Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Chapter 139 I'll go cut his head off

Lawson's figure rose rapidly against the gray sky.

The wind whistled in his ears, and the entire city of Casablanca unfolded beneath his feet.

This city, teeming with 28 million refugees, now resembles a wounded beast curled up in a mud pit.

The Rosen hovered steadily 300 meters above the city center.

“Citizens of the Empire of Casablanca”.

Lawson's voice, like the tolling of a bell, spread through psionic energy to everyone's ears.

“My name is Cole Lawson. Your governor is dead. His three successors, the Chamber of Commerce President Cardio, the Transport Guild President Paynes, and the Tax Collector Mortimer, have been executed on the spot for conspiring with warp demons to sacrifice the entire city’s civilians.”

The city was quiet, and everyone was listening.

"From now on, food rations will be restored to the Imperial wartime standard rations. Each person will receive one ration per day, and fixed collection points will be set up in each block, to be distributed by my soldiers."

People have begun to cry throughout the city.

The vast majority of the 28 million people have not been able to eat proper food for almost a month.

Hunger can turn people into beasts, but food, even just the promise that "food will come," is enough to turn them back into humans.

"The Imperial army has entered the Klein system, and the army of Chaos is being gradually wiped out. You no longer need to hide in the basement and wait to die."

"But I need your cooperation. From this moment on, all civilians must obey the Imperial Military Control Law. No looting, no fighting, and no gathering in the streets. Violators will be killed."

"You have survived the darkest days. The rest is up to me."

The sound waves dissipated.

The city was silent for about three seconds.

Then, in the streets, in the ruins, in the underground pipes, 28 million people collapsed almost simultaneously.

They hugged the people around them and cried, knelt on the ground and wept, and looked up at the sky and howled.

Lawson watched all this with a blank expression.

Go ahead and cry. After you've cried, eat your meal and get back to work.

The portals of the static force field tore open simultaneously across seventeen city blocks.

Thirty thousand non-combatant suicide soldiers filed out.

Swarm intelligence has enabled the city to be divided into grid-based zones.

Thirty thousand suicide soldiers were precisely assigned to every block, every main road, and every key intersection.

They took over security for water supply points, generator sets, communication repeaters, and all grain storage sites.

The remaining 200,000 planetary defense soldiers in the city were quickly incorporated into the control system.

Thirty Thunder-level combat suicide soldiers were dispersed to six key locations in the city as an iron fist to deal with emergencies.

Their physiques were like small war machines, standing at 2.3 meters tall, with muscles bulging like sacks of iron wire. Any one of them could crush the hatch of a heavily armored vehicle with their bare hands.

Order has been restored.

Vera was left at a temporary medical station in the city center.

The living saint's golden wings slowly retracted, transforming into a gentle, pale golden glow behind him.

She knelt down in front of an injured little girl, gently stroking the wound on the child's forehead. Golden light flowed over it, the scab fell off, and new flesh grew underneath.

The little girl's eyes widened.

Vera smiled slightly and handed over her half of a Spark-3 can of food.

"Eat up, the adults are watching you."

Vera was arranged by Lawson to stay in the city; no one could match the power of the living saint's reputation to appease the people.

Lawson stepped into the static field and disappeared.

When he reappeared, he was already speeding through the starry sky on the bridge of the "Blacksmith" ship, where Lawson stood alone in front of the holographic star map.

The seventeen agricultural worlds of the Klein system slowly rotate in the star map.

Seventeen planets, seventeen demon princes.

Sixty days later, the seventeen altars on the seventeen planets will be activated simultaneously, tearing apart the barriers of reality with the desperate souls of hundreds of millions of civilians and permanently dragging the entire Klein system into Nurgle's plague garden.

He took a deep breath: "What a huge appetite!"

Those rotten bastards, Naggle, are planning to devour the whole game.

The swarm intelligence has cross-referenced known information more than 700 times.

The conclusion is clear: if all seventeen altars are activated simultaneously, even if only one-third succeed, the resulting subspace resonance will be enough to tear a permanent crack in the physical barrier of the entire galaxy.

By then, not only will the Klein system be doomed, but the three surrounding systems will also be caught up in the edge effects of the Plague Garden.

Lawson has already killed a demon prince.

There are sixteen left.

Sixty days.

His fleet is currently advancing at maximum warp speed into different agricultural worlds.

The plan is simple: after the escort ship reaches the target planet's orbit, it will drop a landing capsule, and advance suicide soldiers will land and establish an anchor point.

It's simple, but time is the biggest enemy.

Seventeen stars are distributed across three spiral arms of the Klein system, with the two most distant stars separated by a span of twelve astronomical units.

Even with the precise navigation of Starship-001, subspace jumps still take time.

