Warhammer: Empire Reboot

"Is there enough canned food?"

Quintus's lips twitched.

“Your gray-clad soldiers brought over three hundred boxes, enough to feed my men for half a year.”

"Let me know when you're done eating, and there's plenty to go around."

Lawson did not look back. He stepped into the portal of light.

The silver light engulfed his figure and disappeared a second later.

Quintus stood on the city wall, staring at the spot where the portal had disappeared, and remained silent for a long time.

Viktor stopped beside him.

Where did he go?

“Go kill the demons on the next planet,” Quintus said.

The light faded.

Lawson's boots sank into the soft soil.

Klein-IV.

The captain of the advance suicide squad, Jia Qi, was already waiting by the anchor point.

The planet has a population of approximately forty million. The Nurgles are primarily based in Harvest City, the largest town in the Southern Hemisphere.

A demon prince.

The four nuns were left behind in Klein-IX.

Vera pacifies the civilians in Casablanca, while Katarina, along with Sera and Sena, works with the assassin patrols to clear out stragglers around the city.

When a planet needs a living saint to make an appearance and set the tone, a static force field portal can be pulled in, as convenient as taking a coat out of a closet.

Lawson completely shifted his focus from Klein-IX and began to assess the gains from this round of battle.

The swarm intelligence algorithm completed all the settlements in the background.

Total subspace energy: slightly over 7.7 million points.

The number looked large, but Lawson frowned.

The number of Plague Legion killed in this battle was staggering; the corpses of the Walkers alone stretched for twelve kilometers. Including the Daemon Engines, Corrupted Vehicles, and Plague Space Marines, the total number of kills exceeded 300,000.

But these plague walkers are really too low-end. It takes more than thirty of them to extract a little bit of warp energy, which is a far cry from the efficiency of killing greenskins to farm life points.

The real big contributors are elite units like Fectus and the Demon Prince Vikrian, along with other Plague Lords. The rest rely on sheer numbers.

However, what truly caught Lawson's eye was not the energy numbers.

That is the total number of suicide soldiers.

The Ironbone Project on the Upper Oberlus Tri-Star continues to operate, resulting in periodic troop buildups. Total number of suicide soldiers: ten million.

Lawson's lips curled up slightly.

The previous integer node was one million. That time, he unlocked the single-organ targeted enhancement system, granting him the Star-Eyed Assassin and Starship-001.

What will ten million bring?

The feedback from swarm intelligence is almost instantaneous.

First, there's the surge in computing power.

With ten million brains operating in parallel, swarm intelligence has crossed an order-of-magnitude threshold in information processing capabilities.

Lawson could clearly feel that the flow of information in his mind had become clearer and faster.

Then there's psionic energy.

The resonance and superposition of ten million bioelectric fields pushed Lawson's endogenous spiritual energy to a new level.

The radius of psionic perception has expanded from twelve kilometers to twenty-four kilometers, doubling in size.

This means that he is standing in the center of a small city, and the location, heartbeat, body temperature, and even brainwave frequency of every living thing in the city are within his perception range.

The number of shadow wheels that can be controlled simultaneously has also increased from eighty-one to one hundred and eight.

The 108 shadow wheels can execute any combination of four modes—group control, single control, storm, and fusion—under the microsecond-level scheduling of swarm intelligence.

But what truly brought a smile to Lawson's face was the new feature that the system unlocked at ten million nodes.

There's only one word: elite suicide squad.

These suicide soldiers will gradually develop stronger independent judgment, more distinctive personal tactical styles, and even personalities through continuous combat and learning.

In other words, the best of Lawson's elite army of assassins will begin to evolve.

To become a politician like Qingshan, an iron-fisted governor like Lin Qinghu, a brute like Ergou, and a silent thug like Sangou.

Each has its own personality and strengths, yet they are all perfectly integrated into the underlying coordination network of swarm intelligence.

Lawson smiled.

He looked at Jia Qi beside him.

Jia Qi was half-squatting beside the anchor point checking the equipment when he noticed Lawson's gaze and looked up.

Lawson noticed a subtle change.

There was something different in Jia Qi's eyes when he looked over.

A subtle change. But for a process evolving from a "biological computing node" to an "independent individual," this is the first crack.

