Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The coordinate data has been uploaded via the swarm network.

The C-492's body disconnected from the node link, its head, now unsupported, slumped heavily to the ground, and fell silent.

From the moment the shell landed to the moment the soldier died, three seconds passed.

In the fourth second, Agrippina's counterattack arrived.

Below the horizon, three heavy railguns emitted muffled electromagnetic booms.

Three four-meter-long depleted uranium solid armor-piercing projectiles tore through the air at Mach 12, completely ignoring the radar's heat source decoy.

The first railgun directly shattered the upper part of the 600-meter-high rocky hill.

The second one pierced through the gap created by the explosion.

The third missile landed with extreme precision on the bottom of the reverse slope, striking the Steel Warriors' real heavy artillery position.

A violent secondary explosion erupted behind the hill, turning the thirty-two petrified lizard cannons into scrap metal in half a second.

Valence's pupils contracted sharply behind the observation window.

The enemy completely saw through the heat source camouflage, and the artillery response speed exceeded the physical response limit of the old Empire's equipment.

"The air defense positions haven't fired!" the adjutant reported loudly.

The eight hundred plague fly drones had crossed the outer perimeter of Agrippina, but the anti-aircraft laser wells, which used to be so eager to shoot beams of light, were now as quiet as a tomb.

"The drone pilot determined that the air defense system was disabled and is now entering a 35-degree dive!"

Valence grabbed the communicator abruptly: "Raise! Raise it immediately!"

Too late.

As all 800 drones entered their dive trajectory and squeezed into the optimal crossfire zone where high-G maneuvers were impossible to perform, 120 blinding high-energy laser beams simultaneously lit up the sky above the Agrippina-1 site.

Laser wells do not fire blindly, and there is no waste of firepower.

They fired in the same microsecond, their beams weaving a net of destruction in the air with no blind spots.

After three seconds of burning, none of the eight hundred drones were left behind, not even a piece larger than a fist; they were all vaporized in mid-air.

"Communications locked!" Father Saul cried out from the dark communications tunnel in the trench.

Valens turned his gaze to the tactical data panel.

The coordinates of a high-point observer sent to the front line were suddenly hit precisely by an orbital torpedo and instantly vaporized.

"Switch to the backup channel and re-establish the communication link!" Valens roared.

"Switch to Alpha band." Thor pulled the lever.

Immediately afterwards, a concealed relay antenna 15 kilometers away from the bunker was smashed by a secondary shell from a Hongpao gun that fell from the sky.

"Switch to beta band!"

But not long after, the backup signal tower behind the right ridge was covered by surface fire.

Valens felt a wave of suffocation.

As long as they activate any form of radio transmitter, the enemy's fire control system can complete triangulation, ballistic calculation, and fire suppression within three seconds.

It's like a pair of giant eyes hanging in the sky, staring intently at every ant on the ground.

"Sol! Access the underlying network! Contaminate their Fire Control Thinkers with junk code!" Valens issued the final countermeasure order.

Dark Priest Thor immediately plugged the data cable behind his head into a heavy military Thinker port. He summoned an extremely vicious subspace logic virus, attempting to hack into Agrippina's command chain through the battlefield overflow port.

Thor's electronic eyes flashed with a scarlet light.

His stream of junk data surged like a mudslide, violently crashing into the other party's network firewall.

However, the moment this piece of junk code made contact with the opponent's bottom layer, Thor felt as if he had hit a wall.

A massive wall of computing power, as vast as the deep sea, formed by countless tiny computing nodes.

The scrap code was like a lump of mud thrown into a stellar furnace. It didn't even make a ripple before being swallowed up and packaged by that massive computing power, and then burned back along Thor's data chain with a pressure a hundred times greater.

"what!"

Thor let out an extremely short scream.

The breathing mask on his head exploded, spraying boiling brain matter mixed with charred electronic components onto the control panel.

The priest's body fell heavily to the ground, his head completely carbonized.

Valence looked at the still-smoking priest's body and put down the rangefinder in his hand.

The probing attack was completely crushed.

Ten thousand cannon fodder were shredded into mincemeat by crossfire before they even triggered the landmines. The real heavy artillery positions were targeted and eliminated, the drones were all wiped out, and the electronic warfare was instantly countered.

But as the frontline commander, Valence had accomplished his mission; he had obtained the necessary conclusions regarding the variables.

Instead of ordering continued reinforcements, he decisively ordered the remaining troops to retreat into underground air-raid shelters.

Before retreating, he cut off all radio communications and used a physical hardwire buried more than ten meters underground to transmit a short two-line battle report back to the command ship anchored at the edge of subspace:

"The main star's fire control logic has changed."

"Repeat, Agrippina had a brain transplant."

The outer reaches of the Agrippina galaxy, in the dark void.

The eight-kilometer-long steel warrior combat barge, the Cold Anvil, is quietly hovering in the asteroid belt.

