Warhammer: Empire Reboot

"As for who marries whom, that's the law of natural selection."

Isabella's eyes flickered; Lawson was right.

It was this almost tyrannical power and order that provided her with refuge in the endless darkness.

She leaned forward, nestled in Lawson's arms, wrapped her arms around his waist, and pressed her cheek against his chest.

"All you talk about is the big picture, strategy, racial continuation... as if you were some kind of cold, golden statue."

Isa raised her eyes: "Since you've calculated the marriage between civilians and warriors so meticulously, what about me? You promised me back then that you would bear children with me... How long has it been? When are you going to keep your promise?"

Lawson raised his hand and stroked her long hair, a smile playing on his lips: "The dignified Mother Goddess of Life of the Spirit Race, are you in such a hurry to have my child?"

Isa nuzzled against his chest and said coquettishly, "If I can bear your divine essence, the offspring born will have a life godhood and a weight in the real universe. You can't just make me wait forever, can you? The Lord of the Seal has such a full schedule, when will the time be right?"

"hold on……"

Lawson silently thought to himself, "Wait until the eighth jump is complete."

Isa tilted her head slightly, as if preparing to say something...

Just then, Er Gou stepped in and handed a piece of encrypted data to Lawson.

"boss."

"The main force of the insects has been found."

Lawson reached out and pressed his hand on the data panel.

With a buzzing sound, a scarlet cursor unfolded in mid-air, projecting a row of bold text marked with Imperial high-level tactical codes:

A complete Wotan Alliance has been confirmed destroyed.

[The massive main tentacle group belonging to Leviathan has completed its ecological annihilation.]

The core of the ancestral spirit to which this alliance belongs has suffered irreversible physical and data structure damage, and has fallen into a state of logical chaos.

A small number of surviving clans have been confirmed to exist outside the battlefield.

One of the remaining expeditionary clans has sworn an eternal blood feud according to ancient law; the war against this Tyranid swarm will never end until the last member of the bloodline falls.

"Wotan?"

"Yes, those space dwarfs who live in the core of the galaxy."

Lawson swiped his fingertip downwards on the light screen.

The suspended network topology map vanished instantly, replaced by a star map filled with gravitational distortions of celestial bodies.

Deep within the core of the Milky Way.

For the past few years, the Imperial Sealholder's Office and the Strategic Staff have been searching the Void for the Tyrannical Tentacles that have suddenly broken away from the Imperial defenses.

Now we finally know where they went.

The Imperial high command initially believed that the Zerg swarm was accumulating strength in preparation for the next full-scale outbreak.

Only now has the truth been revealed to Lawson: they have moved to a different hunting ground.

Dozens of biological fleets, enough to engulf dozens of star sectors, plunged headlong into the core of the galaxy, following the hidden gravitational currents.

That was the heartland where the Wotan Alliance had thrived for tens of thousands of years.

In the traditional understanding of the human empire, the Galactic Core is almost synonymous with a voyage to hell.

The density of stars there is suffocating, with black holes, neutron stars, high-energy pulsars, and chaotic gravitational vortices intertwined.

The Wotan clans established their home in that harsh region of the planet long before the ancient Great Crusade.

Lawson pulled up the newly declassified battle record.

In the image, rows of Wotan heavy battlecruisers stretch across the star rings like space fortresses.

On the ground battlefield, the Furnace Guard, clad in power armor, formed a low wall of steel.

All-terrain land fortresses and mining heavy armored vehicles roared forward, while hard light deflection force fields kept Tyron acid at bay.

Wotan is very strong in combat.

But there are just too many Tyronns.

Several main tentacles simultaneously encircled the chaotic gravitational blind spot.

The endless swarm of insects eventually overwhelmed the mining station's ventilation system, and the burrowing creatures gnawed through the earth's crustal shield.

An entire alliance's territory was reduced to a desolate wasteland after months of bloody fighting.

Lawson turned to the last few pages of the report, his smile fading.

What truly drove the entire Wotan Alliance into a frenzy was the Ancestral Core.

In the incomplete record of the holographic projection, the ancient mechanical temple buried deep in the planet's core has been torn apart by chitinous fungal carpets and biological acid.

After suffering irreversible physical damage and synaptic psionic contamination, the ancient supercomputer's data stream fell into a logical dead loop.

For Wotan, the Ancestral Core is far from being a supercomputer in the ordinary sense.

That was the beginning and the end of their civilization.

Each generation of sages, miners, commanders, and craftsmen who pass away, after their bodies decay, upload their life's memories, experiences, technical blueprints, and fragments of personality into the core.

That cold, massive metal structure was their technical database, their ancestral temple, and the spiritual home of the entire alliance.

Even if the Wotans lose a few planets, they can grit their teeth and take them back; even if their fleet is wiped out, the foundries can work overtime to rebuild them.

However, the fact that the entire core of the Ancestral Spirit was devoured by the Zerg swarm to the point of logical collapse was considered extremely serious in the Wotan's belief system.

This is tantamount to an alien horde breaking into their ancestral graves, digging up and crushing the remains of their ancestors in front of all the clansmen, and burning their family genealogy, which has been passed down for tens of thousands of years.

