Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The first thing they did upon returning to Planet One was to dock and resupply.

What supplies are needed? Ammunition, fuel, food, replacement parts, and crew replenishment.

Who will carry out resupply? Dockworkers will load and unload ammunition and supplies. Technicians will repair damaged equipment. Newly recruited crew members will replace those who have been killed in action. Newly recruited slaves will fill the boarding holds.

Each of these people could be a suicide soldier.

stevedores, skilled workers, new crew members, slaves.

Once enough suicide soldiers board the warship under these identities, the rest will be simple.

Control the engine room, weapon array, bridge, and life support systems.

By the time the actual crew realized what was happening, all the key parts of the warship had already changed hands.

However, this plan has one prerequisite.

The suicide soldiers who board the warship must be able to operate it.

If you capture the bridge but no one knows how to operate the ship, or if you control the weapon array but no one knows how to aim, then capturing the ship is meaningless. You may have grabbed a gun, but you don't know how to pull the trigger.

Lawson turned to look at the other side of the holographic projection table. There, a live feed of the dock area on Planet Three was displayed, showing three thousand non-combatant suicide soldiers learning warship operation techniques in four docks.

Not fast enough.

Lawson used swarm intelligence to send a command toward the dock.

Learning priorities adjusted.

Engine and weapon systems should be prioritized, followed by navigation systems. Communication and shield systems can be given less priority. In the initial stages of capturing a ship, being able to operate and fight is more important than being able to communicate and defend.

At the same time, an additional 1,000 non-combatant soldiers were sent to the shipyard for training.

The total number of learners increased from three thousand to four thousand.

The fusion efficiency of swarm intelligence increases exponentially with the number of learners; four thousand people learn simultaneously, accumulating experience.

Then, the data is cross-referenced, verified, and integrated using swarm intelligence.

By the time the fleet returns, each of these four thousand suicide soldiers will possess all the skills to independently operate a standard Imperial warship.

This skill can be instantly applied to any newly created assassin.

We can have as many qualified crew members as we need.

Lawson took a deep breath, suppressing his inner turmoil. He decided to take it slow and not rush things.

First, let your eyes see everything clearly; first, let your ears hear everything clearly.

Then, at the right moment, the knife falls.

P.S.: 3 words updated, please vote!

Chapter 118 Even the Emperor Enjoys Watching Me Raise Green-skinned Dogs

The focus of the infiltration needs to be adjusted.

Lawson issued new deployment orders to the assassin network on Planet One.

The focus of infiltration will shift from the interior of the hive city to the periphery, including rail ports, dock maintenance areas, ammunition depots, fuel storage facilities, and crew recruitment stations.

These areas are the core of the fleet's replenishment operations after returning to port, and also the entrances for suicide missions to board the ships.

The dock area needs more manpower.

The demand for porters, welders, and crane operators will surge during fleet resupply periods.

Planet One's labor market was riddled with problems due to Krauser's death quota system, with skilled workers dying in large numbers in the arena, and severe labor shortages in various industries.

The task of the suicide squad was to fill these gaps, appearing discreetly where manpower was most needed.

But what if the existing gap isn't big enough?

Lawson's lips twitched slightly.

Let's make it bigger.

In the shipyard repair area of ​​the fourth hive, a small-scale brawl inexplicably broke out, resulting in three senior welders being dragged into the arena by the Bloodsteel Legion on the grounds of disturbing the peace, leaving the three welder positions vacant.

A minor sealing defect in the fuel storage facility of City Two caused a slow leak of plasma fuel, leading to an emergency lockdown of the entire storage area and a complete evacuation. After the lockdown was lifted, facility management discovered that the existing security inspection team was severely understaffed and urgently needed replacements.

These accidents were all minor.

So small that it wouldn't attract the attention of any higher-ups. So small that it would seem like an ordinary accident happening every day on this decaying planet.

But each accident created a breach in a critical location.

And the suicide squad will fill these gaps.

As the depth of penetration increased, the full picture of this Khorne planet was being peeled away bit by bit before Lawson's eyes.

The ruling structure of Planet One was far more sophisticated than Lawson had initially envisioned.

Krauser wasn't just a slacker who only knew how to chop and slash. If he were, he would have ruined this planet of 18 billion people long ago. He was a butcher, no doubt, but he was a butcher with a methodology.

The Ministry of Justice has been completely transformed.

The enforcers are no longer called enforcers; they are now called skull judges. Their duties are to act as judges in the arenas of each hive city, confirming deaths, counting skulls, and calculating death quotas.

All crimes—theft, fraud, fighting, even peeping at the neighbor's wife taking a bath—have only one form of punishment: entering the arena.

The victim and the perpetrator stand facing each other, each holding a weapon; the one who survives is innocent.

The one who died? His skull was included in the residential area's monthly quota.

