Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The jump procedure is entering its final hundredth of a second.

At that moment, Lawson did something that completely exceeded Vespera's and the nuns' common sense.

His innate spiritual energy is being output at 100% full power!

This power did not originate from borrowing from the warp, nor was it observed by the four Chaos Gods.

This is a bio-electromagnetic and mental pulse generated by 110,000 pure human brains in the real material universe through an extremely terrifying accumulation of numbers and resonance of wavebands!

This force was extremely heavy; it was like a solid mountain crashing down on the fragile ice surface at the boundary between reality and the subspace.

An invisible biological pulse, but dazzling like a supernova explosion in terms of psychic detection, erupted from Lawson's body.

It spread throughout the entire sealed room at the speed of light.

It is spinning at high speed, preparing to be pulled into the final teleportation.

Under the direct impact of this massive pulse.

"Buzz...creak!"

The edge of the vortex emitted a screeching sound similar to glass being squeezed by a huge force and on the verge of shattering.

The extremely precise and fragile subspace jump channel had its underlying operating code forcibly disrupted by this unreasonable resonance.

The stability of the channel collapsed instantly.

Unable to complete the final "lock-pull" procedure.

Vespera's translucent body suddenly froze in mid-air.

She got stuck.

This is an extreme form of physical and spiritual suffering that cannot be described in human language.

Half of her body remains anchored by the gravitational pull and physical laws of the material universe.

Meanwhile, her other half of her body was trapped in a warp rift, enduring the relentless tearing of the warp's raging tides.

Two completely opposing forces are using her body as the rope in a tug-of-war.

"Aa ...

Vespera let out an extremely shrill scream, one she had never uttered in her 160 years of calculating life.

Her facial expression was completely distorted and deformed due to the extreme dimensional tearing force.

The left eyeball ruptured due to the pressure difference.

Lawson stepped forward, trudging over the pebbles scattered on the ground.

He arrived at the edge of that extremely unstable subspace rift.

The silver, living metal on the surface of the ceramic armor on his left forearm and palm gushed out wildly like liquid mercury bursting its banks.

Liquid metal covered Lawson's palm.

Lawson's left hand reached directly into the edge of the violently fluctuating subspace rift.

The high temperature and the resistance of the space cutting through it tried to destroy the hand.

Living metal is being consumed and regenerated at an alarming rate.

Lawson precisely grabbed Vespera's translucent, tearing neck through the crack.

The liquid, living metal, like a persistent leech, quickly wrapped around half of Vespera's physical body surface along Lawson's palm.

The living metal instantly hardened, forming an indestructible, absolute physical "anchor" firmly stuck at the boundary between the material universe and subspace.

"Get back here right now."

Lawson was subjected to the immense suction force of the subspace.

They forcibly dragged Vespera's body back into the material universe from the jump portal.

P.S.: Guys, I'll update 1.3 words first, and the remaining 1.7 words this afternoon. I'm off to write now, please vote!

Chapter 106 Lawson, You Were Born to Return to Chaos

Vespera was thrown onto the black marble floor of the secret room like a fish being pulled from the water.

After the living metal was pulled, it automatically retracted into the inner layer of the armor on Lawson's left arm, leaving only marks on Vespera's body.

Her right half resembled a holographic projector with erratic signals, changing from solid to semi-transparent every one or two seconds before switching back to solid.

In that moment of transparency, everyone could clearly see her bones, organs, and blood vessels, which shimmered with an unsettling blue-purple light.

The energy echoes remaining in her body after the subspace phase transition stopped are slowly consuming her life.

Katarina's chainsaw hummed as she pointed it at Vespera's throat.

"Heretical. Let me end her."

Vespera did not look at the nun.

She supported herself with her still relatively normal left arm and slowly rose from the ground. Her movements were incredibly graceful; even as half of her body was dissolving, this woman maintained an aristocratic demeanor.

She stood up straight.

Her long, grayish-white hair fell messily over her shoulders, and her exquisite long dress was creased into irregular wrinkles by the living metal.

But those grey-blue eyes, clear, cold, and ironic, never dimmed for a moment.

