Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The hundred-meter-high load-bearing columns, like towering trees with their roots severed, snapped cleanly, and the blast-proof deck shattered into millions of steel fragments, tumbling and falling in the red dust.

The ground trembled, and the aftershocks spread throughout the wasteland.

The assassins who were fighting against the enemy sensed the destructive power fluctuation.

Then they stopped, and all 301 power armor suits simultaneously punched their breastplates.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

The clanging of metal blended into a thunderous roar that echoed across the red wasteland.

P.S.: Guys, please vote!

Chapter 132 Humans shouldn't just be about surviving.

Most of the civilians in the Imperial Triad of Obolos had lived for decades and never imagined that there could be any other way to live their lives.

They were born in the hive, breathing polluted air that had been circulated countless times, drinking recycled water that tasted of rust, and eating dusty chunks of corpse starch that tasted somewhere between wet cardboard and vomit. But you had to thank the Emperor; at least there was something to eat.

This is the empire.

Twenty billion people are crammed into the steel skeletons of three giant nest cities, crawling like ants through endless corridors and factory workshops.

Birth, aging, sickness, and death all take place within this metal honeycomb that pierces from the earth's surface into the clouds.

Most people will never see the sky in their lifetime.

But in recent months, some things have changed.

The changes were first perceived from the middle nest.

Nest No. 3, Steel Ridge Industrial Corridor, 72nd Floor.

Herta Glein worked at the No. 4 ammunition factory in this corridor for nineteen years, rising from apprentice to second-level stamping worker.

For the past nineteen years, her daily life has consisted of being woken up by an alarm clock, swallowing a piece of corpse starch, walking seventeen minutes to the workshop, standing in front of the stamping machine and working continuously for fourteen hours, and then dragging her aching body back to the dormitory and falling asleep immediately.

Nineteen years have passed without interruption.

In the past, the corridors were always piled with garbage that no one cleaned up, and the drains in the corners were silted up with black sludge, emitting a sweet, rotten smell. It was said that a union supervisor had stuffed the corpse of a competitor into them, and no one cared, and no one dared to care.

The ventilation ducts above the 37th floor have had a quarter of their airflow cut off by the Rusty Fingers gang, who are using it to supply oxygen to their casinos and brothels in the next district. You want to complain? The queue at the administrative hall window will stretch into your next life. When you finally get to the front, the clerk will glance at you and say, "Where's the number? Where's the approval form? Is stamp number 37 on it? If not, go back and get it stamped before you come back."

This process takes at least three months to complete.

The Rusty Fingers gang has extorted protection money from you six times in three months. You can't afford it? If you can't afford it, they'll break two of your fingers.

This is the Middle Nest, the Imperial hive capital. It's already considered quite good.

But now, the corridor is clean.

Herta Glein was walking to work when she noticed that the water in the drains, while not exactly clear, was at least no longer black.

The walls have been freshly painted with anti-mold paint, and patrol officers are frequently seen on both sides of the corridor.

Those sheriffs were all taciturn and incredibly fast.

Last week, someone stole another worker's lunchbox at the workshop entrance.

Three minutes later, two sheriffs appeared in front of the prisoner, pinned him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away.

In the past, if you received a response within a month after reporting a crime, you should be grateful and burn incense to thank the emperor.

The Rusty Finger Gang is gone. To be precise, all the gangs in Zhongchao have disappeared.

Herta didn't know exactly what had happened; she only heard that one night, guards in gray uniforms suddenly appeared at the gates of all the gang strongholds.

The gate was welded shut from the outside, and toxic gas was pumped in through the ventilation duct.

The gang members who struggled to break free were met with the blue-white light of plasma guns.

The whole process was eerily quiet.

When Herta went to work the next morning, there wasn't a single drop of blood to be seen in the corridor.

Only a faint ozone smell remained in the air.

But the biggest change is in the food.

Herta looked down at the ration box in her hand. This was no longer one of those dusty, lumpy blocks of starch from corpses.

Inside the lunchbox was a compressed brown solid. When you broke it open, you could see crushed meat fibers and dark green seaweed particles.

It has a flavor.

Salty.

Now, the daily rations are all made of this kind of food called "Spark-1".

After eating it for a month, Herta found that her legs no longer felt weak when she stood in front of the press.

Her fingernails no longer broke at the slightest touch, and the rotten flesh in her mouth that had been ulcerated for three years was actually healing.

The atmosphere in the workshop is changing. The workers no longer drag their feet to work, and their eyes have a little more light in them.

"Have you heard?" Old Marcos, who was across from the press, leaned over and lowered his voice, "Xia Chao is doing some kind of 'civilized community selection'."

Herta was taken aback: "What the hell?"

"It's a competition to see which community is the cleanest and most law-abiding. The community that wins the award gets its food quota increased by five percent."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

Herta almost thought he'd misheard: "Descending the nest? Civilization? Can these two words be put together?"

Old Marcos shrugged: "My son runs a plumbing repair shop in District 17 of Lower Nest. He said it's so clean there now he almost doesn't recognize it. All the gangs are gone, and the remaining heads have all been chopped off and turned into machine slaves, picking up trash and unclogging pipes on the streets 24/7. He said that the leader of the 'Iron Serpent Gang,' that man-eating bastard, is now a machine slave cleaning sewers in the dirtiest cesspool in District 17."

