Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Lawson went through more than a dozen options in his mind before finally settling on one.

"All personnel, halt operations. Exit hibernation pods. Remain in the corridor."

The assassins carried out orders and evacuated from their various hibernation pods.

Then Lawson brought up the [Scrap Area] in the system panel.

The Scrapyard is a junkyard that has been silently accumulating various "byproducts" since the system was activated. It contains: Waaagh energy residue after orc souls have been purified, warp contamination remnants after demon souls have been purified, and various impurities and waste generated from kills.

What is the nature of subspace waste?

It is the "subspace impurity" that the system has stripped from the soul and energy, the pure chaotic energy residue that drives people mad, causes matter to mutate, and distorts the laws of reality.

The living metal of the Necromancers in space is a purely physical construct.

Blackrock can shield the warp; that's isolation.

However, the reaction of living metals to subspace energy is not isolation, but rejection.

When subspace energy comes into contact with living metal, the nano-self-repairing units inside the living metal recognize it as an "unknown error" and then frantically try to repair this anomaly that does not exist in their cognitive framework... The result is system overload, logic collapse, and protocol garbled text.

What Lawson had to do was release a sufficient amount of subspace waste into the chamber at the same time as opening the sarcophagus.

These scraps won't harm the necromancer, but they will throw the necromancer's resurrection protocol into a garbled state.

It's like trying to force a large amount of garbled data into a computer that's already starting up; the system will get stuck on a blue screen and won't boot up properly.

During those few seconds when the resurrection protocol crashed, the assassins only needed to do one thing.

Open the sarcophagus. Pierce the chest cavity. Destroy the core of the mark.

Once the core shattered, the undead transformed from a "dormant ancient soldier" into "a pile of ownerless living metal."

"Everyone, listen to my command."

"Start from cabin number one. Team three, take twenty men inside. The rest of you, stand by in the corridor, ready to provide support."

Jia San led twenty suicide soldiers, who lined up in two rows outside the No. 1 hibernation pod.

Each person carries a chainsaw sword or a power sword.

The bomb gun and laser gun are temporarily stored in the armory space.

In the ensuing operation, firing weapons were not only useless, but also caused unnecessary chaos due to friendly fire and ricochets.

"Release subspace debris. Target coordinates: Hibernation Module 1."

Inside Pod One, a murky mist with a dark green and dark red sheen suddenly appeared above the forty hibernation pods.

The fog spread rapidly throughout the cabin.

The undead warriors inside the cabin began to react.

The infiltration of subspace waste triggered their regeneration protocol, but the protocol encountered a large amount of unidentifiable anomalous data in the first step of its execution.

System garbled characters.

"Open the coffin!"

P.S.: Brothers, please keep reading and vote!

Chapter 58 The Dimensional Anchor Fragment Has Been Found

Two people are responsible for one hibernation pod.

One person attaches a pre-prepared hot melt explosive tube to the edge of the hatch.

The hot melt explosive tubes detonated simultaneously.

Forty beams of white light flashed in the cabin.

The focused jet melted through the sealing strip at the edge of the hatch in 0.1 seconds, cutting the hatch off the hull.

The suicide squadmen used brute force to pry open the hatch.

The space necromancer is attempting to awaken.

The skeleton trembled slightly. An unstable, dark green light flickered in the triangular eye sockets.

But the light flickered, like an emergency light about to run out of power.

The interference from subspace debris turned the restart process into a hopeless struggle.

The first assassin aimed the tip of his chainsaw sword at the space between the third and fourth ribs of the undead warrior's chest and thrust it in forcefully.

Living metal is far harder than ordinary steel, but the chainsaw blade's teeth are forged from high-carbon steel, and with the added force of rotation, the cutting power is sufficient to deal with this dormant living metal that has lost most of its self-repairing ability due to the power outage.

The sword tip pierced about fifteen centimeters into the chest cavity before encountering a harder object.

Imprint core.

The assassin pressed the chainsaw sword down forcefully while simultaneously rotating the blade.

The chain teeth tore through the outer shell of the Imprint Core.

A sound like crystal shattering came from the necromancer's chest.

Then the skeletal body immediately stopped all shaking.

The dark green light in the triangular eye sockets was completely extinguished.

The moment the core shattered, the living metal of this undead warrior lost its self.

The surface of the body showed subtle signs of liquefaction, and the metal at the edges began to become viscous, like molten silver.