She looked at the tiger-striped behemoth that was half a meter taller than her.

Then she laughed.

“Mr. Astartes, the mighty one,”

"As you can see, my body is dissipating. Phase damage is irreversible. I guess I have... ten minutes left? Maybe fifteen minutes."

She glanced down at her translucent right hand, her fingers shifting between reality and illusion: "Would you mind talking to me before I die?"

Lawson looked at her coldly: "I don't think we have anything to talk about."

“No.” Vespera shook his head. “I know a lot about this planet. You do have control of the Department of Justice’s database and surveillance network, which is impressive. But the database only shows the tip of the iceberg. What’s beneath the surface? Who is the real traitor? Who is manipulating everything from the shadows? These things are not in any of the Thinkers’ storage cores.”

The curve of her lips deepened.

"They're in my head."

Lawson had no desire to listen to her rambling.

"Prepare to carry out physical decapitation and extraction of neural cortex data."

Within the same microsecond, swarm intelligence issued a warning.

[A deeply implanted Tzeentch meme logic virus has been detected in the target cerebral cortex and memory hippocampus.]

Forcibly accessing and reading its memories through a swarm network is tantamount to deploying a subspace logic bomb with self-replicating capabilities.

Seeing the red warning on his retina, Lawson had no choice but to suspend his operation.

A dangerous glint flashed in his eyes.

"We almost capsized in the gutter."

The Chaos Space Marine Valentine he extracted earlier was a Chaos veteran who believed in Khorne or was inclined towards pure physical killing.

The brains of such people are filled with pure physical muscle memory and combat diagrams of how to swing a chainsaw axe and how to perform tactical rolls.

That's data that you can use directly.

But the woman in front of me is different.

She is Vespera, a fanatical follower of Tzeentch, the god of knowledge and deception.

The minds of Tzeentch's followers are themselves a labyrinth of cognitive traps.

To try and read the memories of a high priest like Tzeentch is like drinking a cup of concentrated sulfuric acid laced with deadly poison, just to quench your thirst.

Lawson would never make such a losing and extremely dangerous deal.

Lawson was silent for two seconds.

An intelligence broker who has been trading with Tzeentch for 160 years and has infiltrated the power core of the three hives for ten years may indeed have things stored in her mind that the Department of Justice's database can never access.

“Speak,” Lawson uttered a single word.

Vespera turned with satisfaction and walked to a small table in the corner of the secret room, on which sat an opened bottle of Florin red wine and several crystal glasses.

Would you mind if I poured you a glass of wine?

Without waiting for a reply, she picked up the bottle on her own.

Because her right hand was in a semi-transparent state, she could only operate it with her left hand.

The wine makes a crisp sound when poured into the glass.

She picked up the cup and took a sip.

Red wine seeped directly from her translucent right cheek and throat, flowing down her neck and onto her dress like an eerie red waterfall.

Vespera looked down at her skirt, which was soaked with wine, and chuckled softly.

"What a pity, this is from Florin 6741."

Katarina gritted her teeth: "You're wasting your time, heretic."

Vespera finally glanced at the nun.

There was no hostility in his gaze, but rather a hint of genuine appreciation: "Your Highness, your temper may be a virtue on the battlefield, but in intelligence trading, patience is the scarcest currency."

She turned to Lawson and put down her glass.

"The first gift."

Vespera walked up to the cross-sectional diagram of the hive city on the wall, which was marked with hundreds of nodes.

Her left hand slowly traced the silken network, and with each node she touched, she announced a name, position, and type of corruption.

"High Priest of the Corpse Guild, Ulric von Heil. A follower of Nurgle. His workshops add a trace amount of plague catalyst to corpse starch, which is not fatal but causes chronic weakness in those who consume it, making them more susceptible to disease. Of the guild's seven high priests, four are Nurgle, two are Tzeentch, and one is Slaanesh."

Her voice was as flat as if she were giving a weather forecast.

"Senior Judge of the Ministry of Justice, Cyrus Armani. Agent for Tzeentch II. Responsible for adding misleading conclusions to all investigation reports involving high-ranking guild members. He shielded me from at least seven audits."