Warhammer: Empire Reboot

"Your eight hundred men should go eat, rest, and have their bandages changed now."

Lawson interrupted him: "I have the expertise to do fortification work."

Lawson channeled his consciousness into the swarm network.

The armory space began to operate at high speed.

Three hundred meters behind the ridgeline position, the air was violently distorted.

One after another, figures fell from the void, their feet slamming onto the frozen earth with dull thuds.

They wore uniform gray overalls, carried standard Imperial engineering bags on their backs, and had various types of wrenches, cutters, and rangefinders hanging from their waists.

Ten, one hundred, one thousand.

The speed was getting faster and faster, with hundreds of figures appearing out of thin air every second.

One hundred anchor points operate in parallel, pushing efficiency to its limit.

Fifteen minutes later, 100,000 non-combatant suicide soldiers stood neatly behind the ridgeline.

Quintus nearly dislocated his jaw.

He had seen the Empire's teleportation technology, the teleportation beams of the Terminator armor, which could send up to five people at a time and required a flagship-level teleportation array to provide energy.

Even with all its might, the flagship of the Ultramarines, the Makuragi Glory, could only transport two hundred Terminators per hour.

"By the Emperor..."

Viktor, leaning against the metal pipe, looked at the sea of ​​gray people: "Company Commander, what kind of technology is this?"

Quintus did not answer, because he himself did not know.

The suicide engineers began working as soon as they landed.

The swarm intelligence mechanism has already synchronized the three-dimensional terrain data of the entire ridgeline to each node during the transmission process.

One hundred thousand brains share the same construction blueprint, and each person knows which coordinate to go to, how deep to dig the trench, and how heavy the prefabricated component to move.

The first thing to appear was a trench.

Twenty thousand suicide soldiers spread out along the southern slope of the ridgeline. They took out folding entrenching tools from their backpacks and dug into the frozen soil with three times the strength and speed of ordinary people.

Each shovel strike was executed at a precise 45-degree angle, and the excavated soil was passed from one comrade to the back of the trench, where it was piled up to form a breast wall.

Five minutes later, the first anti-infantry trench was completed, 1.8 meters deep and 1.2 meters wide, with a moisture-proof layer of metal plates recycled from abandoned bunkers at the bottom.

The trench has a right-angle bend every twenty meters. This is not a textbook design, but a scheme optimized by swarm intelligence based on the attack characteristics of the Nurgle Plague Legion. The right-angle bend can effectively block the straight corrosive flow of the plague jets and limit the contamination range to a single trench section.

Quintus stared at the precise, centimeter-level bends, his pupils contracting once more.

He studied defensive fortification at the tactical academy and had never seen any engineering unit dig such a perfect trench in five minutes.

Then there are the firing points.

Another group of suicide bombers began assembling heavy weapons.

They took out components from the supply crates delivered from the armory: bases, rotating platforms, gun barrels, drum magazines, sights, and coolant lines.

A suicide soldier crouched on the ground, working with both hands simultaneously. While his left hand tightened the base bolts, his right hand inserted the cannon barrel into the slot on the rotary table.

The second assassin behind him took over, loading the drum magazine and sights.

The third suicide soldier completed the coolant filling and final calibration.

Three people, ninety seconds, and a quadruple-mounted heavy rapid-fire cannon was assembled.

The cannon was pointed south, aimed at the gentle slope.

Behind Quintus, the Ultramarines whispered in hushed tones.

"Did you see that? Ninety seconds. It takes us, the technical priests, at least forty minutes to install one."

“Those workers’ hands…did you notice? They were doing completely different things. The left hand was tightening nuts, and the right hand was connecting wires. They were doing it simultaneously.”

"Impossible. The human brain cannot perform this level of hand separation. Unless..."

"Unless they are not ordinary humans at all."

"Stop making wild guesses."

The acting platoon leader of the third row whispered, "A person who can be escorted by four living saints at the same time, I think, must be some kind of secret force of the Emperor. Just like the Imperial Guard, except we never knew about it before."

"If the Emperor has this ability to teleport an unlimited number of elite troops anytime, anywhere, why not use it in Cardia? Why let Cardia fall?" Victor's question was sharp.

……

"Perhaps the price is too high."

The young Ultra Warrior hesitated before saying, "Or perhaps the Emperor doesn't want the Chaos Four to know about this trump card."

Viktor gritted his teeth and said, "So we kept it hidden until the most crucial moment."

"If that's the case,"

The young man's eyes lit up: "Does that mean that now is the most crucial moment the Emperor considers the most critical? The dark side of the Empire?"

Every extreme warrior's heart skipped a beat.

Behind them, 100,000 elite soldiers were still building a defensive line with breathtaking efficiency.

The trenches extended to both flanks, and firing positions sprang up like mushrooms after rain, with prefabricated bunkers being assembled piece by piece.

Meanwhile, on the gentle slope south of the ridge, another scene is unfolding.

