Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Lawson needs a new arsenal.

This thought reminded him of something.

He once captured two warp imps.

Bound by the oath of true names, they revealed the location of a hidden Imperial small shipborne armory.

The supplies in that armory supported him through the crucial stage of growing his squad from six men to sixty.

If we could find one or two more similar hidden armories...

The problem is that he can't find it himself.

The space wreck is a super steel graveyard with a diameter of 120 kilometers.

It was formed by the collision, compression, and fusion of countless imperial warships of different eras and models in the subspace.

Its internal structure is far more complex than any human being can comprehend.

Using suicide squads for a thorough search?

Searching for a hidden, small armory that might be buried by collapsing bulkheads and metal plates in a three-dimensional space with a diameter of 120 kilometers by a thousand people is about as likely as finding a specific pebble with the naked eye in a mountain range.

But the little devil can.

Warp imps are the lowest of the low in the warp food chain.

Their individual combat strength is almost negligible; any Star Guardian soldier with basic training could eliminate them in close combat.

But they have a unique advantage: they can move freely among wrecked spaceships.

The principles are completely different from those of high-ranking demons.

High-level demons, such as vampires, Khorne's Heralds, and Bloodlust Demons, require a massive amount of warp energy to maintain their physical form in the real world.

The Great Demon didn't not want to move freely through the wrecked ship; he simply couldn't afford to.

But Little Devil is different.

They are so weak that they require almost no subspace energy to maintain their physical form.

To the Imps, the softened material interfaces in the wrecked ship were like water-soaked sponges, allowing them to leap in and out of any of the warp-permeated bulkheads like fish jumping out of the water.

That's why imps can appear in almost any location on a wrecked ship.

Not because they are strong, but precisely because they are weak.

Therefore, the little devil is the best guide in the wrecked ship.

They know every crevice, every compartment, every forgotten corner of the wrecked ship.

If we could capture a few more lesser demons, bind them with the True Name Oath, and force them to reveal the location of the Imperial Armory hidden within the wrecked ship...

The ammunition problem may then be solved.

The problem is that you can't just catch the little devil whenever you want.

These things are essentially parasites of the subspace.

They survive by absorbing the negative emotions, fear, despair, and pain from the souls of mortals.

When food is unavailable, they hide in the interlayers of wrecked ship materials and enter a low-energy state similar to hibernation, waiting for prey to approach them.

Unless they come out on their own initiative, drawn out by negative emotions, Lawson simply cannot find them.

They are hidden in the subspace permeable layer inside the bulkhead, making them completely undetectable at the physical level.

Lawson is waiting for an opportunity.

Time continued to pass.

Lawson's troops were operating at a tireless pace in the middle of the wrecked ship.

The green-skinned melee has reached a fever pitch.

The power vacuum left by Irontooth's expedition triggered a chain reaction, with surrounding tribes fighting fiercely for the territory and resources left behind by the Irontooth tribe, and the war quickly spread.

The Rotten Tooth Tribe and the Iron Nail Tribe formed a temporary alliance, which is extremely rare among the Greenskins and usually lasts only until the next meal.

They joined forces to defeat the Bone Shatterers and absorbed most of their forces.

The Red Cleaver Tribe was forced to retreat south after being attacked from both sides, but during the retreat, they clashed with the Poison Mushroom Tribe.

The five-way battle gradually evolved into a standoff between two major camps.

Lawson had long coveted this massive infighting involving hundreds of thousands of Greenskins, but he issued a strict order: no hunting party was allowed to approach within three kilometers of the heart of the melee.

There is only one reason: the Waaagh energy field.

When 100,000 greenskins fight each other in the same area, their collective subconscious will create a terrifying resonance in the subspace. The concentration of the Waaagh energy field will increase exponentially with the number of greenskins participating in the battle and the degree of their frenzy.

In that energy field of high concentration, the orc's muscle density would temporarily surge, his reaction speed would increase, and even those dilapidated weapons that would be impossible to fire under normal circumstances would inexplicably become effective.

For humans, a high concentration of Waaagh energy field is another form of psionic pollution. Headaches, hallucinations, inexplicable violent impulses, weapon malfunctions—the assassins can resist psychological effects, but physical interference cannot be overcome by willpower alone.

Therefore, Lawson's fifty hunting squads only operated on the outermost perimeter of the great melee, specializing in intercepting lone greenskins who had been scattered and fled the battlefield, scavenging abandoned wounded soldiers and corpses, and clearing out small groups of stragglers that spilled out of the combat zone.