Deep within the bridge, war blacksmith Barak Volgan stands before a massive holographic tactical table.

After Volgan read the battle report transmitted back by Valens via physical hardwire, the entire bridge fell into a deathly silence for two minutes.

"Valens' heavy artillery position was destroyed. How many shells did the enemy use?" Volgan turned his head and stared at the adjutant in charge of intelligence gathering.

The adjutant quickly reviewed the gravitational wave oscillation data that had just been intercepted: "Three shots, sir. Solid shot from railguns. 100% hit rate."

"How long was the air defense network activated after the drone swarm was destroyed?"

"Three seconds."

Volgan's metal jaws emitted a teeth-grinding grinding sound.

[Damn it! Who the hell is this?]

Agrippina Main Star, Industrial Zone 47.

Two days ago, this place was a wasteland repeatedly plowed by the heavy artillery of the Iron Warriors.

Molten concrete and twisted plastic steel bars intertwined, the street was blasted into craters more than ten meters deep, and underground coolant pipes ruptured, spewing highly toxic chemical vapors to the surface.

Now, Zeta-7, the squad leader of the Guardian Army's Alpha Squad, stands on the street corner, his optical goggles under his helmet spinning at high speed, trying to analyze the scene before him using his logic circuits based on mechanical dogma.

The streets were cleared out.

The mountains of rubble, the broken parts of the Apostles' servants, and the heavy power armor wreckage of the Chaos Space Marines were precisely sorted, cut up, and towed away.

Radiation-proof barriers have been erected around the area where the highly toxic chemicals leaked, and the damaged underground ammunition transport tracks have been replaced. Three small servo transport vehicles are gliding silently along the tracks.

Zeta-7's attention was not on the buildings being repaired, but on the ordinary people who were working.

The group of people were wearing uniform gray-black work clothes, with no obvious signs of mechanical modification.

However, in the Zeta-7's tactical assessment module, these mortals are rated far more dangerous than the highest-ranking Killer Servants.

Zeta-7 looked at a turret repair point thirty meters away.

A worker in black had just used a plasma welding torch to cut off a severely deformed cannon barrel. Before his hand had even fully retracted, another worker beside him handed over a brand-new replacement barrel. The handover was as seamless as precision gears, without a single millisecond of delay.

On the other side of the load-bearing wall repair site, a worker was drawing cutting lines on the wall with hot melt chalk.

The instant the chalk left the wall, the cutter in his companion's hand had already cut along the trajectory, while the third person was using a hydraulic rod to steadily hold the wall in place before it collapsed.

Even with its hearing sensors deliberately powered up, the Zeta-7 failed to detect a single whispered communication.

They are like multiple limbs sharing the same brain.

A shiver ran through the Zeta-7's bionic spine from the depths of its code.

He silently tightened his grip on the electroplated rifle and took a half-step back.

At the same time, in the planetary fire control temple, the underground core wartime hub.

Lawson stood in front of the holographic star map.

The swarm intelligence is transmitting the latest resource settlement data directly into his retina.

[Klein Galaxy: All 5100 green farms have entered the harvest cycle.]

[Oberus Tri-Star (Headquarters): 900 green-skinned farms are operating stably.]

Total number of connected stations: 6000.

[Production Capacity Calculation: 14-day single cycle, producing 60 million Life Points.]

[Equivalent manpower conversion: Three million non-combatant suicide soldiers.]

The next steps suggested by the swarm intelligence team are: "The manpower allocation of three million non-combat suicide soldiers is ready. This force can be used to fill logistical gaps in Theaters One through Seven, or deployed to underground arsenals to expedite operations..."

"Stop," Lawson interrupted the report.

He looked at the data block representing three million soldiers on the holographic projection and said thoughtfully, "The name 'non-combat suicide soldiers' is no longer appropriate."

In the face of those high-level enhanced units, they might be classified as "non-combat" by the system.

But now, these suicide soldiers have taken over the politics of 21 planets, the production lines of thousands of factories, the voyages of an entire interstellar fleet, and the underlying maintenance of Agrippina, this colossal war machine.

They can repair plasma reactors, repair railgun bases under the Chaos Cannon, comfort tens of thousands of refugees on the verge of collapse, operate Leman Russ main battle tanks, and even pick up explosive guns from the ground and fill them into trenches when soldiers on the front lines are killed.

They were never "non-combatants".

They are the most solid foundation of this rapidly expanding interstellar empire.

"Starting today, the non-combat suicide squad system is abolished."

"Renamed: Cornerstone Sequence".

With Lawson's thought, the swarm mind holographic projection switched, displaying real-time monitoring footage of various areas on the surface of Agrippina in a split-screen format.

Ruins of Block 12.

A squad of [Foundation Sequence Militia] is taking over the barricades left behind by the Christian Guard.