Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Lawson nodded.

He gazed at the pirate star city that had been looted; all that remained were things that were difficult to take away and of little value.

Since that's the case, then we won't leave any for Huron.

"Evacuate the entire force."

"Start the countdown at all detonation points."

Swarm intelligence transmits commands to all nodes.

The cornerstone sequence has begun to withdraw.

The battle formation, along with prisoners, equipment, and the last batch of supplies, retreated into the stasis field.

The stolen pirate ship began to leave its berth.

The tugboat towed the partially repaired hull away.

The T sequence has completed its final check, confirming that all red targets that cannot be removed have entered the demolition sequence.

Before Lawson was the last to step into the stasis field, he glanced back at the giant vortex.

This pirate king's lair was once filled with bloody riches.

Now, it's like a giant beast whose organs have been ripped out.

"It's all blown up."

P.S.: Guys, today is the last day of double monthly votes, so please give me some if you have any!

Chapter 190 The Dead End of a Generation of Heroes

Rumble!

The first explosion occurred at the bottom of Rust Star Wharf.

The black market space station, welded together from three abandoned mining ships, two old Imperial supply depots, and half a remnant of an orbital elevator, first emitted a blinding red light from within, then the entire lower berth was ripped apart. The high concentration of promethium in the fuel tanks detonated under extreme pressure, flames shooting wildly upwards along the delivery pipes, like a fiery serpent burrowing into the very bones of Star City.

The dozen or so small pirate ships moored at the berth didn't even have time to untie their moorings before being mercilessly engulfed by the explosion. The sturdy hulls were first twisted and deformed by the shockwave, and then swallowed whole by the ensuing sea of ​​fire.

A pirate tax collector had just crawled out of the ruins and hadn't even gotten his footing when he was horrified to see the familiar berth ring above him broken in two.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

The next second, the broken metal berth ring, weighing tens of thousands of tons, crashed down, instantly crushing him and the dozen or so pirates behind him into a bloody pulp.

Immediately afterwards, the artillery emplacements on the east side of the Destroyer Star City detonated.

That place was once a key firing point for the Red Pirates to control the outer channel of the Great Whirlpool.

Lawson did not move the entire fortress.

The T-series suicide soldiers precisely removed the fire control core, power coupler, void aiming array, and several sets of high-value optical components. Subsequently, the Xuanwu Battle Group left thermal demolition devices in the turret base and ammunition silos.

Now, all these devices activated simultaneously. The entire fortress complex seemed to be violently twisted apart by an unseen divine hand, its metal structure collapsing section by section. The Red Pirates' proud defensive fortifications instantly became a corpse with its spine removed.

The explosion at Warehouse No. 3 of the Dark Mechanicus seemed even more bizarre.

The usual supplies there had long been emptied by Lawson: reactor regulators, ancient data caskets, alien power cores, Thinker arrays, precision servo arms... all had been sent into Agrippina's bottomless pit. What remained were only the heavily contaminated demon engine heart, the corrupted reactor, and chaotic mechanical components with an extremely high probability of going out of control.

Before the Suanni battle group withdrew, they left behind the Golden Fire Purification Seed deep inside the warehouse.

When the explosion began, the first thing to appear was not a burst of fire, but a piercing, demonic scream.

Inside the sealed chamber, the demonic engine cores that Lawson deemed "not valuable enough to move" began to struggle frantically. They sensed impending destruction and felt the despair of being abandoned.

But the golden flames had already been ignited. The sacred flames climbed rapidly along the runic chains, incinerating the whispers of the warp demons. Then, the main reactor of the warehouse was completely detonated, and the entire Dark Mechanicus warehouse collapsed from the inside out.

Deep within the vortex storm, an explosion of this magnitude even tore open a brief subspace rift. A few rotting giant claws that had just emerged from the rift were instantly pulverized by the aftershocks of the real explosion and the golden flames.

The collapse of the Red Bone Market is most like a retribution from heaven.

This bloody slave market had devoured countless civilians of the Empire, workers of the hive capital, hijacked merchant ship crew members, and unfortunate border migrants. On its auction stage, vibrant lives were coldly priced according to age, physical strength, organ integrity, and suitability for conversion into mech servants.

Now, the explosion of the underground vault has ripped the entire market apart from below. The blood-red dome has cracked open with a deafening roar, and the wrecked iron cages holding slaves are sent flying through the air by the shockwave.

Many pirates, black market traders, and flesh traffickers were still frantically scrambling for the remaining "goods" when they were crushed under the collapsed metal beams. A slave trader, his face covered in blood, clung tightly to the last box of ransom certificates as he crawled out. Just as he reached the gate, he saw the entire load-bearing wall outside collapse.

Even on his deathbed, he was still cursing: "Where are Huron's rules?!"

No one answered him.

The whirlpool has become unruly.

The explosions in Lawson's area were not at one or two locations, but at dozens, even hundreds, of points simultaneously.

The vortex is inherently extremely unstable. This region has been torn apart by subspace storms for a long time, and the boundary between reality and unreality is as thin as a tattered rag.

The scale of Lawson's explosions was enormous, especially since many of the explosions occurred precisely near the subspace anchor point, the old dock power well, and the Storm Edge space station.

