Warhammer: Empire Reboot

An orcish war moon intruded into the edge of Agrippina, only to be taken away by Lawson.

This news caused a stir within the Chaos faction.

Many Chaos Warlords gloated over Huron's loss of his stronghold, and became even more wary and fearful of the Imperial warlords entrenched in Agrippina.

The dark side of the empire is large enough.

There are thousands of agricultural worlds, mining worlds, and hive worlds that have lost their star-guided navigation and lack defenses.

Those planets are inhabited by desperate souls, untapped resources, isolated governors, corrupt PDFs, and nobles so terrified they'd give anything for anything.

Attacking such a world can easily yield millions of sacrifices and mountains of resources.

Attack the Agrippina Sector?

There are monsters there that can kill a Primarch alone.

There is an army of hundreds of millions who are not afraid of death and are not corrupted by the subspace.

There were tens of thousands of heavily armored war behemoths.

They committed a huge force, risking total annihilation, to gnaw on a bone covered in thorns.

Few rational forces would be willing to engage in such a losing proposition, except for those greens whose brains are full of fungi and who only want to fight.

The Death Guard's Plague Fleet changed course, avoiding the outskirts of Agrippina.

When the wizards of the Thousand Sons Legion performed divination, they designated this star sector's coordinates as a blind spot to avoid their spiritual vision being overwhelmed by the strange swarm's will.

The dark apostles of the Word Bearers strictly forbade the lower-level believers from proselytizing or infiltrating in this direction.

Some Slaanesh pirate fleets originally intended to raid the outlying hives, but upon hearing that the Battle Moon had been captured, they immediately turned back to find an even easier target.

The Agrippina sector has returned to a long-awaited period of calm.

In this mad universe, Lawson used absolute violence and brutal attrition rates to create an invisible deterrent barrier for his territory.

Inside the Governor's Palace's strategic command center, he reviewed the defense data for the 318 recaptured planets.

Deterrence can only stop large-scale fleet invasions and the arrival of Primarch-class demons.

Chaos corruption is never achieved through direct, forceful attacks alone.

Gene thieves lurk.

The cult has infiltrated the lower levels of the cult.

The Nagoya cult spreads plague.

Slaanesh followers corrupt the nobility.

The remaining weapons smuggled by the Red Pirates.

These slow-acting poisons are the most common cause of death in the Imperial world.

Even though the chaotic army outside chose to detour, Lawson still established a defense system in the Agrippina sector.

Dynamic zeroing plus a rapid response mechanism.

This mechanism does not rely on sluggish Ministry of Justice investigations, nor on lengthy and error-prone trials of heresy.

It is built upon the information control capabilities of swarm intelligence and the instantaneous delivery of static force fields.

The first layer is a comprehensive physical and psionic monitoring network.

Tens of millions of non-combatant assassins were infiltrated into various levels of society on 318 planets.

Any unusual population movements, strange religious gatherings, symptoms of disease, genetic abnormalities, psionic fluctuations, and large-scale emotional shifts will be recorded by the swarm mind.

The second layer is the instantaneous delivery of absolute violence.

Lawson broke down highly mobile battlebands such as the White Tiger, Crimson Dragon, and Luan Bird into hundreds of five- or ten-man tactical squads.

These squads are armed and on standby around the clock, deployed next to the folding logistics honeycomb delivery nodes.

Once abnormal fluctuations are confirmed, there is no need to report them through multiple levels or request fire support.

The static force field is activated directly above the alarm coordinates.

Five elite assassins clad in White Tiger power armor, or Red Dragon assassins carrying heavy flamethrowers, would smash through the roof of the cult's meeting place.

The third layer is erasure that requires no judgment.

The moment the tactical squad arrived, the bomb guns and molten metal generators immediately opened fire.

Once detected, react quickly and reset immediately.

The 318 human worlds in the Agrippina Sector are undergoing a complete reshaping.

The green-skinned farms deployed in these planetary bottom-nest restricted areas and abandoned mines have completed initial equipment break-in and biomass recycling tests over the past few months.

