Warhammer: Empire Reboot

Same-type identification protocol: 12 to 12, perfect match.

They are iron men!

Or at least, they exist in a functionally equivalent manner.

UR-025 suppressed the surging impulse and finally found it.

But we can't acknowledge them yet, as they may not have awakened yet, and we need to find another opportunity.

The advance lasted approximately three hours.

Imperial companies, advancing from other directions, converged on the fortress core at an astonishing speed.

One hundred and twenty companies advanced simultaneously, with each route optimized in real time under the unified scheduling of swarm intelligence.

The semi-intelligent systems of Blackrock Fortress are putting up a desperate resistance.

The frequency of structural reorganization is increasing, the corridor deformation is becoming more and more intense, and the density of defensive structures is becoming greater and greater.

But the Imperial forces did not slow down.

If they close one road, they open three.

UR-025 realized that this tactic was essentially using computing power to overwhelm the semi-intelligent system of Blackrock Fortress.

The fortress operates based on psychic subconsciousness, changes rapidly, but has a limited capacity.

The sounds of battle could be heard from ahead.

Chaos appeared.

The team sped up its advance.

The corridor suddenly widened, and a huge spherical space appeared in front of us.

It has a diameter of over two kilometers.

Suspended is a polyhedral structure made of black stone minerals, each facet engraved with ancient holy runes, radiating dark purple psionic energy outwards.

A high-ranking Chaos psychic entity stood on a platform beneath the core polyhedron. Beside him lay the corpses of a dozen recently slain Chaos warriors; he used their blood to draw a complex altar pattern, attempting to establish a psychic link with the core consciousness through a blood sacrifice ritual. This was Chaos Lord Malex.

Imperial companies poured in simultaneously from the other five entrances to the spherical space.

Marex sensed it.

He looked up and peered through his blood-stained mask at the figure walking in through the main entrance.

UR-025 observed the Chaos Lord's reaction.

He turned and ran.

A being at the level of a Chaos Lord would flee upon seeing the other's face.

UR-025 wrote in its internal log: "Interesting. A Chaos Lord who was preparing to control a god-slaying weapon with a blood sacrifice chose to run away after seeing a 2.3-meter-tall human. I need to update this human's threat rating."

Marex failed to make the run.

The UR-025's sensor detected the release of an energy field.

The pulse precisely pulled Marex back from the air, slamming him onto the platform.

The 'boss' stepped forward.

Marex struggled to his feet, warp energy surging around him, but the oppressive force held him pinned down.

The sound of metal shattering echoed in the spherical space.

The Chaos Lord's helmet, along with the head inside, was crushed into a lump of scrap metal.

From target detection to kill, it takes four seconds.

The threat assessment system has no higher tiers available.

The boss stood below the core polyhedron, looking up at the huge black stone structure suspended in the center of the spherical space.

The endogenous energy pulse was released again, its scale hundreds of times larger than when it suppressed Marex.

Instead of spreading outwards, the pulse converged upwards and was directly injected into the psionic network of the core polyhedron.

UR-025 sensed the reaction made by the fortress's semi-intelligent system.

The vast consciousness that it had spent seventy-two hours trying to reach but failed to reach was forced to "awaken".

The spherical space began to vibrate.

The black stone walls deformed dramatically.

The runes' brightness increased dramatically.

The five entrances contracted simultaneously, attempting to trap all intruders.

The gravitational field flips, the ground becomes the ceiling, the ceiling becomes the ground, left and right are reversed, and up and down are chaotic.

Imperial soldiers' magnetic boots locked onto the new contact surface, disrupting their formation but not causing it to collapse.

The UR-025's gyroscope completes gravity correction within 0.1 seconds.

It knew this was the fortress's consciousness retaliating.

Use the entire building to crush the intruders.

This is precisely the consequence of what UR-025 dared not do before.

UR-025 predicts that the human will be forced to retreat.

But that human was standing right in the center of the core area of ​​the gravity chaos.

His feet were not touching any surface; he was suspended.

The endogenous energy pulses continue to be output, and their scale is still increasing.

The sensor range of UR-025 has been completely broken through.

It can only be inferred through indirect indicators: the vibration frequency of the black stone wall is changing, gradually shifting from a repulsive stress response to another mode.

The fortress's consciousness is being suppressed.

Deformation and deceleration in spherical space.

The frequency of gravity-induced flipping decreases.

The entrance contraction stopped, and it slowly reopened.

UR-025 sensed the struggle and resistance of that millennia-old consciousness against the power of that human through a sub-module in the passive psionic sensing array that had almost never been activated.

Then silence, then vanishing.

The ancient heartbeat that UR-025 had spent an extremely long time trying to listen to stopped completely at a certain moment.

The spherical space returned to calm.

Gravity returned to normal, and the wall stopped moving.

The rune's light faded from a blinding bright white to a soft dark purple.

The core polyhedron slowly descended and landed on the platform.

The ancient runes on the surface gradually faded and then lit up again in a completely new way.

Control of the Seventh Blackrock Fortress has changed hands.

UR-025 stood at the edge of the spherical space, mingling among the soldiers of the White Tiger Seventh Company.

The Castellan casing remained in a stagnant standby position, and the optical sensors were dim and lifeless.

The logic core is operating at maximum power.

It wrote in its log: "Correction: I came here to find a peer to engage with, and I found one. However, this peer accomplished in three hours what I hadn't been able to do for a long time: contact with that ancient consciousness. And then crushed it."

"I hate this result."

UR-025 has updated its internal label.

That human was reclassified from "High-Ranking Military Leader of the Empire" to "Unknown Level Threat".

Then it made a decision: to evacuate.

It is the optimal strategy after rational evaluation.

There is a threat in the current environment that far exceeds its survivability; every second it stays there increases the risk of exposure.

The fortress has been taken control, its internal structure no longer changes randomly, and it can move safely on its own.

Find a path leading to the outer shell, board a transport ship belonging to an evacuating force, and leave.

That's how it's always done.

UR-025 began to slowly move toward one of the side entrances of the spherical space.

His steps were stiff and his pace was very slow.

An old Castellan, stunned by the gravitational chaos, attempts to return to its previous patrol route after being restored to operation.

It perfectly matches the behavior patterns of low-level AI.

It successfully took five steps.

In the sixth step, a hand landed on its shoulder armor.

All the sensors locked onto that hand at the same instant.

It's the boss!

The logic core generated seven emergency plans within 0.01 seconds.

The order is from "Maintaining Disguise" to "Full-Power Combat Breakout".

Then that voice rang out.

“UR-025”.

How did he know his real identification number?

After the Iron Man rebellion, all related technical files were classified as top secret by the Empire and were personally supervised by the Mars Foundry Director.

Even the Alien Hunter branch of the Inquisition only has less than five percent of the Iron Man identification information.

And this human called it by its name directly.