Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The mortality rate is extremely low.

But it was enough to plunge millions, or even tens of millions, of ordinary people living together into a state of absolute, irrational panic and stampede.

Panic spreads, and the violent fluctuations in her soul will provide her crystal ball with a final, enormous amount of energy.

Within Vespera's network of associates, the 12 most core high-ranking members each held control of key infrastructure and water purification hubs within the three hive cities.

Their composition is complex.

Some are technocrats who have been bought off by interests and power.

Some were elderly mechanical engineers whose lives had been extended by Tzeentch's power for decades. Others were even, on the surface, the most devout bishops of the state religion, responsible for daily scripture recitation.

Communication is the biggest obstacle.

Vespera knew that Astartes had taken over the Ministry of Justice.

Any form of electronic communication or encrypted telegram will be instantly intercepted by the Ministry of Justice's monitoring network.

She couldn't use psionic communication either, as the fluctuations in the warp would immediately alert high-level psionicists or that mysterious Astartes.

She chose an extremely ancient communication method that was purely based on mechanical transmission.

Vespera took out a specially made solid brass resonator weighing one kilogram from inside his robe.

She walked to the wall at the deepest part of the secret chamber, a wall that connected to the thickest main load-bearing steel frame of the hive.

This steel frame, several thousand meters long, runs through the upper and lower levels of the Nest City.

She lifted the brass resonator and slammed it against the cold, load-bearing wall.

The vibrations travel at the speed of sound along the centuries-old steel skeleton of the nest city.

A specific tapping frequency, a specific time interval, and a specific encoding pattern.

In the background mechanical noise of the vast city, this tiny vibration was extremely difficult to detect.

Only those who have a pre-existing brass resonator of the same frequency and attach it to a specific load-bearing column can receive this signal through resonance.

despair--

Pause for two seconds.

Tap tap—

Pause for one second.

despair--

Pause for three seconds.

Ta-ta-ta.

A simple four-stage impact.

In the party's codebook, this vibration represents only two words.

"implement."

The vibrations traveled upwards along the main steel frame of the deep-seated nest, at a speed of 5,100 meters per second.

It penetrated the waste liquid pool of the lower nest, crossed the explosion-proof layer at the junction of the middle and lower nests, and reached the key industrial and life support nodes of the middle nest.

This series of taps, based on specific frequencies and time intervals, is captured by twelve brass resonators pre-attached to the load-bearing columns. The reeds inside the resonators resonate at the same frequency, triggering miniature mechanical latches.

The latches popped open, and the twelve accomplices, at different coordinates, received Vespera's final execution orders.

The operation begins.

Twelve accomplices, located at different coordinates, received Vespera's final instructions and simultaneously activated four layers of devastating sabotage networks:

Three undercover members of the Mechanical Cult used super-acid capsules to precisely corrode the core bearings of the main atmospheric processors in three Nest Capitals.

Within fifteen minutes, the units experienced a series of violent mechanical explosions and shut down. The oxygen concentration in Zhongchao began to steadily decline, while the carbon dioxide concentration soared.

Four accomplices deliberately created a multi-million-volt ultra-high-voltage short circuit by disabling overload protection at a major power substation in Zhongchao. The cascading failure triggered a series of explosions at secondary substations.

In just three minutes, more than 70% of the industrial and residential areas in Zhongchao lost power and were plunged into absolute darkness.

Two senior technicians activated a pre-planted logic bomb. Within ten seconds, the fiber optic switching module overheated and burned out due to high-frequency micro-switching. Zhongchao's wired communication, emergency broadcasting system, and administrative command network were instantly paralyzed, and evacuation guidance channels were completely cut off.

The final step was the most insidious part of Vespera's plan. Three accomplices abused their high-level authority to activate the highest level of isolation protocols. Fifty-ton adamantite gates crashed down, forcibly separating and sealing millions of civilians and workers into completely sealed, powerless, and oxygen-deprived cages.

More than fifty bribed black market brokers and gang leaders were involved.

The lower-ranking agents, the instant the power went out and the gates fell, began spreading the same message among the dense crowd: "The plague in the bottom nest has breached the defenses, and the poison gas is spreading upwards."

Under conventional imperial logic, intimidation of the lower classes is unlikely to induce devastating panic among the apathetic hive workers.