On a normal battlefield, this is the barrier that the imperial army can never break through.

After a necromancer is destroyed, the phase teleportation protocol is automatically triggered. The entire body turns into a green light within seconds and disappears into thin air, being teleported back to the distant tomb world for repair and reconstruction.

This is why the Empire has fought a ten-thousand-year war against the undead, yet has never captured even a single complete living metal sample on the battlefield.

The corpses of the undead do not remain on the battlefield. Like the Tyranids, the Zerg's biomass is reabsorbed in the recycling pool after death, turning into primordial organic soup to hatch new organisms.

The Empire also fought the Zerg war for thousands of years, and all the Zerg biological samples captured on the battlefield were fragments obtained under extreme conditions.

The core reason why the war economies of these two races are so terrifying is that their losses are recoverable, while the losses of the Empire are permanent.

But Lawson's system broke this rule.

Just as the living metal attempted to liquefy and dissipate, a notification popped up on Lawson's system panel.

[Special resource detected: Dimensional Anchor Fragment.]

[Dimensional Anchor Fragment +3.]

Special resource detected: living metal.

[Living metal + 20 liters.]

At the instant the imprint core shattered, at the moment the phase transfer protocol should have been activated, the system intercepted the residual dimensional anchoring energy released by the core, and forcibly absorbed the living metal that had lost its self before it liquefied and dissipated.

For the first time, the undead's corpse did not disappear.

Just like when the Tyranid Genestealer was killed previously, the system completed the extraction before the Zerg biomass was recalled by the recycling pool signal.

What the Empire couldn't obtain in ten thousand years, Lawson's system intercepted.

Lawson stared at the word "dimensional anchor fragment".

Dimensional Anchor Fragments: the only material needed to expand the armory's space.

Previously, his reserves were zero, and he had no idea where to obtain such a substance.

Now he knows.

It came from the Necromancer in space, and only he could obtain it.

The reason became clear the moment the core shattered.

The phase teleportation technology of the necromantic beings in space is essentially to fold their own material existence into real space and enter an intermediate layer called the phase dimension.

The phase teleportation protocol and dimensional folding algorithm contained within the Necromancer's Mark core released residual dimensional anchoring energy the instant the core shattered.

This is what the system identifies as a dimensional anchor fragment.

Lawson's armory space is similar to the necromantic dimensional pocket technology.

Dimensional anchor fragments are the perfect raw material for expanding the space of the armory.

The recycling of living metal is even more direct. After the core shatters, the living metal loses its ability to self-repair and be transported away, and begins to liquefy in a disorderly manner. The ownerless metal in the liquefaction process happens to be in a state that the system can directly absorb.

When the core of each undead warrior's mark shatters, it releases two resources: dimensional anchor fragments from the residual energy of the core's spatial folding, and living metal from the liquefied body after losing its self.

After confirming the gains from the first undead in Cabin One, Lawson issued an acceleration command.

"No need to wait any longer. All hibernation pods will begin simultaneous operation."

Forty.

Total for Cabin One: Dimensional Anchor Fragments +120, Living Metal +800 liters.

"Next compartment. Repeat procedure."

The next hour or so was a brutal, industrialized slaughter.

Each compartment follows the same process: subspace debris fills the air, molten metal tubes blast open the hatches, chainsaw swords and power swords precisely destroy the core within the blue screen window, and silver living metal liquefies and shrinks under the watchful eyes of the suicide soldiers before being intercepted and absorbed by the system.

The swarm intelligence acts like a cold-blooded overseer, monitoring the system status of every undead in real time.

Once the restart progress of any unit exceeds 70%, the corresponding assassin will immediately receive a priority kill order.

However, this contingency plan was never triggered.

Twelve cabins, four hundred and seventy-two ancient warriors, after sleeping for countless millennia, had their hearts shattered one by one by a group of mortals with chainsaw swords in a way that their creators could never have imagined.

Then there are the two advanced hibernation pods.

They were left for final processing.

The hull of the advanced hibernation pod is significantly thicker and more robust than that of a regular hibernation pod.

The conventional power of a hot melt explosive tube is insufficient to melt through an alloy of this thickness in one go.

Under Lawson's remote command, Jia San used two molten explosive tubes to make a cross-cut, and the heavy alloy cover plate was finally separated from the cabin.

Four suicide soldiers worked together to pry open the hatch, which weighed over 200 kilograms.