Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The number of intruders in this hall has been reduced to zero.

The other halls also ended in the same way.

More than an hour later, the swarm intelligence team delivered its post-battle report.

All invaders inside the fortress have been cleared, and salvaged items include Chaos Power Armor, Dark Eldar anti-gravity devices, and other miscellaneous items from the explorers.

Lawson shut down this part of the sensory channel.

The area around Blackrock Keep has been cleared, and millions of Keystone sequences have been deployed to Blackrock Keep to assist in the takeover efforts by the swarm mind.

Swarm intelligence also projected panoramic data of Blackrock Fortress onto Lawson.

This is a large fortress with a diameter of over 2000 kilometers, larger than the Battle Moon of Losen.

This is not the point.

The key point is that the entire fortress is made of pure black stone.

From the core to the outer shell, from the corridors to the dome, every inch is made of black stone minerals.

Blackstone minerals are considered strategic-grade materials in the galaxy.

This is a top-grade material forged by the ancient saints during the war in Heaven.

This material has only one core characteristic: it has absolute plasticity and interference capability with subspace energy.

In its passive state, Blackrock shields against energy penetration from the subspace.

A fist-sized piece of black rock can create a psionic dead zone several meters in diameter around it.

Blackstone shards from the Empire are typically used to craft anti-psychic amulets and forbidden equipment for the Inquisition.

Even fragments are already a top-tier, scarce resource for combating chaos.

In active mode, Blackstone can be crafted into psionic weapons.

The sole purpose of the Old Ones in building Blackrock Fortress was to deal with the Star Gods, beings even older than the Chaos Gods.

Millions of years ago, the Star God was a living deity who was said to devour stars for survival.

All six known Blackstone fortresses of the Empire were destroyed in the Gothic Wars and the fall of Cadia.

Abaddon used one of them to smash Cardia, which directly caused the Great Rift to tear the galaxy apart.

The collision of a Blackrock Fortress could cleave the Milky Way.

Lawson now possesses a complete Blackrock Fortress, larger and more complete than the one Abaddon once had.

The swarm intelligence has completed its full takeover of the Blackrock Fortress weapon system, and the data has been transmitted back to Lawson.

Blackrock Fortress's primary weapon is the Warp Death Ray.

Blackrock Fortress has no cannons.

Its attack method involves condensing energy in the fortress's spire structure and directly launching a beam of pure subspace energy.

This energy beam is not from any known physical weapon.

It is a destructive force regulated by the Blackrock Matrix, drawn directly from the warp and the real universe.

At its highest power, this subspace beam, when it enters a star, can directly trigger a supernova explosion, bringing devastation to the entire galaxy.

Swarm intelligence allows for precise calculations of the main weapon's energy output.

The energy equivalent of a single full-power salvo from the main weapon exceeds 1 times the total energy of all conventional weapons currently in the possession of Lawson, including the Gravity Whip main cannon of the Combat Moon.

For Chaos, the Warp Death Beam means that daemons cannot maintain their physical form within its range. The warp engines of Chaos warships will shut down, the spells of Chaos wizards will fail, and the daemons' original bodies will be forcibly stripped of their warp blessing, degenerating into pure physical bodies.

It is equally deadly to space necromancy.

After all, Blackrock Fortress was originally designed to deal with the Star God, and the Necromancers were created by the Star God.

Although they were deceived, strictly speaking, the living metal shell of the Necromancer and many of its technologies originated from the Star Gods.

While the main weapon of the Seventh Blackrock Fortress is powerful, its firing pattern is similar to the Empire's macro cannon, making it suitable for dealing with large targets and planetary threats.

You can't use a star-detonating main cannon to swat mosquitoes when dealing with small units that board ships.

The swarm intelligence approach brought out the internal system of the fortress.

The original defense mechanism of Blackrock Fortress is far more complex than the geometric changes that Lawson encountered in the corridor.

Within the core of the fortress lies a defensive force far exceeding any imagination.

Hundreds of millions of black stone crystal structures, ranging in size from the size of a fist to the size of a war chariot, are all under the unified control of the core psionic network.

Their attack methods include releasing concentrated psionic pulses or directly crushing targets with physical collisions.

Geometric mechanical bodies are larger defensive units with various irregular polyhedral structures that can deform, combine, and split.

The combat power of a single geometric mechanical body is roughly equivalent to that of an Imperial Dreadnought.

Another aspect is the fortress's ability to deform geometrically.

This is one of the most terrifying defensive measures in Blackrock Fortress.

Once the swarm mind takes over the fortress's consciousness, with just a thought from Lawson, he can manipulate the passageway structure, wall contraction, floor flipping, ceiling compression, corridor folding, and gravity changes in any area within the fortress.

The cleanup of those intruders just now was a basic application of this defense mechanism.

When those invaders arrived, the original consciousness of the Seventh Blackrock Fortress had not yet awakened, but now it has a new ruler.

