Warhammer: Empire Reboot

It was a Tyrant-class heavy cruiser, followed by four Sword-class corvettes.

They had just survived a long and bloody meat grinder battle, and every inch of their armor plating was etched with the scars of war.

The edges of the cannons in the macro gun array turned a dark purple from being scorched by high temperatures, and tens of tons of torn wreckage from enemy ships still hung on the ramming bow, with frozen blood and metal fragments slowly drifting in the cold vacuum.

Above the planet, the massive and cumbersome "brass orbital dock" opened its mechanical pincers, which resembled the gaping maw of an abyss.

The 5.5-kilometer-long Tyrant-class cruiser quietly slid into its berth.

With a low-frequency roar that caused the entire orbital station to tremble violently, the Void Shield shut down completely.

With the massive energy barrier receding, the ancient beast that had swum back from the deep sea of ​​the subspace was exposed, its belly riddled with wounds and completely defenseless.

Thousands of heavy oil pipelines, like giant black blood vessels, were precisely inserted into the dozens of refueling ports, each over ten meters in diameter, on the side of the warship under the precise operation of servo robotic arms.

High-pressure plasma fuel surged along the pipeline, producing a deafening roar, and the surrounding space visibly distorted due to the high temperature.

Further down in the loading and unloading area, hundreds of heavy barges, their surfaces coated with anti-radiation and anti-rust paint, are engaged in stifling logistics operations.

The cranes screeched as they lifted massive, hundreds-of-tons-heavy solid cannon rounds, dozens of meters high, and shoved them row by row into the abyssal cargo hold at the bottom of the warship. Besides ammunition, the barges were loaded mostly with meat.

One truckload after another, densely packed with boarding slaves, were forcibly crammed into the lower decks of the warship.

Each person wore a heavy, red-glowing explosive collar around their neck, like livestock being herded into a slaughterhouse, stumbling and crawling forward in the footsteps of those who came before them, whipped by overseers wielding electric whips.

The only value of these cannon fodder is to be at the forefront during boarding maneuvers, using their flesh and blood to deplete the enemy's explosive shells, or to bite through the enemy ship's energy lines with their teeth on decks where gravity generators have malfunctioned.

Your gaze travels through layers of armored decks to the command throne area at the highest point of the warship.

This place has long been completely transformed beyond recognition by the owners of the warships.

The Thinker array and brass star chart, which originally symbolized the majesty of the Imperial Navy, were forcibly removed, and the entire bridge was transformed into a huge indoor arena.

Dark red blood had accumulated into a thick layer of viscous plasma in the anti-slip grooves of the deck, making a nauseating splattering sound when stepped on.

On the deck surrounding the throne, more than a dozen mutilated corpses lay scattered about.

There was a corpse dressed in a gray jumpsuit; it was a slave who was a beat too slow and hadn't handed over the chainsaw axe lubricant in time. Next to it was a pile of junk mixed with wires and rotten flesh; it was a Dark Mechanicus technical priest who had miscalculated the fuel ration.

The most horrifying sight was the remains of two people in crimson power armor in the corner. They were two World Eater blood slaves who had just been forcibly implanted with gene seeds. They had been cleaved in two at the waist simply for glancing at their company commander when they shouldn't have. Their internal organs spilled out onto the ground. Their powerful Space Marine organs allowed them to wail for a full ten minutes after being cut in half before finally dying.

Calgos, the company commander of the World Eater Gang, was wearing the battered Iron Cavalry Terminator armor.

This sacred relic from the Great Crusade is now stained with bits of flesh, brains, and dried blood. Its brass-lined edges are inlaid with pale white skulls.

Kargos paced back and forth among the corpses like a bloodthirsty beast trapped in a small cage.

On his scarred bald head, the butcher's nails, like centipedes, were deeply embedded in his skull, flashing a dangerous red light at a high frequency and emitting a faint but piercing mechanical electric sound.

"Zzz... Ahhhhh!"

Kargos abruptly stopped, clutching his head tightly with both hands, and let out a chilling, inhuman roar.

The butcher's nail was gnawing at his cerebral cortex, the pain like ten thousand rusty saws sawing at his nerve endings, forcing him to seek blood, to seek killing.

He roughly grabbed the bucket of "blood wine" specially prepared for him from the long brass table. It was a mixture of inferior mutated alcohol, a lethal dose of potent combat stimulant, and warm blood that had just been released from several bottom-nest mutants.

