Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Similar scenes were occurring simultaneously on fifty hunting routes.

The demon army reacted as frantically to the "soul theft" as always, chasing after the demons out of the heart of the battle, only to be met with another group of orcs.

Unable to vent their anger, the creatures turned to attack the nearest living thing, which in turn fueled a further surge in the Waaagh field.

Positive feedback loop.

Lawson took advantage of this precisely.

The resource numbers on the system panel are jumping at an unprecedented rate.

But war doesn't come for free.

In the fifth hour of the outer harvest, a hunting party strayed into the three-kilometer line due to unpredictable fluctuations in the Waaagh field boundary.

The fifteen assassins simultaneously experienced a loss of perception for about two seconds under the pulse impact.

When they recovered, they had deviated more than 300 meters from the retreat route and happened to fall into the sight of a group of orcs under Waaagh's amplification.

In this state, the orc boy's charging speed approached that of a Norbert, and even the accuracy of those tattered iron pipe weapons improved to an alarming level.

Three large-caliber iron-shearing bullets hit the outer edge of the formation at a distance of less than ten meters.

Two were killed instantly, and one was seriously injured.

Jia Shiwu quickly led the remaining team members away from the battlefield.

"From now on, all squads must maintain a distance of at least five kilometers from the core area. No exceptions."

The battle remained intense, with each squad essentially playing a high-risk game.

Three days later, Lawson's number of assassins reached 5000.

At this moment, the technical team transmitted status reports for the twelve powered armors.

Lawson personally went to the spherical storage tank at the forge site to inspect it.

Twelve MK VII Skyhawk-type power armor suits were neatly arranged within the reinforced area.

When Lawson first saw them, he knew they were no longer the defective products cobbled together three days ago.

The paint job has been completely changed, with a matte tiger stripe base coat covering every inch of the carapace surface, and the white tiger relief on the chest is lifelike.

The gray-black color and skull logo have completely disappeared.

But what truly made Lawson stop was not the paint job.

It has the texture of a carapace.

He walked up to the nearest power armor and placed his hand on the front of the breastplate.

The sensation under my palm was completely different from three days ago.

Three days ago, these shells were Imperial standard ceramic steel plates with micro-cracks and wear pits accumulated over hundreds of years.

Its strength still far surpasses that of the Astronauts' shell armor, but it is significantly weaker than the new armor that just came out of the Martian forge.

Now, the ceramic steel surface under my palm is covered with an extremely fine metal film that can almost be felt with my fingertips.

During the repair process, the technical team applied living metal to both the inner and outer layers of the power armor.

Lawson had Jia Shi report on the specific construction plan.

The most obvious change is the modification of the outer layer.

The technical team uniformly coated the outer surface of the ceramic steel plate with liquid metal, which then formed a nanoscale physical bond with the underlying ceramic steel after solidification.

This is not a simple coating; rather, the nano-self-healing units of the living metal penetrate the micro-cracks and wear pits of the ceramic steel at the molecular level, filling and sealing those structural defects accumulated over hundreds of years one by one.

The strength of the ceramic steel, which had decreased by 15% to 20% due to years of disrepair, was restored to near factory quality by filling it with living metal.

The inherent properties of living metal add an extra layer of dynamic protection to the ceramic steel plate.

Lawson tapped on his breastplate.

The echo was much more muffled than it had been three days ago, and the overall density of the carapace had increased due to the filling of living metal.

Then comes the inner layer modification, which is where living metal truly plays a disruptive role.

Lawson opened the back access panel of the most recent power armor, and the beam of his flashlight shone into the inner wall of the shell.

In the Imperial standard MK VII power armor, the inner lining of the shell is a rough metal lining riddled with pre-fabricated interface holes.

These interface ports are designed for the black shell of the Astartes. When a Space Marine puts on the power armor, neural synapses extending from under the skin of the black shell are precisely inserted into these interface ports, establishing a direct connection between the wearer's nervous system and the power armor's control system.

Without the black shell, these interface holes are just a bunch of useless little holes.

Now those little holes are gone.

The entire inner wall is completely covered by a layer of silver living metal coating.

The coating thickness is not uniform. At the original interface hole positions, the living metal forms high-density conductive nodes, like countless fine silver tendrils slightly raised from the metal surface.

In non-interface areas, the coating is thin and uniform, forming a conductive network that covers the entire inner wall of the shell.

This network replaced the function of the black shell.

Once the wearer enters the power armor, the living metal coating actively contacts the skin surface. Its nanostructure automatically senses the nerve electrical signals beneath the skin, converts them into standardized control commands, and transmits them to the drive units of each set of servo muscle bundles through a conductive network.

