Warhammer: Empire Reboot

A burly pirate captain pushed through the crowd and stepped out.

His name was Gorm Split Tongue, and he originally commanded a sizable privateering fleet.

Not only did Lawson dismantle his shipyard and steal two half-finished frigates, but he also emptied all the ransom money he had hidden in Redbone Market.

Half of his face was burned by plasma, and his split tongue makes his voice muffled and extremely harsh when he speaks.

"Overlord—" He deliberately dragged out the honorific title, with a mocking tone.

"We obeyed your orders and followed you out in pursuit. You said you wanted to reclaim the Ghost of Destruction! We chased it like idiots in the void for fifteen days, without even catching a glimpse of it, and then we slunk back. And then what? We found our hideout ransacked! Our ship stolen! Our slaves released! Our warehouses were cleaner than if a dog had licked them clean!"

He suddenly spat a mouthful of thick, bloody phlegm onto the ground and stared directly at Huron: "Now you want 30%? I'll give you three hairs."

A collective gasp filled the hall, but it was accompanied by an even more arrogant chuckle.

Huron looked down at him: "You want compensation?"

Gorm grinned, revealing his ugly mouth: "Everyone here wants compensation!"

He turned to the others with a highly provocative look, "Right? Or are you bunch of scoundrels who enjoy cleaning up Huron's messes for free?!"

Emotions were instantly ignited.

"compensation!"

"My shipyard, built up over forty years, is gone!"

"My fuel tank was blown up! My ledgers are gone, but the creditors are still alive!"

"Huron, you're the one who caused this trouble, so you should pay for it!"

A cunning underworld boss raised his voice to drown out the noise: "We absolutely do not want to rebel against you, Overlord!"

That was an extremely cunning statement. "But you have to let us live! We have no fuel, no docks, no cargo, and you're still demanding 30% of our goods? You're forcing us to eat our own flesh!"

Immediately, someone nearby retorted viciously, "I'd rather eat your flesh!"

A burst of laughter erupted. The veterans of the Red Pirate headquarters instantly raised their explosive guns, the atmosphere tense as if a steel wire were about to snap.

Huron stood up.

His massive frame descended from the throne, his heavy metal boots striking the marble floor like a death countdown. He walked straight toward Gorm Split Tongue.

Gorm stood firm, refusing to back down an inch. He knew that if anyone could withstand the first blow, the rest of the vortex's wolves would immediately follow and tear the old lion to shreds.

Huron walked up to him, looking down at him: "You think I have nothing to compensate you with?"

Gorm tilted his head back and stared intently at him: "Can you produce it?"

Huron nodded coldly: "Yes."

Gorm was stunned. Before he could react, Huron's iron claws had already grabbed his chin and the top of his head with overwhelming force.

Click!

A sharp, cracking sound rang out. Gorm's cervical vertebrae were snapped instantly by a terrifying force, his head twisted 180 degrees around his neck, his ashen face turned directly to his back.

Huron lifted the heavy corpse high with one hand.

"I'll give you my life in return."

Bang! The corpse was slammed down like a battering ram into the loudest crowd. At the same time, the veterans of the Red Pirate headquarters pulled their triggers.

The armored hall instantly transformed into a slaughterhouse.

Large-caliber explosives mercilessly tore open the fat bellies of the black marketeers, while chainsaw axes roared as they cleaved into the shoulders of privateer captains.

The Chaos Space Marine leader had just drawn his power sword to retaliate when Huron rushed forward and tore open his breastplate with a claw, pulling out his still-beating heart.

The Dark Mechanicus agent attempted to activate the heavy guard mech, but before he could even raise his hand, a sniper precisely pierced his brain-computer interface at the back of his head, spraying blood and sparks all over the wall.

The people who were just clamoring for compensation are now frantically fighting for the escape door like startled rats.

"Get out!"

"That old dog has gone mad!! Completely mad!"

"Don't push! My leg is going to be broken!"