Moreover, Nurgle's fleet roams the galaxy, and every jump could result in a collision with a patrolling plague warship.

"We need to speed things up."

Lawson tapped the border of the holographic star map, and circled the icons of the three planets, Klein-IV, Klein-VII, and Klein-XII, with his finger.

These three planets are closest to his current location. If the three escort ships operate separately, they can deploy the advance teams within seven days at the earliest.

Using swarm intelligence, Lawson simultaneously issued new navigation orders to the three frigates: full speed ahead, abandoning the previous stealthy maneuvering plan and taking the shortest path directly.

Another cruiser headed to a more distant planet.

Will we be discovered?

The voice of Starship-001 came from the swarm's thinking.

“Definitely,” Lawson replied, “but we don’t have time to take a detour. If we crash into it, we’ll shoot it through.”

On the outer edge of planet Klein-IV, the Broken Bone Sword-class frigate is making its final deceleration maneuver at 0.7 times the speed of light.

This 1.5-kilometer-long warship is not considered a behemoth in space. In the Imperial Navy's organization, the Sword-class frigate is just the most basic escort ship, designed to do dirty work: patrolling, anti-submarine warfare, and hunting pirates.

However, the Broken Bone in Lawson's possession was completely different from the Sword-class ships, which were standard equipment for the Imperial Navy.

At this moment, all the crew members on the Broken Bone are operating every system of the warship with zero-delay efficiency, like swarm intelligence.

Engine room, fire control console, damage control station—the suicide soldiers in all these positions are like different gears on the same machine.

There were no shouts from the captain on the bridge, nor the running of messengers.

All commands are synchronously delivered to every node within 0.01 seconds through swarm intelligence.

It was eerily quiet.

If an Imperial Navy officer walked into this bridge, he would probably think he had entered a tomb.

"Three million kilometers from the orbit of the target planet."

Just then, the assassin in charge of the port side passive sensor array detected an unusual signal.

A warship is approaching from near-Earth orbit from Klein-IV, patrolling at low speed in an elliptical orbit.

The swarm intelligence completed the identification and assessment of the Imperial "Sword-class Frigate" hull, but the outer shell had been corroded beyond recognition by the subspace. The adamantite armor plates were covered with dark green pustules, and the Imperial Skyhawk insignia on the bow had been burned off with a welding torch and replaced with a crooked three-ring emblem.

A rogue sword-class vessel captured and modified by Chaos.

It is similar in tonnage to the Broken Bone, but judging from the thermal radiation characteristics reported by the sensors, the ship's engines and weapon systems are in a state of severe decline.

While subspace corrosion enhances the physical strength of the hull, it also makes the mechanical structure bulky and sluggish.

The plague warship had apparently also spotted the Broken Bones.

The Chaos Battleship's engine output suddenly increased, and sensors showed a sharp shift in the spectrum of its plasma exhaust flame, a sign of full-speed propulsion.

It turned its bow, attempting to cut off the Bone's course and form an interception position with its broadside cannons.

This is a space tactics textbook followed by both the Imperial Navy and the Chaos Navy. Large warships turn slowly, so they must seize the T-shaped position in advance and use all the firepower on the sides to pour fire on the longitudinal axis of the enemy ship's bow.

Textbook tactics, nothing special.

But textbooks are written for ordinary people.

The entire warship, Broken Bones, reacted in a single instant.

The engine output is asymmetrical, with the main thruster on the port side at full power and the output on the starboard side reduced to 40%, and the attitude control nozzles are adjusted accordingly.

The 1.5-kilometer-long steel behemoth turned sharply to the right with an agility that defied common sense, its hull tilting slightly due to inertia, like a barracuda twisting in the water.

On the bridge of the plague warship, something was giving orders—perhaps a former Imperial officer corrupted to the point of madness, or perhaps a mutated brain soaked in pus—and it issued the command to fire.

Two cannonballs shot out from the port side of the Plague Warship.

Each of the macro cannon shells was the size of a small shuttle, hurtling straight at the Broken Bone with an initial velocity of five percent of the speed of light.

The Broken Bone's trajectory traced a strange curve in three-dimensional space, using the gravitational slingshot effect and the gravitational field of Klein-IV to perform a miniature orbital maneuver.

Two cannon shells swept past the void 120 meters away from the warship's belly, piercing into the deep interstellar space behind them, turning into two pieces of space debris destined to fly for tens of thousands of years.

The plague warships hadn't even had time to reload for their second salvo.

The Broken Bone had completed its course change, its bow precisely pointing towards the starboard stern of the Plague Warship, towards the engine area.

In space warfare, tailing is the most despised tactic because you can only use the limited weapons on the bow to attack the enemy's thickest engine shields.

However, the bow of the Broken Bones was not equipped with cannons.

It's a corner strike.