Six large harvesting machines transferred from the agricultural world roared across the battlefield, driven by twenty mechanical suicide soldiers.

Huge bulldozer blades pushed the mountain of plague corpses into the natural canyon in front of the ridgeline.

Six harvesters rolled back and forth, compacting the carcasses and filling one-third of the canyon floor.

"From now on, this ditch will be a natural anti-tank trench."

Lawson said to Katarina beside him, "Nurgle's corruption tanks have low chassis and can't flip over."

Katarina stared blankly at the body parts that had been used as building materials.

Before joining Lawson, she would have felt uncomfortable with this behavior.

Now, she simply recited an imperial scripture in her mind and asked, "Is the defensive depth to the south sufficient?"

"not enough."

"But that should last for a while," Lawson said. "The Plague Legion's next offensive will have to wait until they reorganize their command chain, which I estimate is a window of six to eight hours."

He turned and walked toward Quintus.

"Old soldier, wanna talk?"

"I need to understand the situation on this planet."

Lawson cut to the chase: "How long have you been here? How large is the Plague Legion? What is its command structure? Are there any high-ranking demons overseeing it?"

"When we arrived on this planet, it had already fallen."

Quintus spoke wearily.

“That was 147 days ago. The Fifth Link received a distress signal. The planetary governor of Klein-IX sent out the highest level of distress call via subspace communication. The signal was intermittent and almost indistinguishable through the storms of the Dark Side. But we were the closest Astartes unit.”

"When we arrived, the planetary governor was already dead, the entire southern hemisphere had fallen, and 60 million civilians had been infected within a month, turning into Nurgle's plague walkers. The situation in the northern hemisphere was slightly better."

“They landed across the strait,” Rosen said.

"From three directions."

Quintus held up three fingers: "West Coast, East Coast, Northern Ice Sheet. A three-pronged attack. I held them off on this plain for one hundred and forty-seven days with a hundred brothers and four thousand Astral Army soldiers."

"One hundred brothers. Now only fourteen remain."

Quintus' Adam's apple bobbed: "Nurgle's plague weapons are very difficult to deal with; some people don't even recognize themselves before they die."

Lawson didn't reply; he waited.

Quintus took a deep breath and continued, “Currently, the Plague Legion’s main force is deployed on the Southern Great Plains. According to our last reconnaissance, which was twenty-three days ago, we haven’t had enough manpower to conduct reconnaissance since. The Plague Space Marines have at least four full companies. They are led by a Plague Lord named ‘Rotten Bones’ Gul’ga, accompanied by at least two wizards. In addition to the Space Marines, there are also a large number of Demon Engines, Corrupted Raiders, and Filthy Creepers. I’ve counted at least twelve.”

"Where is the Plague Walker?"

Quintus gave a wry smile: "Which number do you want to hear? The 60 million infected in the Southern Hemisphere, or the number infected in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 147 days? There are still about 28 million civilians in Casablanca behind us. Around them, there are at least three or four million plague walkers roaming. The wave you killed today probably only accounts for one percent of the total."

Lawson tapped his fingers lightly twice on the bunker wall.

Three to four million Plague Walkers, and four companies of Plague Space Marines.

One Plague Lord and two wizards.

More than twelve Demon Engines.

Swarm intelligence uses this data to simulate twenty-six different attack scenarios.

“Plague Walker is a smokescreen,” Lawson said.

Quintus looked up at him.

"Millions of Plague Walkers sounds terrifying, but you know in your heart that a single Ultramariner can kill ten thousand when fully armed. The real threat is those four companies of Plague Space Marines and those Daemon Engines. Especially that Plague Lord named Gulgar and the two wizards. Cut off their heads, and their bodies will rot on their own."

Quintus's eyes lit up: "Beheading."

"You thought of that too."

"I've thought of it, but I can't do it."

Quintus shook his head: "Gulgar is never on the front lines. He's in the heart of the Southern Plains, surrounded by at least two million Plague Walkers and all of his main forces. I only have fourteen brothers. Even if they were all fully armed and managed to break through the encirclement of two million walkers, they'd be nothing but empty shells by the time they reached Gulgar."

"What about those demon engines?"

"They are spread out along three attack routes, serving as the core of each offensive. Each Daemon Engine is guarded by at least a platoon of Plague Space Marines. Twenty-three days ago we attempted a small-scale raid, sending five brothers and three hundred Astral Army soldiers to target a Corrupted Raider on the eastern front."

"The results of it?"

"The raiders were killed, but all five brothers perished. Two were killed by Plague Space Marines, and three were corroded by the raiders' dying venom spray. All three hundred Astraklans were killed."

Quintus clenched his fist: "The trade ratio isn't worthwhile, I can't afford to defend anymore."

Lawson nodded.

This is the typical predicament faced by the Imperial Dark Side Defenders: no reinforcements, no supplies, and no air superiority.

Every proactive attack is a gamble with one's life; if you can't afford to gamble, you can only cower in your position and wait to die.