Huron didn't need any weapons; he charged into the crowd himself, a raging killing machine in his own right.

Every swing of his iron claws takes away a piece of flesh, a head, or a broken bone.

A privateer captain desperately tried to aim his flare gun at him. The moment the muzzle flashed red with intense heat, Huron smashed through the man blocking his way and charged forward. His iron claws gripped the scorching barrel tightly, and he violently shoved the red-hot flare gun, along with the captain's terrified hands, into the man's gaping mouth!

Boom! A high-temperature explosion erupted directly from the back of the captain's head, sending the three pirates behind him flying.

The massacre lasted for more than ten minutes. The Red Pirates headquarters only ceased fire when the corpses piled up into a twisted mountain of flesh in the hall.

Huron stood atop the pile of corpses like a demon god, his body covered in bits of flesh and blood, thick brain matter still dripping from his demonic iron claws.

He slowly raised his head and looked at the survivors huddled together by the door, some so terrified they had lost control of their bladders:

"Now, who else wants compensation?"

Before the blood in the hall had even dried, the hyenas outside could already smell an even stronger stench of decay.

Huron killed Gorme!

"He can't offer any compensation; he'll only kill you to silence you!"

"He didn't destroy the Ghost! He's just an empty shell!"

"He can be subdued by killing ten, but can he kill a hundred or a thousand?! If we don't kill him now, we'll all be burned alive and skinned alive once he recovers!"

Rumors spread faster in a vortex than light spears and cannonballs.

It burrowed like a plague through the narrow ventilation ducts of wrecked ships, into the smoky taverns, into the slave quarters at the bottom, and into the ears of every pirate who had just lost everything and was looking for someone to vent his anger on.

The first to truly open fire were the remaining fleets in the Black Tooth Lake area.

They openly refused to hand over their last fuel. When the Red Pirates' patrol boat arrived menacingly to forcibly collect it, they immediately opened fire with their preheated cannons. Caught off guard, the patrol boat was pierced through its port side and, with a loud smoldering tail, crashed into the wreckage of a derelict ship.

Subsequently, three small gangs near Rusty Star Wharf launched a joint attack.

They besieged the remnants of the Red Pirates' tax bureau, stripped the arrogant tax officials naked, and hung them upside down on the outer shell of the space station.

Below, a huge, insulting sign was painted in fluorescent paint:

Tax revenue is suspended—until Huron grows a new backside.

This vulgar insult, characteristic of a major vortex, spread like wildfire.

The Red Pirates headquarters would naturally retaliate brutally, with Huron personally leading the suppression.

On the first day, he swept through the Blacktooth Port area. Three mutinous armed gunboats were blown to smithereens. A pirate captain who proclaimed himself "Lord of the New Port Area" was dragged off the bridge by Huron himself, chained with mithril chains to the tailpipe of the flagship's thrusters, and burned alive.

The next day, he returned to Rusty Star Wharf. The gang leader, who was wearing a tax official's sign, was captured alive. Huron did not kill him immediately, but instead had the huge metal sign shoved into the man's ripped-open stomach, and then sealed off the belly layer by layer with an industrial nail gun.

"You enjoy writing so much,"

Huron looked at the bloodied man writhing on the ground and screamed, "Then take the words into your guts and read them slowly in hell."

On the third day, he heavily suppressed a remnant stronghold of the Dark Mechanicus. The group of traitorous technicians took advantage of the chaos to seize the advanced repair dock and openly declared that the Red Pirates had lost their "technical oversight qualifications."

Huron said nothing, but directly ordered the cruiser's ram to tear open the outer wall of the dock and throw in the most ferocious boarding party. After four hours of meat grinder, the dock was filled with broken mechanical arms, red-hot wires, cleaved automatons, and twitching cyborg corpses.

Huron won every game. But with each victory, his Red Pirate forces were irreversibly decimated.

Because he is not attacking the weak imperial bureaucracy now, he is frantically tearing at his own vortex.