Explosions piled upon explosions, flames collided with the storm. The physical structure of reality began to vibrate violently, and some areas were directly swallowed up by spatial rifts.

A former imperial colony, now only half intact, suddenly folded inwards in a bizarre manner after the explosion, as if stuffed into an invisible stomach, and vanished in the blink of an eye. Outside another ship graveyard, the warp tides suddenly reversed, spitting out several unknown ancient ship hulls, now reduced to rusted skeletons.

There was even a brief opening in a previously inaccessible storm zone, revealing a floating black asteroid with its surface covered in broken cannon barrels and ancient antennas.

This is the Great Whirlpool. If you stab it with a knife, it will bleed and spew out something even more disgusting and ancient.

At this moment, on the bridge of the "Destruction Ghost".

Lawson was already comfortably seated on the throne of the new flagship.

This massive 10-kilometer-class warship, originally belonging to Huron, is steadily sailing toward its designated transit area under the precise guidance of the Star Eye Navigation Death Squad.

Lawson quietly watched the system notifications that popped up on his retina.

[System notification: Kill a Chaos unit to gain Warp Energy.]

[System notification: Destroy the Demon Engine core to gain warp energy.]

The notifications kept refreshing rapidly, almost forming a waterfall of light in the field of vision.

Lawson glanced at the final settlement.

The final massive explosion across the entire map alone contributed tens of millions of subspace energy points to him.

In addition to the efficient annihilation, purification, decapitation, and destruction during the seven-day plundering campaign, the harvest of subspace energy alone approached the 40 million mark.

Looking at these astronomical figures, Lawson slowly smiled.

Ordinary pirates would rob a merchant ship, take the goods, and leave.

Huron seized a planet, taking with him slaves, weapons, ransom, food, and ships. This time, Lawson is seizing the very lifeblood of the Great Vortex.

He struck at countless vital points simultaneously within the vortex.

Three million cornerstone sequences were pre-implemented, marking value, mapping routes, and calculating priorities.

The static force field continuously pulsated for seven days and seven nights.

The battle sequence was non-stop: killing, seizing ships, dismantling warehouses, and capturing prisoners.

White Tiger, Red Dragon, Black Tortoise, Yazi, Bian, Suanni, Bear Guard... all take turns appearing.

Even combat units without power armor possess the terrifying ability to single-handedly kill Chaos Space Marines.

Ordinary pirate groups are no match for them; even seasoned pirates often can't organize a first counterattack when faced with a coordinated attack from a fighting formation.

The Red Pirates' second-line forces were slightly stronger, the Dark Mechanicus's escorts were a bit more troublesome, and the few Chaos Space Marine squads that remained behind did indeed create resistance in some war zones.

The gap in organizational discipline and the crushing power of sheer force are undeniable.

They couldn't protect their property. Many of those who survived didn't do so through bravery, but through hiding.

Hiding in the interlayers of wrecked ships, in scalding cooling pipes, under piles of slave corpses, in nooks and crannies marked as "low value" by the Lawson system.

After the explosion, these survivors crawled out of the darkness, trembling, like rats in a sewer.

A Chaos Space Marine crawls out of a repair well in the Broken Star City.

His right shoulder armor was completely burned through, his left arm was reduced to half, and half of his helmet visor was shattered. He was originally the champion of a small warband who had burned down three shelters on the Imperial border and cruelly nailed an Astragalus colonel to the bow of his ship.

Now, he stands in the ruins, looking at the empty treasure vault.

A mountain of fine gold is gone.

The slave funds that the War Gang had accumulated over seventeen years were gone.

The reactor core, stolen from the Mechanicus fleet, is gone.

Even the several boxes of precious metals he had secretly hidden in his private cabin were completely wiped out by the Cornerstone Sequence according to their value.

He suddenly flew into a rage and kicked the corpse of the red pirate beside him, gritting his teeth: "Huron...you bastard!"

Another location, near the wreckage of Rusty Star Pier.

A group of small-time pirates emerged from beneath the wrecked berth. Their ship was gone, their cargo was gone, but the berthing tax they owed Huron was still clearly recorded in the bomb disposal ledger.

A captain with a severely burned face stared at the still-burning fuel tank in the distance and muttered, "What did we do to deserve this?"

The henchman beside him spat out a mouthful of blood mixed with fragments of internal organs: "They've attracted robbers!!!"

The captain turned and stared blankly at him. The first mate cursed, "Why did Lawson come? It's all Huron's fault! He went to arrest their Imperial civilians, he went to block Dante, and he dragged the whole Maelstrom into this mess!"

Another pirate said in a hoarse voice, "Huron's flagship has been stolen."

These words silenced the surroundings for a moment, as if it were death.

Then, someone laughed strangely.

"The Pirate King?"

"Even his damn throne has been taken away, what kind of king is he?"

Similar words spread like a plague in every dark corner of the vortex.

In the ruins of the Red Bone Market, a slave trader leader stands on the collapsed auction platform, holding a slug gun high, roaring mournfully at the remaining pirates around him:

"Huron is no longer worthy to be the King of the Great Whirlpool! His flagship is gone! His treasury is empty! He caused us to be robbed of everything by Lawson! He brought this disaster upon himself, and he couldn't even catch up with it, so what right does he have to come back and continue collecting our taxes?!"

Someone responded.

Then the noise grew louder and louder.