When the wearer wants to raise their hand, the living metal translates the neural signal of "raising the hand" into electronic instructions that the servo muscle bundles can understand, specifying exactly which muscle bundles should be activated, how much torque should be applied, and at what speed to respond.

This is what the Space Marines' black armor does, but the black armor needs to be permanently implanted under the skin of the Astartes through surgery, and it is the last of nineteen genetic modification surgeries.

The entire implantation process takes several months, and the combined mortality and disability rates exceed five percent.

Living metal coatings require no surgery, no genetic modification, and no implantation.

Wear it and it's there; take it off and it's gone. Zero intrusion.

Finally, there is the control system.

The machine spirit is the brain of the power armor.

The machine spirits of these twelve power armors were long dead.

The technical team's solution does not require a machine soul.

Because the wearer is not an ordinary brain, but a computing node in a swarm intelligence network.

That's the key.

The reason why the Empire's power armor needs machine souls is that the human brain cannot handle the scheduling calculations of servo muscle bundles.

The simple action of "raising the right hand" involves the coordinated activation of seventeen servo muscle bundles in the right arm from the shoulder joint to the fingertips. The torque, timing, and acceleration curve of each bundle need to be precisely calculated within a millisecond time window.

The average human brain cannot do this. Even the muscles in its body are automatically coordinated unconsciously by the cerebellum. Asking it to manually calculate the driving parameters of seventeen sets of servo muscle bundles? Impossible.

Therefore, the Empire's solution was to outsource this computational task to Machine Soul.

But the brain of each suicide soldier is a node in a swarm intelligence network.

Swarm intelligence is not an external system that exists elsewhere; it operates within the cerebral cortex of every suicide bomber.

When a suicide soldier has the intention to "raise his right hand", his own brain, as a swarm node, will directly complete all the scheduling calculations of the servo muscle bundles locally, and then transmit the instructions to the corresponding muscle bundle controller through the living metal conductive network.

The signal does not need to leave the wearer's body.

There's no need to send it to a remote central hub and wait for a reply.

The intention to move is generated in the cerebral cortex, and the swarm algorithm completes the servo calculation in the same cerebral cortex. The calculation result is transmitted to the inner wall of the shell through a living metal network. The entire process is completed in a closed loop between the wearer's body and the powered armor.

This is two levels shorter than the Empire's four-level transmission chain of "brain → black shell → machine soul → servo muscle bundle".

The latency isn't very low; it's almost zero.

The time interval between the generation of motion intention and the response of the servo muscle bundle depends on the signal transmission speed of the live metal conductive network, which is approximately 0.01 to 0.02 seconds.

The optimal latency for the Imperial standard black armor and machine soul is 0.05 seconds.

This means that a zombie wearing living metal modified power armor reacts 0.03 to 0.04 seconds faster than an Astartes wearing standard power armor.

In close combat, this difference can be enough to determine whether a knife pierces the enemy's neck or one's own chest.

More importantly, the computing power of swarm intelligence is not fixed.

It grows linearly with the number of nodes in the network.

The current computing power of more than 5,000 nodes is more than enough to calculate the servo scheduling of 12 powered armor units. However, if the number of suicide soldiers increases to 10,000 or 100,000 in the future, the auxiliary computing power that each suicide soldier node wearing powered armor can call will increase exponentially.

Servo calculations will be more accurate, torque distribution will be more optimized, and latency will be further reduced.

Power armor becomes smarter the more you wear it.

Wearers can share their movement experience in real time through a swarm network. A set of dodging action patterns that Jia San developed in combat can be synchronized to the other fifteen wearers within milliseconds, making everyone stronger at the same time.

Lawson stepped back and examined the twelve modified power armor suits in front of him.

They are no longer standard products of the Imperial MK VII Skyhawk.

The terracotta skeleton is Imperial, the living metal coating is Necromancer's. The control system is based on swarm intelligence, the neural interface is adaptive to living metal, and the paint job is Lawson's own.

The technologies from four different sources were assembled into a single shell.

Now only one question remains: ignition.

This is a problem that neither living metal nor swarm intelligence can solve.

P.S.: Thanks to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" for the suggestion. Our previous title wasn't quite right, so from today onwards, we'll change it to "Warhammer: Empire Reboot".

Brothers, don't get lost, keep reading and please vote!

Chapter 65: Taking Action Against the Chaos Space Marines!

Lawson looked at the twelve newly painted power armor suits, lost in thought.

They weren't thinking about technical issues, they were thinking about political issues.

Power armor.

In the empire's legal system, these three words were second only to heresy and rebellion in terms of sensitivity.

Space Marines' power armor is not ordinary military equipment.

It is a symbolic creation of the Empire's highest power structure, and only legitimate chapters established with the approval of the Terra High Lords Council are qualified to equip and use it.