Warhammer: Hail to the Void Lords!.

Chapter 934 (08.933): 'Slender Fingers Push the Earth'

The Tribunal, as the only oversight body in the entire Empire that enjoys near-absolute authority on the loosely defined star map of the human world, has unquestionable authority.

Faced with the witness of the inquisitor's rose-knot ornament, even the ancient machine spirit of this remote, isolated storage planet on the spiral line had to awaken from its slumber and humbly submit to the will of the God Emperor's agent.

"System privileges have been taken over. Let me see..."

Horatio looked up at the dozen or so huge and old-fashioned CRT screens hanging in front of him.

After a hiss of electricity, they lit up one by one, with the surging data streams on them like a green waterfall, eventually stabilizing to reveal a macroscopic tactical map covering the entire surface of the planet.

He quickly used the location coordinates to find a detailed view of their section on one of the screens.

“This is it, DT-037,” he said to Thee, pointing to the area on the screen divided by a fine grid. “It’s divided into 5 by 5, a total of twenty-five controllable sub-segments.”

“Great. Now we need to figure out how to use this thing. I’ll give it a try.”

They walked up to Horatio, a hint of youthful curiosity and eagerness in his eyes.

"wait!……"

She barely hesitated before raising her slender finger and casually pressing down on one of the squares representing the distant desert.

drop!
After a crisp confirmation tone, the entire control room fell into dead silence, with only the deep hum of the Thinker Array core, like the breathing of a giant, remaining.

"..."

Horatio and They exchanged bewildered glances. They looked around warily, but the control tower remained motionless and unresponsive.

“Well, okay, no response,” she shrugged slightly awkwardly, as if her earlier rash action was insignificant. “Maybe I did it the wrong way.”

As she spoke, she prepared to press the next button.

“I suggest,” Horatio’s voice was calm and restrained as he reached out to stop They’s next attempt, “that we should first extract the relevant standard operating procedures from the memory circuits of those dead tech priests. The complexity of this system far exceeds our imagination.”

But this time, before Thee's finger could touch the screen again, the earth began its response.

At first, it was just a very slight tremor coming from deep within the floor, as if some ancient behemoth had turned over in the planet's mantle.

Immediately afterwards, the tremors intensified, and the entire control tower began to shake.

"Wh...what's wrong...?" Tei's voice was tinged with tension as she instinctively grabbed the control panel beside her to steady herself.

The two of them turned to look out the window at the same time. In the distance, the sandy land, that golden sea stretching to the horizon in the dim light, was now churning violently like boiling water.

Huge sand dunes began to collapse and sink at a visible speed. Finally, amidst a series of earth-shaking, teeth-grinding roars, the earth split open with a bottomless wound.

The quicksand, like a golden waterfall bursting its banks, cascaded down from the edge of the crack, creating a magnificent chasm stretching for hundreds of miles across the vast expanse of yellow sand.

"Hehehehe! I'm number one! I'm number one!!! Waaaaagh!!"

Meanwhile, in the desert to the southeast, a bloody race between the green-skinned soldiers is in full swing.

Countless go-karts, cobbled together from scrap metal, fury, and pure violent aesthetics, are roaring toward the energy hub tower.

Their goal is clear: to wipe out the small fry in the tower and steal everything of value they can.

The lead go-kart was incredibly fast, its body smeared with crooked skull and crossbones symbols in blood. The green-skinned driver was clearly a master, weaving through the congested traffic with near-mad skill, brutally smashing aside any rivals who dared threaten its lead with its added ramming horn and chainsaw on the front, taking the lead by a wide margin.

In the Green Man's creed, falling behind means only being able to pick up the scraps left over by others, which is an unbearable disgrace for any ambitious "speed demon"!
However, perhaps due to the bumps of the vehicle itself, these beasts, immersed in the thrill of racing, plundering, and violence, were completely unaware of the earth's tremors, not to mention that beyond the massive sand dune ahead, the once solid ground had become a trap leading to hell.

"Charge, kids!!! Waaaaagh!!"

The lead green-skinned beast, riding its steel monster, charged at full speed to the top of the sand dune.

Due to the immense inertia, the entire vehicle was lifted into the air.

In that instant, it and its crew roared with excitement in mid-air, the front of the vehicle pointing high into the smoke-blackened sky.

However, when the vehicles reach the apex of the parabola and begin to slowly descend, the scene before them changes.

Ahead lay no longer the familiar golden sand, but a bottomless, massive ravine with edges as sharp as if carved by a knife and axe.

"Waaaaagh!! Ahhhhhh!!!"

The Greenskin's signature battle roar, without warning, turned into a scream mixed with astonishment and fear in a mere second.

Immediately afterwards, one after another, green armored vehicles, like a broken string of beads, flew out from the top of the sand dunes and plunged headlong into the dark ravine.

The vehicles in front perfectly blocked the view of the vehicles behind. By the time they realized that the horizon had suddenly disappeared and turned into a huge square abyss, it was too late—the huge ravine, tens of kilometers long, wide, and high, completely blocked all their maneuverability.

Those green-skinned vehicles with better-modified braking systems, or those that simply used "original" vehicles stolen from the Sintira flintlock regiment, even if they managed to stop at the edge of a cliff, were quickly rear-ended by their comrades who couldn't stop in time.

More and more lumps of iron blocked the edge of the cliff, piling up higher and higher, until finally, a super-powerful siege truck crashed into the very center of this pile of steel debris like a cannonball.

The critical point has been breached.

With a crash, the small steel mountain, made up of countless green armored vehicles and tanks, began to irreversibly slide down the cliff.

In their desperate fall, in their final moments, these green-skinned orcs finally saw what lay beneath the abyss.

Those are mountain-like "pillars" made up of countless huge shipping containers, supporting the underground structure of the continental plate, which is made entirely of metal.

Almost half of the tithes collected by the Calicus sector are piled up underground on this planet, enough to completely hollow out its interior.

The entire planet, like a magnificent underground anthill, has been transformed into the ultimate fortress dedicated to storage. Machinery manipulates the movement of landmasses to move and redeploy resources—much like carrier-based aircraft moving back and forth between the hangar and deck.

Minerva, on the other hand, is a magnificent, enormous warehouse.

Before they were smashed into a pile of mangled flesh, they managed to reach their "dream paradise"—an underground labyrinth filled with endless resources.

“It seems to be a transmission delay in the mechanical structure.” Horatio looked out the window at the spectacular and terrifying scene and calmly analyzed, “To drive such a huge landmass, countless parts need to work together, and energy transfer and mechanical response both take time.”

“But this means that all of these sections are adjustable! Horatio, look! These control buttons!” There was an almost fanatical excitement in Thee’s eyes. She pointed to the densely packed, shimmering buttons and sliders on the control panel, her voice trembling slightly with excitement.

“Let’s take a look.” Horatio’s gaze sharpened. “Perhaps this thing can allow us… to turn the tide of the entire battle.”

But the premise is that we won't recklessly manipulate the market, causing our reinforcements on the way to suffer the same fate as these green-skinned soldiers.

(End of this chapter)