Warhammer: Empire Reboot

It painstakingly carved out a brass core that burned with the demon's true name and primal flames.

Use all five fingers to exert force.

"Click".

The core shattered.

This power transformed into a crimson psionic shockwave that pierced through the veil of warp, and the violent energy swept towards the edge of the Eye of Terror in the material universe like a tsunami.

"Whoever can bring that mortal's head back to the Warp... will receive the full blessings of the Blood Tyrant! I will personally pave the path to ascension beneath his feet!"

The Weaver of Fate's blue flame flickered with satisfaction.

"Perfect, go and fight. Let me see just how many secrets that mortal is hiding."

The chessboard of the material world has been set up.

On the edge of the Agrippina sector, there is an abandoned anchorage of wrecked spaceships.

This area is shrouded in radiation clouds year-round.

Far from Abaddon's main fleet, the Black Cruiser looked down on this barren star system.

This place has become a gathering place for chaotic pirates, heretical mercenaries, and ragtag war gangs who are not qualified to join the main force and can only eke out a living on the fringes.

Black Legion Outer Warband, Rift Jaws.

The lower deck of the flagship cruiser USS Carrion.

War gang leader Grat is enjoying torturing Imperial prisoners.

He was wearing a set of Mark IV power armor painted black, with the Eye of Horus printed on his shoulder armor.

Grath and his men were nothing more than marginal outcasts whom Abaddon looked down upon, a group of Chaos pirates who made a living by robbing the Empire's peripheral supply lines.

Inside the dimly lit cabin.

Grat held a rusty chainsaw dagger in his hand, its serrated edges wedged into the collarbone of an Imperial Astronautical Major, slowly pulling at it.

The major was covered in blood, his limbs were tightly chained to the bulkhead, and he gritted his teeth to suppress his screams.

“Tell me the route of that convoy transporting plasma batteries. Tell me, and I’ll give you a quick death.”

The major spat out a mouthful of blood, which landed on Grat's mask.

"The Emperor will curse you..."

Grat prepared to twist his wrist and crush the major's internal organs.

Suddenly, Grath and all the Chaos Space Marines in the cabin stopped moving at the same time.

A strong, fishy smell suddenly swept through the sealed cabin.

"Whoever can bring that mortal's head back to the Warp... will receive the full blessings of the Blood Tyrant! The ladder to ascension..."

The roar of the Great Demon Skragag, carrying with it a surge of warp energy, slammed directly into the depths of their brains.

"puff!"

Several mutated slaves in the corner, who were responsible for delivering torture instruments, could not withstand the pressure and their heads exploded like watermelons, their brains splattering all over the Chaos Veteran next to them.

Grat threw down the bloodied and mangled saw blade in his hand.

The greedy flames flickered wildly beneath the one-eyed mask.

"Boss...that's a wide-area bounty on the Great Demon Khorne!"

"The bounty coordinates point to the Obulus system! That small star system is only four months' journey from our current anchorage!"

The adjutant swallowed hard, then tentatively offered a prudent suggestion: "Should we report this to Lord Abaddon's main force? The bounty offered by a high-ranking demon might be enough to secure a reward from the commander..."

"Report my ass!"

Grath slapped his adjutant away with his massive powered gauntlet, sending him flying. The adjutant crashed heavily into the metal bulkhead, creating a dent, and spat out several bloody teeth.

"That tyrant Abaddon only ever sent us to fill the trenches in the meat grinder of Cardia! We've been eating dust on the fringes for two hundred years! Two hundred years! We haven't even been given a new power armor, and we've been scavenging for scraps every day!"

Grat drew his explosive pistol from his waist, and without even looking, shot the Imperial major in the head.

"The opportunity to ascend to demonhood is right before us! This bounty is for us!"

"Did you hear that?! There's only a mortal warlord at that coordinate, who doesn't even have psionic power! That guy must have gotten incredibly lucky, dug up some relic weapon, and just happened to injure the Great Demon! It's the Great Demon's own stupidity that's the problem!"

Grath's logic was simple and straightforward: mortals could never possibly fight a great demon head-on; the only explanation was that the enemy had used some kind of powerful field weapon.

"A mortal who got lucky. If we rush over and cut off his head, offering it to the Great Demon, we can bypass Abaddon and receive Khorne's blessing! We will become the chosen ones!"

Grat raised his explosive pistol and fired a shot into the air.

"Tell all the hyenas in the fleet! Activate the subspace engines! Overload all reactors!"

"Four months! I'm going to beat the other warbands to the punch and tear that mortal planet's defenses to shreds! I'll put his head on my wine glass! Anyone who dares to stand in my way, I'll kill them!"

