Arabelle asked him to find Ivan for the first time. Later, he was injured several times and received treatment here.

The previous times Howard came here, the lights were on and the brightness was turned to the maximum, but now it was pitch black. All the experimental instruments and operating tables that Howard had seen before were gone, and even the huge culture tanks were all broken, and the liquid and biological tissue fluid inside had disappeared.

This empty and dark space was crowded with people. They were wrapped in blankets or waste paper to keep warm. There was no communication between them, and they even breathed carefully for fear of making any noise.

With Howard's arrival, these clay-like figures all slowly raised their heads, and then a glimmer of hope ignited in their dim eyes.

"Messiah, it's the Messiah!"

Some people in the crowd cheered softly. Those who were huddled in the corner and trembling, those who were groaning with sad faces, everyone in the laboratory stood up. They slowly formed a circle around Howard and placed the burden of hope on him.

Howard stepped down from the wooden box despite the pressure. He had returned to bring hope to the survivors. He slowly made his way through the dense crowd, heading towards the lab's sole light, where Reverend Francis sat. The Gene Harvester priest, dressed solemnly, held a brass candlestick in one hand and a sacred text in the other, waiting for Howard.

"Welcome back, Mr. Howard." When Howard walked up to him, the pastor calmly opened his arms to welcome him.

"Forget the small talk. I need to know what happened while I was away." Howard got straight to the point.

"After you left, the plague raged again, but the pancakes you left behind had run out. However, thanks to the efforts of Char and the Mechanical Priest, the situation averted its worst," Francis replied. "But some time later, imperial envoys from a distant planet declared that everyone on that planet had been contaminated... To avoid those soldiers, we established a total of thirty-three quarantine points. Excluding those that were discovered, a total of twenty-three remain."

As expected. The Empire has always been ruthless towards those who have had direct contact with demons. Not only because of brutality, but also because mortals who come into contact with demons are truly contaminated and become a potential source of pollution. This cruel rule has been summarized through countless even more brutal tragedies.

There was once an Astartes Chapter that, out of kindness, protected Imperial citizens who were supposed to be purged. As a result, many of those citizens were subsequently corrupted by Chaos, causing serious subsequent pollution and losses.

However, as a normal human being who has not been brainwashed by the Empire, Howard can understand this decision, but he absolutely cannot accept it.

"Where is Char? Where is Ivan? Where are they now?" Howard asked again.

"In order to allow more people to survive, they chose to sacrifice themselves." Francis' response remained calm.

Howard took half a minute to digest and accept the news. Then, he asked the question he wanted to ask the most: "Then...what about Arabelle?"

Francis responded with silence. After a long moment, a look of sadness and helplessness appeared on the face of this usually calm priest.

He took two steps back and pushed open a hidden door, behind which was a passage leading deeper underground.

"Please follow me. Miss Arable is inside."