When he was suppressing the Black Tooth Po district, the remaining bandits of the Red Bone Market took the opportunity to loot the tax hall.

While he was burning down the mechanical cult's stronghold, Rusty Star Wharf took advantage of the chaos to launch two high-value fuel ships.

While he was wiping out the small gang, the real captains who owned fleets were secretly forming an alliance to divide up his remaining territory.

The pirates perfectly exemplified the tactics of hyenas: never engage a lion in direct combat. They bit off tails, legs, and tore at bleeding wounds, tearing off chunks of flesh before turning and running away.

Enraged, the male lion turned and chased after one of the lions, while another pounced from the shadows and tore at its belly.

What made Huron even more furious was that some people were even using his title of "Huron the Overlord" to double-cross him.

A small vassal squad of Red Pirates forged the Overlord's order to requisition a fuel depot. The guard officer saw through the deception, and a fierce firefight ensued. By the time Huron's trusted men arrived, half of the fuel depot had already been blown to pieces, and the remaining half had been taken away by a third group that appeared out of nowhere.

Huron's reason began to burn in his rage, and he began to frantically execute his own people:

Those who forge orders will be killed. Those who fail to execute orders effectively will be killed. Those who hoard fuel will be killed. Those who desert their posts will be killed.

In the midst of the uproar, some said he had completely gone mad, while others sneered that he wasn't mad enough.

On the fourth day, the truly fatal bite came.

Outside the remnants of the ruined star city, dozens of pirate groups and privateer fleets gathered in one place. Among them were former loyal vassals of the Red Pirates, small captains who had been robbed of their fortunes by Lawson and were in dire need of recovery, well-equipped private armies of black market merchants, the Chaos Astartes Warband, remnants of modified ships from the Dark Mechanicus, and even several heavy pirate ships that had originally accompanied Huron on his expedition but had deserted halfway.

They came together for their own greed or for survival.

A pirate captain, cloaked in human skin, stood before the flagship's public address system, broadcasting his malicious taunts throughout the entire Wasteland Star City:

"Huron! You old good-for-nothing! You fed the Great Whirlpool to Lawson like it was meat, and now you have the nerve to come back and be king?"

"Where is your throne?!"

"Where's your ten-kilometer-long Black Widow 'Destruction Ghost'?!"

"I heard she's already been taken away by the Emperor of the Empire?! Hahahaha!"

A burst of extremely vicious and deafening laughter suddenly erupted on the public channel.

"Don't talk nonsense! Riding away is being polite! That Imperial Dog even emptied her of all the hidden money under her belly!"

Another pirate burst into laughter and coughed violently: "Huron! Aren't you supposed to be the toughest man in the Great Maelstrom? How come you couldn't even keep your flagship wife?! The 'Destruction Ghost' slept with you for hundreds of years, and in the end, it still ran off with Lawson! She took all her dowry with her when she left!"

More laughter and shouts flooded the communication channel. Someone pounded on the control panel and screamed hysterically, "Your Majesty! Shouldn't we all chip in some ransom and go to Agrippina to buy your wife back?!"

"Redeem my ass! After experiencing the thrill of a ten-kilometer-long behemoth, do you think Lawson would be willing to give it back?! Hahahaha!"

On the bridge of the Red Pirates, many battle-hardened veterans trembled with rage, their armored servo motors humming in protest.

One veteran bit his metal replacement tooth so hard it shattered, while another smashed the safety off his heavy explosive rifle, wishing he could launch himself into the void and rip the tongues off every single one of the bastards on that channel.

However, Huron fell into an unusually calm state.

He stared intently at the tactical star map, the crimson electronic light illuminating his terrifying cyborg face.

He had calmly concluded that this battle absolutely could not continue.

He could certainly order a full-scale assault, using his elite troops to kill that fool in the human skin cloak, destroy a dozen privateers, and even slaughter all of those dozens of pirate groups.