Amidst a frenzied howl, the entire battle guild erupted in cheers.

Three patched-up, dilapidated cruisers, along with a dozen or so armed transport ships teeming with cultists and mutants, slashed the anchorage cables like a pack of wild dogs drawn by the scent of blood.

With engines spewing out murky exhaust flames, the fleet eagerly plunged into the waves of warp space.

The message spreads in subspace far faster than the laws of physics.

Six months' journey from the Obulus system, in another part of deep space, a notorious Red Pirate mutant fleet also received this blood-soaked bounty fluctuation.

"Brothers! There's a fat sheep! And the Great Demon's blessing!"

The pirate captain, covered in mutated tentacles, stood on the bridge, frantically chugging down a jug of cheap alcohol.

"Change course! Target Obulus! Loot all their women, burn their city to the ground, and bring back that mortal's head for the bounty!"

This mob, driven purely by the desire for plunder and slaughter, cheered wildly and propelled the warship toward its target.

The waves of the subspace were completely boiling.

The bounty on the Great Demon's origin is like a piece of bloody meat thrown into a shark tank.

Those marginalized warbands unqualified to fight alongside the main legion, greedy heretical pirates, and all the hyenas and vultures roaming the edge of Agrippina, all sprang into action upon hearing the news.

In the pitch-black sea of ​​stars, the exhaust flames of hundreds of engines lit up.

The trajectories of countless warships intertwined on the star map, forming a dense web.

The central intersection of this network is the Oberlus Triad, where Lawson is located.

Planet Obolos III, the Red Wasteland.

The gale whipped up coarse red dust, grinding everything on the wasteland like sandpaper.

The training ground.

Lawson sat on the edge of a high platform on a cliff.

Below, 301 powered armored vehicles are divided into three full-strength companies and are engaged in tactical combat.

The battle was fierce, with assassins falling and being seriously injured every now and then.

Lawson's gaze swept across the entire basin.

Such real combat confrontations take place every day in the wilderness, with suicide soldiers breaking bones and smashing armor as commonplace.

Lawson can afford this kind of consumption.

On the three planets, the green-skinned breeding factories have entered a period of explosive production.

Within three thousand assembly line slaughterhouses, Squig and the fart spirits multiplied wildly, nourished by organic matter.

Every fourteen Terra Standard Days, the system backend receives an inflow of 3000 million Life Points.

The total number of non-combatant assassins across the three planets has surpassed the 500 million mark.

The black hole in the subspace projection of Lawson has grown from the size of a soybean to the size of a fist.

This allowed his psychic powers to rise to a whole new level.

Formless and intangible endogenous spiritual energy spreads out in all directions from him as the center.

Six kilometers, eight kilometers, ten kilometers.

Ultimately, the coverage area remained firmly at twelve kilometers.

"rise."

In the void behind Lawson, liquid living metal rapidly condenses, shapes, and hardens in the air.

One after another, silver discs with edges as thin as molecules materialized out of thin air.

Ten, thirty, fifty.

Up to eighty-one.

The number of Shadow Wheels controlled by Lawson increased dramatically from the original thirty-six to eighty-one.

The immense computing power provided by five million elite soldiers made multi-threaded operations at the micro level as natural as breathing for him.

Eighty-one shadow wheels floated around Lawson, forming a nested spherical defense and attack matrix.

The living metal spun at high speed in the air, cutting visible white vacuum marks into the surrounding air, and its shrill shriek even drowned out the gale on the wasteland.

It is more flexible to control, faster, and has a wider kill area.

Lawson located a few kilometers ahead of the cliff, a massive abandoned steel mill, remnants of a civil war in the hive hundreds of years ago.

Covering an area of ​​tens of thousands of square meters, the main structure is made of high-strength steel load-bearing columns that are hundreds of meters high and several meters thick, and explosion-proof decks, making it as solid as a fortress.

"go."

Eighty-one silver lightning bolts instantly tore through the sound barrier, exploding in the air into rings of white, booming air.

The Shadow Wheel transformed into a violent metal storm, plunging into the massive steel factory at supersonic speed.

The deafening sound of metal cutting mixed with the muffled thuds of load-bearing structures breaking came continuously from inside, and sparks erupted wildly from every window and vent of the factory like a volcanic eruption.

Just five seconds.

Eighty-one shadow wheels transformed into a long silver dragon, bursting out from the top and obediently flying back behind Lawson.

In the wilderness, the massive abandoned steel plant stood eerily still for a moment in the wind.

Immediately afterwards, the steel behemoth, covering tens of thousands of square meters, collapsed with a roar as it was cut by the Shadow Wheel.