Hertha Berlin remained silent for a few seconds.

"May the Emperor bless us," she concluded, "and may it always be so."

“I hope it stays this way,” old Marcos repeated.

Descending from the nest...

The lower hive of the third hive city is a colossal monster three times larger than the middle hive.

If we compare the nest to a giant steel tree that rises from the ground, then the upper nest is the canopy. The gardens and palaces of the powerful and wealthy are bathed in artificial light, air purifiers run 24 hours a day, and some noble mansions even have hydroponic flower beds planted with genetically modified roses imported from Santa Tera.

The central nest is the tree trunk, with factories, barracks, administrative institutions, and ordinary residential areas densely embedded within it, barely maintaining the bottom line of imperial civilization.

And the lower nest is the root system.

It occupies the largest cross-sectional area and the largest available space in the nest.

When the Empire built its hive capital, the lower hive was supposed to be the infrastructure layer, crammed with all the dirty, dangerous, and necessary systems, including geothermal power plants, wastewater recycling plants, heavy industrial smelting furnaces, and ore processing workshops.

But the population growth in the Imperial hive has never ended.

When the population density of the nest reaches a critical value, and newborns have no space, no quota, and no identification number, they move down to the next level.

Generation after generation went down. Hundreds of years later, Lower Nest became a city within a city, with billions of people crammed into rusty pipes and scrapped machinery, building their own shacks and nests.

There is no official water supply system.

They were drinking wastewater that was tapped through holes in industrial pipes. After sedimentation, it was barely drinkable, but the heavy metal content was enough to cause kidney failure in a person before the age of forty.

Without official food rations, the distribution of corpse starch stopped at the very bottom of the nest.

What do the creatures that descend into the nest eat? They eat the fungi in the pipes, rats, cockroaches, anything they can put in their mouths. When there's absolutely nothing left to eat, they eat people.

Without laws, the empire's administrative system terminated at the gate between Middle Nest and Lower Nest. That three-meter-thick titanium steel gate was the dividing line between the two worlds. Above the gate were the empire's subjects; below the gate... no one cared what lay beneath.

So the gangs filled the vacuum.

The gangs in the lower lair are not the thugs in the middle lair who collect protection money and run casinos. The gangs in the lower lair are warlords. They control water sources, transportation routes, and everything they can control. The largest gangs have tens of thousands of armed members, equipped with everything from stolen automatic guns to modified industrial laser cutters. They divide up territories, collect "taxes"—which are essentially robbery—and maintain a brutal order.

In this environment, crime is not a deviation from the norm; crime is the norm.

Murder is the standard means of resolving disputes, and rape is commonplace. Organ trafficking is one of the pillar industries of the underworld economy. Child laborers work in mines and scrap yards, starting as young as seven or eight, with an average lifespan of less than thirty years.

How many people die every day? Nobody keeps count. The ruling class doesn't care. In their eyes, the population of the lower nest is a natural disaster in itself; it keeps expanding and creating problems, but as long as the gates are thick enough and there are enough guards, the problems won't spread to the middle nest.

This pattern is almost identical in the countless hive worlds of the Empire.

The only differences are the gang names, the intensity of the violence, and the specific number of deaths each day.

Many died in Amalien's nest, even more died in Herodian's nest, and in Nemesis's nest...

That place was basically a slow slaughterhouse.

But in essence, they are all the same: those above treat those below as trash, and those below treat each other as prey.

Lawson does not intend to follow this logic.

In his view, the lower nest occupies the largest cross-sectional area and has the largest population of the nest city.

The fact that billions of people were left to fend for themselves in the darkness was one of the most foolish design flaws of the empire.

This isn't a question of kindness or cruelty; that word doesn't exist in Lawson's dictionary.

An uncontrolled nest is a natural petri dish for filth, a natural breeding ground for heretics, and a natural channel for chaos to seep in.

Why did Vespera's Plan B almost succeed? It was because she took advantage of the chaos during the nest's descent.

Where did those Nurgle thugs come from? Down in their nest. Where are those Tzeentch agents hiding? Down in their nest. If Lawson doesn't cut open this festering sore, sooner or later there will be a second Vespera, a third Vespera.

So he took action.

Three planets, cleaned simultaneously.

All organized crime groups are given 24 hours to surrender and disarm. Those who fail to surrender within the specified time will be killed without exception.

Twenty-four hours later, not a single gang had surrendered.

How could they possibly surrender? Those gang leaders had reigned supreme in Lower Nest for decades, some even for three or four generations. They had weapons, manpower, territory, and a lifetime of guerrilla warfare experience in the pipe maze. The PDF forces in Middle Nest would occasionally launch raids, but each time it was all bark and no bite—they'd go in, kill a few unlucky souls, and then declare victory and retreat.

The gang leaders thought it would be the same this time.

They are wrong.

The people Lawson sent down weren't PDFs, but Thunder Warrior-level assassins.

Each of these assassins could crush an ordinary person's skull with their bare hands. They wore standard Imperial armor, carried heavy explosives and plasma guns, and advanced layer by layer, zone by zone, starting from the central gate, in units of one hundred men each.

Even more deadly is the swarm mentality, which acts like an invisible net covering the entire hive.