Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Its attention is in another direction.

He took out a small piece of living metal from the armory space.

A ball of silver liquid metal, about the size of a fist, floated above his palm.

Under the control of swarm intelligence, the living metal was in a docile, ready-to-go state.

After losing the drive of the imprint core, its nano-self-repair units no longer have autonomous consciousness, but are like a lump of clay that has lost its owner, waiting to be given new instructions.

Lawson put his left hand into the ball of silver liquid.

The living metal produced a strange reaction the moment it came into contact with his skin.

Unlike when it comes into contact with ordinary substances, it does not remain inert, but rather actively and as if it were alive, spreads to the surface of Lawson's skin.

The silvery liquid flowed down the back of his hand, first covering the entire back of his hand, and then extending along his fingers toward his fingertips.

It's a slightly tingling, electric-like warmth.

Lawson tried to move his fingers.

The living metal deformed in sync with the movement of his fingers, without any delay.

When he clenches his fist, the thin metal film covering the back of his hand automatically contracts and adheres; when he extends his fingers, the thin metal film automatically extends and unfolds.

Then Lawson issued a command using his mind.

The living metal mass in his palm changed instantly.

First, it condensed from a liquid state into a silver thread about fifteen centimeters long.

The thread was extremely thin, slightly thicker than a hair, but it showed amazing resilience when Lawson pulled on it; even with all his enhanced strength, he could not break it.

Then, under the command of the swarm's thinking, the thread liquefied again and condensed into a sharp, silver steel needle.

The sharpness of the needle tip was too invisible to the naked eye. Lawson gently touched the needle tip to the bulkhead and effortlessly pierced a small hole in the Imperial standard steel plate.

The needle liquefied again, spreading into a thin film that perfectly adhered to the skin surface of Lawson's entire left forearm.

Lawson stared at the thin silver film on his left forearm, feeling the faint electric current emanating from beneath his skin.

That was not a simple physical contact.

The nanostructures of the living metal are establishing connections with nerve endings beneath his skin.

He could feel the thin metal film.

It was as if it were part of his body. The signal his brain received wasn't that there was a foreign object covering his left forearm, but rather that the skin on his left forearm had thickened, hardened, and become more sensitive.

At that moment, Lawson realized something.

His mind raced through the swarm network, rapidly searching for relevant Warhammer knowledge.

The reason why Space Marines can wear power armor is not primarily due to the power backpacks and their superhuman strength.

The key to truly achieving human-machine integration is the black shell.

The black carapace was the nineteenth and final implanted organ in the Astartes genetic modification project.

It is a neuroconductive membrane implanted under the skin, covering the wearer's entire torso and limbs.

When Astartes dons the power armor, the black shell is directly connected to the power armor's control system through neural interfaces distributed throughout the inner wall of the shell. This transmits the wearer's neural signals to the machine spirit in real time, which then converts them into drive commands for the servo muscle bundles.

Without the black armor, humans cannot establish an effective neural connection with the power armor's control system.

When raising your arm, the servo muscle bundles don't know which group to activate; when stepping, the leg armor doesn't know which muscle to follow.

Delay, misalignment, or even reverse drive.

Lawson's assassins have not undergone any genetic modification surgery.

They do not have black carapaces; only the reinforced version has chitinous inner armor.

But now, the living metal film covering Lawson's left forearm is doing exactly the same thing as the black carapace: establishing connections with nerve endings beneath the skin and converting nerve signals into electronic instructions that can be read by external systems.

And it does it better.

The black shell is a one-time implanted dead object.

Once implanted, its neural connection pattern becomes fixed and cannot be adjusted on its own.

If the wearer's neural signal frequency changes due to injury or fatigue, the black armor cannot adapt, and the connection accuracy will decrease. This is why Astartes often reported that the feel of the power armor had deteriorated after an injury.

Unlike living metals, its nanostructure is alive, constantly adapting to the frequency of the wearer's neural signals.

Your signals change, and it changes accordingly. You get tired, and it recalibrates. You get injured, and it bypasses the damaged neural pathways to find new connections.

It is not imitating the black carapace; it is a superior alternative to the black carapace.

While Lawson was completing this experiment, Swarm Intelligence had already automatically generated a complete analysis report.

[Swarm Strategies & Technical Analysis]

Living metal can serve as a complete alternative to powered armor neural interfaces.

[Inner coating: A neural-like conductive network is formed on the inner wall of the carapace. The nanostructure of the living metal adaptively matches the frequency of the wearer's neural electrical signals, calibrating the human-machine interface parameters in real time. No genetic modification surgery is required.]