Lawson did not intervene.

He quietly made a mark in the background of the swarm intelligence: give appropriate preference to the early suicide soldiers such as Jia Yi and Jia Qi in terms of computing power allocation and knowledge resources, so as to accelerate their elitism process.

Klein-IV.

Lawson unfurled his living metal wings and rose from the seaweed field where the anchor point was located.

His psychic perception range was 24 kilometers. The moment he ascended to an altitude of 1,000 meters, he could "see" a large area of ​​the planet's northern hemisphere clearly.

Klein-IV is a standard Imperial agricultural world.

North of the equator lies a vast seaweed cultivation area, while south of the equator is a cluster of towns and settlements centered around Harvest City.

The Empire has a colony population of about 40 million on this planet, most of whom are concentrated in six agricultural towns in the Southern Hemisphere.

This planet has completely fallen.

According to Jiaqi's reconnaissance report.

The commander of the Planetary Defense Force was infected and mutated during the first wave of the plague attack. He led half a regiment of soldiers to turn against the enemy and directly opened the gates of Harvest City.

Since then, there has been no organized resistance on the entire planet.

After capturing Harvest City, the Nurgle Legion immediately began constructing an altar.

From Pfectus's memories, Lawson knew that the demon prince of Klein-IV was called "Vitrak the Corruptor".

After being transformed into a demon by Nurgle, he treated building altars like building factories, and his progress ranked among the top three out of the seventeen planets.

Lawson flew south at maximum speed.

With enhanced psionic power, the living metal wings interact with airflow more efficiently.

Lawson's flight speed easily exceeded twice the speed of sound, leaving a white trail of solidified matter behind him.

Twenty minutes later, Harvest City came into his view.

This town was originally a typical imperial agricultural distribution center.

Low-rise prefabricated houses, huge barns, and crisscrossing irrigation canals. Now it looks more like a prison.

The city walls enclosed the entire city in a closed circle, with only four gates on the four sides, each guarded by rows of plague walkers.

Inside the city walls, approximately three million civilians were imprisoned in the eastern half of the city.

They are sacrifices. When the altar is activated sixty days later, their souls will be extracted to serve as fuel to tear apart the barriers of reality.

The western half of the city has been completely transformed into a construction site.

Lawson could already sense the outline of the altar under construction from 24 kilometers away using his psychic powers.

A circular stone platform with a diameter of over 300 meters, with intricate subspace energy conduits buried beneath its foundation.

In the very center of the altar stood a massive silhouette.

The energy concentration in the subspace is extremely high, and the size of their souls far exceeds that of ordinary Plague Space Marines.

Vitrak, the Demon Prince.

Vitrak was squatting in the center of the altar, using a two-meter-long iron stylus to carve energy-conducting runes on the surface of the stone platform.

His stature wasn't considered tall among the demon princes, standing at around 3.5 meters, much shorter than Gulgar and Vikrian.

However, his physique is extremely compact, and the density of his muscles and bones far exceeds that of demon princes of the same level.

He was wearing a set of Great Expedition-era power armor that wasn't too badly corroded. The chest and shoulder armor were covered with a thin layer of dark green bacterial film, but the basic structure of the armor plates was well preserved.

Vitrak was an Imperial engineer before his fall, and even after being ascended to demonhood by Nurgle, he retained his passion for precision work.

His altar carving precision ranked first among the seven battle groups, with the error of each rune line not exceeding 0.3 millimeters.

At this moment, he was concentrating intently on sketching the last set of energy-conducting loops in the core area of ​​the altar.

Then he felt a sudden chill on the back of his neck.

Vitrak's body reacted before his brain, rolling to the right, the iron pen slipping from his hand, and his left hand already drawing the power warhammer from his waist.

A silver figure crashed down from the sky.

The landing point was exactly where he had been crouching a second earlier.

The stone platform shattered under the impact, creating a crater five meters in diameter, with debris and dust flying in all directions.

Vitrak steadied himself and recognized who it was.

A humanoid figure wearing silver-black power armor.

His expression was obscured behind the helmet and visor. A pair of silver metallic wings were folded behind him.

Vitrak's pupils contracted slightly.