However, at this point, the physical and physiological environmental variables have undergone drastic changes.

This rumor became the perfect match to ignite this sealed pressure cooker.

Nest No. 3, the highest level secret chamber in the Spire District.

Vespera's lips curled back into that confident smile.

She mentally rehearsed her strategic plan.

First, the scale of the riots in the bottom nest reached tens of millions.

The force of this impact was terrifying. In order to defend the boundary between the middle and lower nests, Astartes must have already committed all his elite troops to the front line of the bottom nest.

She confirmed this through snippets of information intercepted by a PDF military advisor within her party.

The main force is conducting intensive mopping-up operations deep within the enemy's territory.

Our forces have been completely tied down.

Command of the planet's PDF army has been taken over by that Astartes.

This means that without explicit instructions from the Astartes, officers at all levels of the PDF dared not independently carry out large-scale troop movements.

Meanwhile, the Astartes was deeply mired in the command quagmire of the bottom nest.

Even if Astartes discovered the anomaly in the Middle Nest and wanted to mobilize troops, it wouldn't be easy.

Zhongchao is a purely industrial and residential area, not a military fortress.

The PDF forces stationed in Zhongchao are extremely weak, consisting of only a small number of security maintenance troops.

The main force had already been transferred to the bottom nest defense line or the outer wilderness to deal with the remaining Greenskin soldiers.

If Astartes wants to withdraw its main force from the bottom nest defense line or the outer wilderness to reinforce the middle nest.

The Oberlus Nest is a magnificent structure that reaches tens of thousands of meters in height.

Large-scale vertical troop movements rely on heavy-duty elevators and main roads.

The travel time alone would take at least two hours.

Vespera arrived at the final mathematical conclusion:

Within this absolute response window of four to six hours.

Zhongchao is in a vacuum state of anarchy and military absence.

She doesn't need to kill everyone in the nest; she just needs to let panic spread within the confined space.

In just a few hours, stampedes, lack of oxygen, infighting, and equipment explosions could kill as many as 50 million people in China.

Fifty million souls died in utter despair.

The resulting Soul Despair value is enough to fill the gap left by the failed Underworld Ravage uprising.

Not only can it repay the debt to the Weaver of Fate, but it can also grant her the additional blessing of the Great Demon.

All of these deductions are absolutely correct and flawless within the conventional logic of the Warhammer universe.

Each hypothesis is based on precise calculations of the empire's military deployment.

Except for one extremely fatal, illogical variable.

Vespera didn't know.

Unbeknownst to her, Lawson had spread a total of 80,000 invisible eyes across the planet.

What they see, Lawson can see in the same microsecond.

Unbeknownst to her, the Swarm Intelligence supercomputer, composed of tens of thousands of brains connected in parallel, could complete the "discovery-analysis-upload-decision" process that she thought would take four hours in just 0.2 seconds.

What she didn't know was that in the underlying logic of Lawson's system, there was a god-like function called static force field that allows for access regardless of distance.

This feature can break the time limit for vertical maneuvering of the nest city.

Within five seconds, a fully armed Astartes-level army can be moved directly from the bottom nest to any coordinate in the middle nest.

Nest No. 1, the inner nest of the city, is the E-7 large-scale laser battery factory area.

This is a giant workshop covering an area of ​​more than ten square kilometers.

The dome is forty meters high.

Tens of thousands of workers are engaged in intensive assembly line operations here.

Worker Li Geer stands in front of the No. 44 injection line.

He has been working 14 hours of intense labor today.

During the siege, the Governor's Office issued wartime production orders.

The factory operates on a three-shift system with seamless coordination. The required production volume of laser batteries has quadrupled.

Liger's hands were covered with blisters from the high-temperature coolant, his eyes were dark-rimmed, and his muscles were in a state of severe lactic acid buildup.

But he dared not pause, much less complain.

The workshop director read out the decree over the loudspeaker: those who neglect their duties during wartime will be punished as treason and thrown directly into the nest to feed the mutants.

He mechanically operated the robotic arm, preparing to pour high-energy coolant into the high-temperature resistant casing of a laser battery.

Sudden.

Riegl felt a slight distortion in his vision.

He stared at the stainless steel injection nozzle in front of him.

Due to the sub-spatial microscopic interference of the crystal dust, his optic nerve transmitted incorrect image signals to the cerebral cortex.