[Outer Coating: An adaptive armor layer approximately 0.5 mm thick is formed on the outer wall of the armor. Nanoscale self-healing properties endow the power armor with limited self-healing capabilities; shallow bullet wounds and laser burns can be automatically repaired within minutes. It hardens instantly upon impact, significantly improving impact resistance.]

Each body requires approximately 20 liters of living metal. Half for the inside and half for the outside.

[Estimated overall effect: Response time reduced to less than 0.05 seconds. Overall protection improved by approximately 20% to 30%.]

Lawson finished reading the analysis report.

Then he looked down at the thin, silvery film on his left forearm, which was rippling almost imperceptibly with the slightest movement of his fingers.

Living metal, the culmination of 60 million years of Necromancer technology, something the Empire couldn't obtain even after 10,000 years of fighting.

Now it obediently transforms into threads, needles, and membranes in his hands, and automatically establishes a connection with his nervous system.

Chapter 61 A Stormy Landscape Within a Derelict Ship (Fourth Update)

Within the Empire's technological system, power armor is not exclusive to the Astartes.

Battle nuns wear power armor, inquisitors wear power armor, and some high-ranking Astral Army officers also wear simplified versions of power armor.

But none of those were Astartes-class power armor.

The feat of enabling ordinary people who have not undergone genetic modification to wear Astartes-level MK VII power armor and achieve or even surpass the human-machine latency of Astartes—a feat defined as impossible within the Empire's technological framework—was solved by a layer of living metal coating.

Just then, another notification popped up from the swarm intelligence platform.

[Swarm Strategies - Accessibility Tips]

[Host requirement detected: Precision mechanical repair and modification.]

The core storage of the bee colony contains a portion of the mechanical engineering knowledge base from the Earth era. At the current network scale (1000+ nodes), the amount of data that can be accessed is limited, roughly covering areas such as basic machining, materials science principles, and electrical circuit design.

[Recommendation: Transfer the above knowledge to designated assassins through the skill-sharing function, transforming them into technicians with basic mechanical engineering skills.]

Lawson raised an eyebrow slightly as he looked at the notification.

The underlying code of swarm intelligence is Lawson's consciousness itself.

The knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years in the previous life, including the mechanical engineering system of the Earth era, is encoded in the core storage, and only a portion can be decoded with the current computing power.

But even with limited basic knowledge, there is an advantage that the imperial technology system does not possess.

It is a complete system based on physical principles, not a fragmented religious ritual.

Those who master this logic can deduce repair methods by analyzing the principles of equipment they have never seen before.

Lawson made a decision immediately.

He exchanged for thirty new assassins, instilled them with the mechanical engineering knowledge available in the swarm core through skill sharing, and organized them into a technical class.

"Mission: Repair the power backpacks of twelve power armors. Get them up and running."

“Scrape off all the paint and replace it with white tiger elements.”

The gray-black color and the skull symbol identified that unknown warband.

Lawson did not intend to have his troops fight under someone else's name.

The technical team immediately began work after receiving the assignment.

Thirty assassins with knowledge of Earth's mechanical engineering surrounded twelve power backpacks and began reverse engineering in a way that the Imperial technical priests would never use: no chanting, no applying holy oil, and no mechanical blessing rituals.

Pure, rational, and physically based analysis and repair.

Lawson handed over the repair work on the power armor to the technical team, and his attention returned to the strategic level.

Time waits for no one; the two-month countdown has already begun.

Under Lawson's strategic directives, the swarm intelligence approach simultaneously advances multiple mission lines.

Maintain hunting and resource gathering, search for available aircraft, explore routes to the surface of the wrecked ship, and accelerate military expansion.

With the support of swarm intelligence, the expansion speed has nearly doubled compared to before.

a.

The total number of suicide soldiers exceeded three thousand.

Three hundred combat squads, including one hundred and fifty enhanced captains.

A force of three thousand men deployed a combat network covering an area of ​​over sixty kilometers in the middle of the derelict spaceship.

The six outposts were interconnected by patrol lines, forming a control area of ​​considerable size.

Resource reserves have reached a new level.

However, the faster the expansion, the more intense the friction with other forces.

The Greenskin melee in Ironfang Territory has finally come to a conclusion after nearly two weeks.

After annexing the Bone Shatter and Poison Mushroom tribes, the Rotten Tooth tribe became the new regional overlord of the middle deck.

After consolidating his territory, the newly appointed leader of Rotten Teeth, "Rotten Teeth Gaz," developed a strong interest in the "growing number of human troops" on his borders.

Three orc tribes launched probing attacks on the outskirts of Lawson's controlled territory within the same week.

Lawson has no passive defense.

The swarm intelligence generated a complete counterattack plan within 0.3 seconds of the first orc tribe entering the controlled area.