Calgos shoved the thirty-pound iron barrel into his mouth, his sharp teeth crushing the metal and the liquid together, his Adam's apple bobbing as he forced down the deadly liquid mixed with iron filings and blood clots.

The crude alcohol and high concentration of stimulants could not quell the boiling, excruciating pain in my brain.

Kargos was panting heavily.

Only killing, only hearing the sound of bones breaking, only hacking a chainsaw into the enemy's spine, could bring the Butcher's Nail a moment of peace. But now, he was trapped in this iron coffin docked in the shipyard, unable to kill anything.

"boom!"

Calgos kicked over the long brass table in front of him, which was made from a single piece of fine steel.

The table, weighing several tons, crashed against the bulkhead with a tremendous roar.

He strode over the pieces of flesh on the ground and grabbed the neck of the Dark Mechanicus technical priest who was nervously reporting on the loading progress.

The Terminator armor's terrifying servo power instantly crushed the hydraulic hose around the priest's neck.

Calgos lifted the half-human, half-machine monster into the air like a rag doll.

"The Klein Galaxy!"

Calgos's eyes were bloodshot, and his eyeballs almost bulged out of their sockets.

He roared, spittle mixed with blood spraying onto the red-glowing mechanical compound eyes of the Tech Priest: "In the Coleone system, those Ultramarines in their blue armor are about to collapse! I can already smell the blood in their damn company commander's neck! My chainsaw axe is less than ten meters from his throat! Ten meters!"

He angrily swung his arm and slammed the priest hard against the terracotta wall.

"boom!"

The steel wall instantly caved in, creating a deep crater, and the priest's servo skull on his back shattered on the spot, sparks flying everywhere.

"And then what happened?!"

Calgos brought his face close to the priest's shattered mechanical face, his voice filled with a frenzied rage that seemed capable of tearing the entire universe apart: "That winged, cow-dung-smelling red-skinned beast, Skragag, actually issued a divine decree at this most crucial moment, ordering us to retreat! To retreat from that perfect massacre!"

"Just because of some damn planet number three in some remote star system? Just because a few petty thieves from who-knows-where crawled out of some gutter killed a few of its henchmen? Is Skragg's brain filled with Khorne's excrement?! That we, the great Devourer of Worlds, should abandon the skull of an entire planet and come back to deal with a few rats?!"

Upon hearing this, several other World Eater veterans, whose eyes were also bloodshot from the torment of the Butcher's Nails, raised their power axes and let out deep growls in agreement.

To these blood-cursed madmen, abandoning a cathartic massacre to return to this tedious shipyard for lengthy logistical resupply was the greatest blasphemy against Khorne.

"Sir...sir..."

The tech-priest, half-crushed and with oil and nutrient solution gushing from his pipes, pleaded desperately. His voice, distorted and electronic, emanated from his microphone: "Lord Skragh's oracle... cannot be disobeyed... it represents the will of the Blood God... our resupply schedule is at its maximum, the reactor is preheating..."

Kargos stared intently at the priest's twitching mechanical arm.

He knew, of course, that the Great Demon's orders were not to be disobeyed.

No matter how arrogant or crazy he was, he wasn't arrogant enough to dare challenge a bloodthirsty demon in its prime.

He just had a headache and needed to vent his pent-up rage.

Calgos threw the priest to the ground like trash, leaving him convulsing in a pool of blood.

He strode heavily to the massive blast-proof glass of the bridge. Suppressing the muscle spasms from the Butcher's Nails, Kargos looked down at the dock below, where the loading and unloading area teemed with activity, like a swarm of ants.

"They're too slow! These damn lumps of iron and pigs are too slow!"

Calgos slammed his fist into the bulletproof glass, and spiderweb-like cracks instantly spread out.

His thick fingers pointed to the long, seemingly endless line of "boarding slaves" being herded into the lower decks of the warship by the Mechanicus priests with electric whips.

Suddenly, Calgos's brows furrowed tightly.

Even though the Butcher's Nail is tearing his sanity to shreds, deep down he is still a veteran who has lived for tens of thousands of years.

In that fleeting moment of frenzy, he caught a whiff of something unusual and unsettling.

“Look at that batch of newly delivered slaves down there…”

Calgos turned his head and pointed at the orderly ranks of cannon fodder silently entering the abyss of the warship below, his voice tinged with doubt and irritation: "Why aren't they screaming? Why aren't they crying out? Shouldn't these bottom-nest scum, when they smelled the blood at the bottom of the warship, be begging for mercy like those trash, wetting their pants in fear, or even needing their servants to break their legs and drag them in?!"

