Warhammer 40: Starting as a Rogue Trader

Chapter 140: Tunnel Worm

On the first day of landing on the surface of Malfi, Norris and the ghosts followed the sewage pipe connecting the hive to the wasteland and entered the bottom nest of the Malfi hive.

Phase Shift allows them to ignore most terrain.

After experiencing the Agathos chicken thief incident, Norris's first worry was whether the nest here would be completely occupied by chicken thieves, just like the nest in Agathos at that time.

These guys are much harder to deal with than Chaos. Their perfect unity and fighting spirit to the last man will make their actions even more difficult.

However, Norris felt more at ease after looking at the ghost beside him and a backpack behind him.

Zerg eggs lay quietly in their backpacks, waiting to hatch.

Norris has seen the planet that the alien insects now occupy.

Gao Yi has named this planet Char, just like the Zerg's home planet in the interstellar space.

The Zerg that covered the entire planet and the Leviathan floating in the void still left a deep impression on him.

Norris thought of Kerrigan, who looked like a girl. No one would have thought that Kerrigan was the real ruler of this terrifying race. Everyone who saw her saw her as a lively and cheerful little girl. She only showed her queen side when she was controlling the Zerg.

As Norris began to explore the bottom nest, he found that the situation here was not much better than being occupied by chicken thieves.

"Doesn't the Governor here send people to clean the bottom nest regularly?!"

Norris couldn't believe what he saw at Malfi's nest.

Even though the area being explored now only occupies a tiny part of the Bottom Nest, it can be said that there is no normal Bottom Nest settlement in these areas.

Almost every settlement has some kind of chaos belief. Norris even saw a few black oil men, and while following these black oil men, he even discovered a blasphemous factory.

Profane production lines are consuming human life, transforming it into weapons and even transforming it into corrupted fighting servants.

From time to time, mutants are captured for sacrifice or even body modification.

It is normal for Chaos Cults to exist in the Base Nest. It would be strange if there were none. Even in Holy Terra, where the God-Emperor resides, there are Chaos Cults in the Base Nest.

But under normal circumstances, the Ministry of Justice or the rulers of the hive city will regularly send teams to clean up the bottom nest and suppress the rampant spread of these cultists or mutants as much as possible.

But it doesn't look like this place has ever been cleared.

Only believers of different evil gods and mutants fight and clash with each other in this nest.

Glades is simply letting these cultists grow stronger.

In half a day, Norris was surprised to find that he had read all the five mainstream beliefs of Chaos, and there were even Undivided Chaos believers who believed in Chaos itself. Wow, Undivided Chaos was rare among these ordinary Chaos cults.

Even the proportion of Chaos Psykers or Chaos Sorcerers here is frighteningly high.

The entire Malfi Hive Base is now like a Chaos Cult Museum, where cults with different ideologies exist under the belief in one evil god.

But no matter what, under the wanton destruction of this group of Chaos Cults, the chaos in the entire base nest was simply outrageous, with unsightly scenes everywhere, which made Norris a little unsure of how to start.
What shocked Norris the most was that he even saw some soldiers in PDF uniforms trading with these cultists.

Various supplies were delivered here to support these cultists.

Instead of attacking these traitors with Ghost, Norris began to look for uninhabited areas suitable for the development of the Zerg.

The good news is that the bottom nest is large enough and has enough uninhabited areas to hide the eggs.

The Zerg are not strong before they form a large scale, and can even be said to be fragile. Once discovered, Norris has no confidence that the hatched Zerg basic units such as the Zerglings can withstand the siege of a large number of cultists.

Hatching high-level Zerg requires considerable time, and Gao Yi cannot afford to wait. "Lord Norris! This area is suitable. We've already explored it, and there are no heretics nearby!"

"Good! Let's begin!"

Norris and others took off their backpacks and placed the alien insect eggs in an abandoned pipe where they were now.

At this time, Kerrigan, who was beside him, also sensed the state of the insect eggs.

"Father, Norris and the others should have finished laying the eggs. I can sense that they are eager to hatch."

Kerrigan's body has grown to about 10 years old at this time, and more and more alien insects are constantly strengthening her psychic power and physical body.

As the number of Zerg increases, the swarm network becomes more and more solid, allowing Kerrigan to remotely hatch some Zerg.

Even though Kerrigan herself is now a powerful psyker, if we were to ask who is the chief psyker of the Monget Dynasty, it would definitely be Kerrigan.

"Kerrigan, hatch those eggs!"

"I know, Father!"

As the hive network began to transmit Kerrigan's orders, the eggs in front of Norris turned into worker bees.

Soon a huge hatching nest slowly took shape in Malfi's bottom nest.

This was the first time the Zerg had truly taken root on a planet ruled by the Warhammer humans.

There are no alien insects even on Agathos. After all, even if the civilians are told that these creatures are obeying Gao Yi's orders, the appearance of the alien insects is too scary, and humans' acceptance of this kind of creatures is still too low.

The fungal mat began to spread throughout the pipes, and metals, discarded industrial wastewater, and various mutated creatures in the bottom nest all became nutrients for the alien insects.

According to Gao Yi's idea, this time the alien insects did not produce worker bees and various military buildings according to the normal development process, but developed slowly step by step.

Even if the Zerg wanted to develop to a scale sufficient to influence the war situation through conventional means, it would take a long time.

As the scale expands, it will inevitably be discovered and a war will break out with the cultists in the bottom nest.

So this time Gao Yi asked Kerrigan to hatch not a large number of Zerglings on Malfi, but a special kind of Zerglings.

All biomass and energy are used to produce special Zerg called Nydus Worms.

Although according to normal settings, these Zergs, like tunnel boring machines, use their extremely strong muscles and sharp teeth to dig tunnels underground, and then form a fast network to transport the swarm.

However, with the support of the system, the in-game effects were once again displayed in the tunnel.

The tunnel worms in two places do not need to be actually connected to each other to directly transport swarms across the planet.

If it could only transport ground units and Zerg units, the Old Ones' Webway could have been retired directly.

However, after Gao Yi's testing, these tunnel worms also have a very fatal weakness, although they can ignore the terrain distance and link the two together.

However, the longer the distance, the smaller the number of swarms that the tunnel worm can transport. Transportation across galaxies will continuously consume the lifespan of the tunnel worm, and their bodies will gradually lose activity. A tunnel worm that can transport swarms over ultra-long distances for a long time and stably requires a large number of queens to be by its side to continuously restore its life.

But even so, the tunnel worms have a limit. Once they reach the limit, no amount of recovery methods can restore their lives. Gao Yi guessed that this was also related to the subspace of this world.

At this time on the planet Char, a large number of Zerg swarms were waiting to be summoned.

Huge tunnel worms have been bred, waiting for the tunnel worms on Malfi to hatch.

(End of this chapter)