Stay away from the eye of the storm and scavenge for debris on the edge.

It's not as efficient as just rushing in to harvest, but it's safe enough.

Life points, steel, and the occasional fragment of human-made equipment captured.

The other thirty squads carried out clearing and resource collection missions in the new territory to the northwest.

The contraction of the Genestealers has turned this area into a relatively safe rear, where only sporadic small groups of Greenskins and a very small number of wandering Imps need to be dealt with.

Twenty squads take turns guarding two outposts and patrol lines.

The suicide soldiers were constantly dying, but they were also constantly being replenished.

The old number disappears, and the new number is filled in.

Ammunition consumption is indeed approaching the red line.

Lawson had to issue a strict ammunition control order: explosives were only allowed for targets of Orc Boy rank or higher, and all others had to be dealt with using melee weapons.

The firing frequency of the laser guns was changed from free firing to precise burst firing; after the grenade inventory was reduced to the last box, the entire operation switched to using locally sourced physical traps.

Efficiency is declining, but it is still within an acceptable range.

Two more days passed.

Lawson reviewed the latest troop strength statistics at the command post of the forge stronghold.

At some point that morning, the total number of suicide bombers surpassed one thousand.

Chapter 49 The Swarm Strategies Are Back

Total number of suicide soldiers: 1003.

Then, the system panel changed.

The moment the 1001st assassin was redeemed, Lawson felt a sensation he had never experienced before, as if a new dimension had suddenly appeared in his mind.

Three new notifications popped up on the system panel.

[Core functionality redesign: Swarm intelligence has been awakened.]

In his previous life, during the hundreds of years he commanded millions of assassins on Earth, swarm intelligence was his most core, irreplaceable, and closest ability to the definition of a divine artifact.

By that time, swarm intelligence had evolved over hundreds of years to a level that was almost omniscient and omnipotent.

The computing power of a million suicide soldiers was connected in parallel to form a super biological computer covering the entire globe.

All Lawson needs to do is generate a single thought, and the swarm intelligence will break that thought down into millions of specific execution instructions within nanoseconds, down to which foot each assassin should step out, which angle they should turn, and which target they should fire at each moment.

That was the true foundation of his rule over the earth.

And now, it's back.

Although it's just a prototype.

[Swarm Strategies: A cloud-based computing network of collective subconsciousness, with the host's consciousness as the core node and the collective brainpower of all "suicide squads" as distributed processing units. Current node: 1003. Processing efficiency is approximately 800% higher than the consciousness-interconnection mode.]

Lawson quickly calculated the meaning of the number in his mind.

Mutual understanding is a channel for sharing information.

All the assassins can see what each other sees, but there is a chasm between seeing and making the best use of each other.

With a force of a thousand men, relying on one person to make all the decisions, this bottleneck began to hold us back when the number of elite soldiers exceeded three hundred.

Swarm intelligence has broken through this bottleneck.

It's not simply information sharing; it's computing power sharing.

A thousand brains are connected in parallel to form a biological supercomputer.

All Lawson needs to do is provide a strategic direction—eastward—and the swarm intelligence will automatically generate the optimal advance route, troop allocation, firepower configuration, ammunition consumption budget, and contingency plan. Each soldier will automatically receive their own set of execution instructions, precise down to their pace, firing rhythm, and magazine reload timing.

He no longer needs to personally direct every detail of every battle.

Swarm intelligence will move every piece for him.

He clicked on the second notification.

[Core functionality refactored: Distributed consciousness storage, now awakened.]

[Distributed Consciousness Storage: The host's complete consciousness data (personality, memories, emotional patterns, logical framework) is sliced ​​and encrypted in real time, and backed up deep into the cerebral cortex of each assassin. Data is synchronized in real time via a swarm network. Redundancy: As long as one assassin survives, the host's consciousness data remains complete.]

Lawson's gaze lingered on the last line longer than on the first.

As long as one assassin survives, the host's consciousness data remains complete.

In layman's terms, he has a thousand lives.

No, it's not just a thousand; as long as one of the assassins is alive, he won't die.

In the Warhammer universe, spanning 40,000 years, death is the fairest currency.

Mortals die, Space Marines die, and Primarchs can theoretically die as well.

Even emperors, if you consider sitting on a golden throne as living, are also approaching their end in an extremely slow manner.

Now, Lawson has, in a sense, transcended this ironclad rule.