It's too quiet.

That uniform silence, that deathly stillness devoid of any fear, sorrow, or despair, was more jarring than a deafening scream in the Warhammer universe, filled with madness and bloodshed. It completely defied the instincts of mortal beings.

A World Eater lieutenant standing behind Calgos strode forward.

Half of his chin had been modified into a mechanical structure, and his speech was accompanied by a heavy, metallic scraping sound. He glanced in the direction Kargos was pointing.

"grown ups."

The adjutant replied nonchalantly, “It’s probably some new tricks those Dark Mechanicus priests on Prime One have come up with. I heard they’re currently implementing a new type of nerve resection surgery that directly burns the fear nerves and frontal lobes of these mortals. These pigs are just cannon fodder to fill trenches and consume Ultramarines’ explosives anyway, so it’s easier for them to stay quiet and save us time from running around aimlessly.”

Kargos stared intently at the crowd below, a growing sense of crisis trying to break through the encirclement.

But in that instant, the Butcher's Nail, deeply embedded in the skull, seemed to sense that its host was engaging in mentally taxing thinking and logical reasoning, which violated its underlying mechanism of only craving killing.

"Bah..."

A violent current instantly pierced Kargos's cerebral cortex.

The excruciating pain caused his vision to go black, and his hallucinations were filled with gushing blood and broken bones. That fleeting moment of the veteran's alertness was instantly overwhelmed by boundless rage and bloodlust.

Calgos snorted and pounded his helmet, trying to break free from the pain.

Screw the conspiracy, screw the anomaly.

As long as we can kill people, we don't care if these pigs are mute or crazy!

He turned around and drew the demon chainsaw axe called the Flesh Thirster from his waist.

The moment this terrifying weapon, which housed fragments of the Great Demon, was drawn, the roar of its violent engine exploded within the bridge, the serrated edges of the axe blade spinning wildly, and a few drops of still-wet flesh and blood splattered out.

"Tell the manager below!"

Calgos's eyes flashed with a savage red light as he gritted his teeth and growled, "I'll give them one last five hours! Five hours later, regardless of whether the macro cannons are fully loaded or the plasma reactors are fully fed, the fleet will weigh anchor immediately!"

He wielded a chainsaw axe, hacking a deep gash into a thick load-bearing pillar beside him, sparks flying everywhere.

"I'm going to jump out of the warp as fast as I can! I'm going to grind the crust of that planet number three into dust! I'm going to twist off that damn governor's head and use it as a goblet when I return to the Corian system! Anyone who dares to delay me for even a second, I'll fill the engine's reactor with their skull!"

While Calgos roared in fury, an even more bloody entertainment activity was taking place in the massive training cabin in the middle of the warship.

This place has been transformed into a blood-soaked arena by the veterans of the World Eaters.

Dozens of veterans, each two and a half meters tall and wearing heavy power armor, were gathered outside a gladiator cage welded together from thick alloy steel bars.

Inside the cage, two World Eater blood slaves who had erred were locked in a deadly battle. They were shirtless, covered in scars, and wielding barbed chains and chainsaw axes with their engines off the ground, hacking at each other.

Every collision of muscles, every dull thud of metal cutting into bone, would elicit a frenzied roar from the veterans outside the cage.

Further out from the cage, a few veterans, finding the sight of their own kind fighting each other not exciting enough, threw several bottom-nest mutant creatures they had just captured from the port, a three-headed radiated hound, and a few Dark Mechanicus slaves who were a bit slow in their work, into a pool of blood filled with corrosive acid.

These veterans, like madmen watching cockfighting, laughed unrestrainedly, using their explosive pistols as stakes to bet on which beast could survive longer from the corrosive acid and the desperate biting of the slave laborers.

"Bite his throat! You idiot! Use your teeth!" A veteran with half his face burned off laughed as he pounded on the railing.

Just then, groups of ordinary slaves, pushing heavy carts of ammunition, slowly walked through the passageway outside the arena, being whipped by their overseers. They trembled and dared not even breathe.

An old World Eater who had lost an eye found the bet in front of him rather boring.

He turned his head and caught a glimpse of the group of mortals passing by.

A cruel glint flashed in his eyes. He grabbed a heavy alloy wrench covered in black blood from the weapon rack next to him, and without even looking at it, smashed it into the crowd.

The Space Marines' terrifying power imbued this wrench with the kinetic energy of a cannonball.

"boom!"