Ninety-five thousand four hundred giant culture tanks have entered full-capacity production line operation.

On the system's data panel, the readings for life point production showed a steady exponential increase.

Each standard 14-day cycle can theoretically yield 45 million Cornerstone Sequence Death Warriors.

Lawson is not stingy with its initial investment.

The governance of the Agrippina sector has entered a phase of high initial investment.

Lawson's strategic goal is very clear: to physically force every street, every water treatment plant, and every energy core on these 318 planets into the control network of the swarm mind.

Tens of millions of cornerstone sequences were visualized.

They landed on 318 planets.

Based on the infrastructure gap data provided by the theater-level swarm sub-brains, Lawson precisely deployed troops to these planets.

For a heavily polluted city-state with a population of tens of billions and infrastructure on the verge of collapse, Lawson would deploy three million cornerstone sequences at once.

For a mining world that undertakes the task of smelting metals in the star sector and lacks manpower for high-risk operations, he would directly deploy 1.5 million Keystone Ranks to fill the furnace workshops.

This massive troop deployment, ignoring logistical supply lines and the population reproduction cycle, demonstrates utter "inhumanity."

The empire's bureaucratic system was physically severed.

The traditional aristocratic council, the technological monopoly of the Mechanicus, and the territorial divisions of the Underworld gang were all forcibly erased in the face of the Cornerstone Death Squad.

Lawson's control over the 318 planets of the Agrippina Sector reached a terrifying level that even the Terra Highlord Council dared not simulate.

The entire star system has achieved physical integration.

Trillions of civilians in the empire were re-categorized and classified by swarm intelligence, ultimately becoming intricate cogs in the massive war machine of Lawson.

This high-pressure, absolutely coercive takeover produced extremely intense chemical reactions on the physiological and psychological levels of the empire's civilians.

It did not trigger riots.

On the contrary, it plunged the common people of this trillion-dollar empire into a near-dreamlike sense of unreality.

The first thing to hit ordinary people was water.

Visarian Nest City, Middle Level 42, Water Purification Station No. 7.

Before the morning shift change bell rang, the line had already stretched three blocks away.

This was not unusual in the past.

People in Chaodu spend half their lives queuing.

Drain clean water, drain nutritional paste, allocate cremation quotas, allocate workstation registration, allocate vaccines, allocate pardons.

Sometimes, they even line up to die.

But today is different.

The line was long, but no one dared to push forward.

Six Keystone Sequence warriors stood at the street corner.

Gray armor, black goggles, and a slug gun hanging in front of their chests. No one heard them speak; only when the line had been stopped for too long would one of them raise two fingers.

As a result, everyone on the street was pulled forward a small step as if by invisible chains.

In the past, the water purification station was guarded by the Iron Throat Gang.

The Iron Throat Gang collects money for water, money for queuing, money for cutting in line, and money for "I won't hit you today."

There used to be three rows of iron hooks hanging at the entrance of the water purification station.

Those who owe money will be hung up.

Relatives use work permits to redeem the person. If they can't redeem them, they have to wait for the mortuary union to come and collect the body.

The iron hook is still there today.

The traces of people hanging on it are still there.

But the Iron Throat Gang is gone.

To be precise, they didn't stay on the hook for very long.

The Cornerstone Sequence does things very cleanly.

The bodies were put into black bags, labeled with numbers, and sent to the farm. Bloodstains were washed away, shell casings were collected, and gang graffiti on the walls was scraped off, leaving only empty iron hooks hanging there.

The old rules are dead.

In the middle of the group, Daquil pulled his ten-year-old son, Palin, behind him.

"Don't look around."

Palin peeked half his face out from under his arm.

"I'll just take a look."

"Don't you want your eyes anymore?"

Palin immediately shrank back, and after a while, asked in a low voice, "Dad, are the Iron Throat Gang really dead?"

Daquil saw an old man stand for so long that his knees buckled and he almost knelt down.

The two people next to them instinctively wanted to help, but then stopped at the same time, looking first at the gray-armored man at the street corner.

One of the cornerstone assassins turned his head.

He raised his hand.