If any enemy attempts to board and land at Blackrock Fortress, they will be met with an unprecedented nightmare.

The boarding force is like a group of bacteria that have invaded the human body.

The defensive structure of Blackrock Fortress is composed of white blood cells.

Swarm Intelligence has conducted preliminary integration tests between the combat sequence and the fortress's native defense system, and the results have exceeded expectations.

The battle sequence shares real-time terrain data of the fortress through swarm intelligence, and the passageway deformation can be adapted to their formation.

Under the unified command of the swarm mentality, the internal defensive structures of the fortress seamlessly cooperated with the firepower network of the combat sequence.

The constructs are responsible for blocking retreat routes and flank harassment, while the combat units are responsible for firepower output.

The collaborative efficiency of the two systems reached 98% in the test.

This means that any enemy attempting to board Blackrock Fortress, whether Chaos, Necromancer, or simply the Dark Eldar, will face a constantly shifting, living labyrinth filled with hunters and ruled by the swarm's consciousness.

Next, Lawson needs to consider another issue.

One of the weaknesses in Blackrock Fortress's defenses comes from the Necromancers in space.

Such a useful weapon should not be wasted.

If they ever face off against the Necromancers in space, this will be Lawson's ultimate weapon.

However, if we are to deal with space necromancy in the future, there is a risk that must be addressed in advance.

Because Blackrock's psionic malleability is a double-edged sword.

The Necromancer's specialty is reversing the polarity of black stone.

The Ancient Saints could use it to deal with the Star Gods, and the Necromancers of the Space also developed a technique to interfere with the movement of the Black Stone.

The technology wizards of the Necromancers of the Space can resonate with the molecular structure of blackstone minerals through Gaussian pulses of a specific frequency, rewriting the polarity of the blackstone from within, turning the repulsive subspace into an attractive subspace, and turning weapons into bombs.

In the future, if Lawson is preparing to launch a warp death ray to strike the undead fleet, and the enemy's techmages reverse the polarity of the blackstone at a crucial moment, causing the main cannons to shut down, the situation will not be just embarrassing, but a disaster.

If we already know about the vulnerabilities in the defense, we need to patch them in advance.

Swarm intelligence is not omnipotent, although it has taken over all of the fortress's defense protocols and is able to block detection and external intrusion at the psionic level.

However, Blackrock Fortress operates on a psionic logic, using psionic echoes and warp resonance.

The necromancer's interference techniques were specifically designed to target this psionic system.

Using a psionic firewall to block a necromancer's Gaussian intrusion is like using a dam to block an earthquake; it's not even in the same dimension as the attack.

The swarm intelligence provided a suggestion after its calculations, which caught Lawson's eye.

Swarm Intelligence suggests adding a firewall composed purely of electronic logic to the psionic operating system of Blackrock Fortress.

For example, using the purest 0s and 1s from humanity's golden age, binary code.

Add an absolute materialistic digital defense to this ancient weapon that operates on psionic energy and magic.

The core of Blackrock Fortress operates on the psionic layer, and the necromancers' invasion methods also target the psionic layer.

However, if we add an electronic logic layer on top of the psionic layer, a control layer that is completely independent of psionic energy and is purely based on physical circuits and mathematical algorithms.

In this situation, even if the necromancer's Gaussian pulse signal penetrates the psionic defenses, it will become a bunch of meaningless noise at the electronic logic level.

It's like a hacker who only speaks Eldar language being faced with a computer that only recognizes binary code; unable to understand the language, they have no idea where to start.

Just like when UR-025 first arrived at the Seventh Blackrock Fortress, it was unable to communicate with the consciousness of this planet.

The electronic logic layer designed by swarm intelligence has more than just a passive defense function.

The Swarm Sense protocol embeds countermeasures in firewalls.

When a necromancer attempts to hack into the fortress using frequencies, the firewall automatically identifies the characteristics of the intrusion signal, generates a targeted logic virus, and injects it back into the necromancer's system along the intrusion signal's path.

Therefore, when the space necromancer attempted to hack into Blackrock Fortress, they were met with a backlash from a logic virus of the Golden Age AI level.

Lawson seemed to be deep in thought.

This solution is feasible, but it requires top-tier artificial intelligence technology to implement.

The binary system used by Mechanics is definitely not going to work.

Swarm intelligence clearly states that the best AI logic architecture is at the level of the golden age.

While T-sequences can achieve some of this, in terms of pure electronic logic depth, they still lag far behind the Iron Man of the Golden Age.

And at that moment, he happened to seize a genuine Ironman from the golden age.

Lawson smiled slightly.

It seems we really need to have a serious talk with UR-025.

However, Lawson was not in a hurry to go back and talk to UR-025 immediately. There was still one last core system of Blackrock Fortress that he had not yet learned about, which was the power system.

The swarm intelligence tool retrieved the energy architecture data for Blackrock Fortress.

This surprised and deeply impressed Lawson.