Lawson continued to review the intelligence gathered by the swarm.

In the galactic core, the symbols that originally represented the various clans and alliances are rapidly converging.

The Wotan Alliance, which had fought fiercely for centuries over rare mineral veins or shipping route tolls and remained estranged, ended its internal strife as quickly as possible after receiving news of the destruction of the Ancestral Core.

The warships of the Great Turian Alliance began to assemble at the border.

The high-ranking Karl commander of the Kronus hegemony put aside the mining contracts at hand and directly issued a mobilization order for the entire race.

The Ymir Consortium's forging fleet raised defensive force fields, converting heavy laser arrays originally used for mining planets into main guns for military battleships.

The situation at the heart of the galaxy is rapidly escalating from a localized defensive counterattack into a full-scale holy war waged by the entire Wotan race.

Looking at the red dots that kept lighting up on the star map, Isa asked, "With Wotan's current strength, can it withstand Leviathan's concentrated attack?"

"If the battle lines are stretched out, they won't be able to hold them off."

Lawson pulled up Wotan's industrial and military calculation models.

"Wotan has a strong technological foundation, and in many aspects it has even completely preserved the heavy industry design of the Golden Age Federation of Humanity."

"In terms of the robustness of their equipment and the density of their heavy firepower, they are far superior to ordinary Imperial Legions."

Two sets of cross-sectional diagrams of equipment with different industrial styles were quickly displayed on the light screen.

"The titanium family's military industrial system emphasizes standardization, modularization, drone collaboration, and high-speed mobility."

"Wotan goes to the other extreme. Their equipment is simple and crude in structure, their armor is ridiculously thick, and their weapon systems have a heavy mining and heavy industry style."

As Lawson analyzed the situation, his gaze swept across the diagrams in the appendix of the tactics board.

Suddenly, his gaze fell on a snapshot of a ground battle.

In the center of the image, a fully armed Wotan female warrior is holding a gravity hammer in one hand and a bomb gun at her waist with the other.

She was only about 1.4 meters tall, with broad shoulders and dense, tough muscles under her power armor. Her lower body was as stable as an alloy bunker, and she was unabashedly fierce.

As Lawson watched, a meaningful smile suddenly appeared on his lips.

Upon seeing that familiar smile, Isa immediately stared at him warily: "What strange plan are you hatching now?"

"I just suddenly discovered a very constructive strategic complement."

Lawson solemnly dragged the Wotan female warrior's physical examination data to the center of the light screen.

"Look, although the Wotan people mainly rely on cloning lineages for reproduction, their physiological structure has not lost its natural reproductive function. Moreover, this set of cloned genes has undergone tens of thousands of years of targeted selection in extreme environments, resulting in excessively good physical fitness."

Lawson pulled up a set of physiological indicators: "The degree of bone mineralization in high gravity environments is more than four times that of ordinary people, muscle fiber density is high, internal organs have strong resistance to overload and radiation, metabolism is stable, and more importantly, they have stable emotions and a resilient character."

Isha's wariness grew stronger: "So?"

Lawson casually pulled out a set of Ark Eldar male body structure data and placed it next to the Wotan female warrior.

Two sets of 3D models are suspended in mid-air.

On the left is a tall, handsome, and lithe young man from the Spirit Clan, with a sensitive nervous system and psychic perception.

On the right is a Wotan female warrior who is just over 1.4 meters tall and as sturdy and heavy as an armored wall.

"Gene complementarity, perfect closed loop."

Lawson spoke with the seriousness of someone reporting on a five-year industrial plan at a meeting of the Sealholder's Palace: "Men of the Eldar have long lifespans, high soul strength, keen psionic perception, and a deep understanding of the void dimension, but their fatal flaw is that their bodies are too fragile, their psychological endurance is poor, and their natural reproductive cycle is outrageously long."

"If only I could get together with a girl from Wotan..."

"..."

Isa looked down at the horizontally sized Wotan female warrior model, then looked up at the slender Eldar guard.

"Lord Lawson, my dear..."

Isa raised her hand to rub her temples and said weakly, "Even if our Eldar men have their marriage partners stolen by New Human officers in various Arks, they would never like this type of alien woman."

Lawson scoffed, "Do they still have the right to be picky? Any girl on the Ark who has witnessed the responsibility and physique of the new humans would be willing to go back to serving those pretentious bean sprouts all day long?"

"Wotan girls are straightforward, their families are rich, and their warships are sturdier than the Ark. If they were to get married, they could easily carry them out of danger with one hand under their arms. Wotan girls would be lucky if they didn't mind that they're weak and frail, let alone dare to look down on others."

"you……"

Isa felt a tightness in her chest from his twisted logic.

An image involuntarily formed in my mind: a tall, handsome Eldar ranger being hoisted onto the shoulder of a Wotan female warrior clad in heavy power armor, striding back to the underground fortress...

Isa forcibly banished this absurd image, one that could drive all the prophets in the galaxy mad, from her mind.

She glared at Lawson with annoyance.

"This kind of thing must be based on the complete free will of both parties! You absolutely cannot use administrative power to issue any orders for forced pairing!"