The evil of this system lies in its efficiency: gang feuds, neighborhood disputes, and factory accidents can all be channeled into gladiatorial combat. Civilians resolve their own problems, death quotas are automatically fulfilled, and Khorne's blood sacrifices continue unabated.

Based on the current mortality rate and natural population growth rate, the population of Planet One will fall below the critical threshold of six billion in twenty-three years. At that time, the labor force will be insufficient to maintain industrial capacity, and the entire planet's economic cycle will collapse.

But Krauser clearly didn't care about what would happen 23 years from now; Khorne's followers never made long-term plans.

Another noteworthy discovery is the Dark Mechanicus.

Planet One is able to maintain such a strong industrial and military production capacity entirely thanks to these corrupt mechanical priests.

They occupied a vast industrial zone between Hive City 1 and Hive City 3, a region known as the Furnace Belt.

The Empire's orthodox Mechanicus worships the god of machines, a technological deity.

They regarded technology as sacred dogma, and every manufacturing process was accompanied by strict prayers and rituals. Innovation was taboo. Questioning the dogma was heresy. At the heart of their doctrine was preservation—preserving ancient knowledge, preserving the STC template, preserving the last technological spark of human civilization.

The Dark Mechanicus is the opposite of this mirror.

They worship knowledge itself, or more accurately, forbidden knowledge.

Subspace technology, demon engines, extreme experiments in human modification, and the forced fusion of soul and machine—areas considered supremely forbidden by orthodox Mechanics—are precisely the research directions most enthusiastically pursued by the Dark Mechanics.

The Dark Mechanicus branch on Planet One calls itself the Ironforging Guild.

Approximately three thousand Dark Tech Priests control at least two hundred large manufacturing workshops.

They provided repair and modification services to Krauser's fleet. In exchange, Krauser allowed them to manage the Forge Zone independently and provided them with experimental materials and living people on a regular basis.

The Iron Forging Corps possesses a remarkably high level of technical expertise. The fact that their five warships could maintain basic combat capability for two years of fighting in the Klein system is inseparable from their maintenance efforts.

According to Swarm Intelligence's assessment, their technological reserves may include several manufacturing techniques that have been lost to the Imperial Orthodox Mechanicus.

These are all technologies that Lawson will eventually have to acquire.

Another force has caught Lawson's attention.

The assassins spotted several figures wearing dark gray power armor on the outskirts of the first hive city's spire.

The shoulder armor was painted with a deliberately worn but still recognizable emblem: an iron fist crushing a bone.

The swarm intelligence compared this emblem with the Astartes Chapter emblem in the system's database.

Match result: Iron Warriors Legion.

However, database records show that the official paint scheme for the Iron Warriors is a metallic silver base with black stripes.

The paint scheme of these power armors on Planet One has been changed to dark red and brass, the iconic color scheme of Khorne.

The swarm mentality is marked by uncertainty; it could be a defector from another chapter using the old armor of the Iron Warriors, or a small split faction within the chapter.

But regardless of their origins, their existence means that Krauser has at least one Chaos Space Marine guard.

Number of witnesses: four to six.

Their existence suggests that Krauser's connection to Chaos is deeper than previously thought.

These traitorous Astartes may have been brought in from outside via warp portals, or they may have been gifts bestowed by the Khorne archdemon Skragg.

Lawson archived this information and left it for the time being.

Krauser completely reorganized the original Imperial Standard PDF forces, renaming them the Bloodsteel Legion. With a strength of approximately five million, this number isn't large considering the population of Planet One, but each member is an assassin selected from the gladiatorial arena.

These soldiers possessed combat skills far exceeding those of ordinary Imperial PDFs, but their tactical coordination was extremely poor.

The reason lies in Krause's selection mechanism.

The arena trains assassins, one-on-one fighting masters.

But war is not a gladiatorial contest. War requires cooperation, discipline, and obedience to orders. These qualities cannot grow in the jungle law of killing or being killed. The soldiers of the Bloodsteel Legion are all capable fighters, but when put together, they are like a pack of wild dogs.

Krause solved the problem in a simple and direct way.

When soldiers of the Bloodsteel Legion are enlisted, they are forcibly injected with a dark red liquid. After the injection, the soldiers' adrenaline secretion is locked at a stable high level, and they will be in a low-intensity state of combat euphoria, making obedience to orders as natural as a conditioned reflex.

The side effects of this drug are obvious; the lifespan of those injected is drastically shortened, and most soldiers die from organ failure within three to five years.

But Krauser didn't care. A planet with 18 billion people would never run out of manpower, at least not before that population tipping point in 23 years.

Lawson closed the intelligence interface for Planet One and turned his attention back to Planet Three.

Good news came from the bottom nest.

The second harvest cycle of Project Iron Bones has arrived.

The nine hundred incubation pools operated for another fourteen days, and Squig and the fart spirit matured as scheduled.

Another nine million life points gained.

He immediately began distributing the orders.

The previous cycle had already pushed the total number of combat suicide soldiers to the upper limit of 50,000.