Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The governor's office, vault, communications center, and underground altar are all located here.

This is also the position that the court most wants to take over.

The first thing Er Gou did after landing was to go straight into the governor's private office.

The governor's headless body lay in a pool of blood beside his desk.

The Holy Blood Angels left decisively, not even bothering to clean up the bodies after killing the people.

Er Gou squatted beside the corpse, opened the governor's coat, and took out a data tablet from the inner pocket.

The data board's screen was half cracked, but the memory chip was intact.

He removed the chip and put it into a sealed box on his waist.

"The Governor's private communications records."

"Have the intelligence team analyze the situation and see who this traitor is still in contact with."

Titus stood at the doorway, his helmet's automatic sensing system continuously scanning the surrounding environment.

He sensed something.

In the shadowy corridor a hundred meters away, there was at least a small squad.

There was also the servo skull. The high-frequency electromagnetic hum emitted by those miniature anti-gravity spheres as they hovered in the air was something Titus had heard for over a hundred years in the inquest's detention center.

He will never forget that voice.

"Brother Er Gou, stop for a moment."

Titus lowered his voice: “There are Stormtroopers in the Shadow Corridor, and the Servant Skull is scanning. The Inquisition has come in; they are monitoring us.”

Er Gou, of course, noticed it too.

His senses, enhanced by Lawson's targeted enhancement, were even more acute than Astartes'.

There were indeed people standing there.

The leader was an inquisitor, a middle-aged man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, wearing the standard black trench coat of the Inquisition, with a gold rose-shaped badge pinned to his chest.

He held a blessed explosive pistol in his right hand, and three force field generating rings on the fingers of his left hand.

A group of Stormtroopers stood behind him.

The courtroom has taken over the scene.

Titus could guess what would happen next; he was all too familiar with it.

The judge will display his badge, announce that the scene is under the jurisdiction of the court, all those present will be interrogated, and all evidence related to Chaos will be sealed.

Any resistance will be considered as heresy.

Titus's body instinctively began to execute the standard response procedure he had been trained in for two hundred years in the Ultramarines Chapter: cease all actions that could be misunderstood, keep his hands visible, and wait for the Inquisitor to reveal his identity and intentions.

He thought Er Gou would do the same.

Er Gou stood up, but he completely ignored the courtroom.

He walked toward the Governor's Hall.

There stood a chaotic altar that emitted a purple light and a foul stench.

The altar was constructed from a mixture of human bones and some kind of subspace metal, and a curved ritual dagger was inserted into it.

The blade of the dagger was engraved with runes of skarma, and there was congealed black blood at the edge. The entire weapon emitted a low-frequency hum that made people feel dizzy, and the lesser demon sealed in the dagger was uttering warp whispers.

Chaos artifacts of this caliber are classified as extremely dangerous items by the Inquisition.

The standard procedure is as follows: a 50-meter isolation zone is designated, and the Grey Knights or Tribunal purification experts, wearing full anti-contamination gear, seal the area before transporting it to the Tribunal's isolation vault for permanent sealing.

To touch it directly with one's bare hands is tantamount to suicide in any imperial textbook.

The warp corruption of Chaos artifacts can penetrate into the soul of the contactee along the physical contact surface.

For Space Marines, this was the beginning of their fall from grace; for ordinary people, it meant being instantly transformed into a Chaos Egg.

Er Gou reached out and grabbed the dagger.

"You are crazy!"

Titus growled in a low voice.

He knew better than most Astartes the horror of Chaos Corruption; mere suspicion of "contact with heretical forces" was enough to ruin a Space Marine's life.

In front of the courtroom, Er Gou reached for a demon dagger with his bare hands.

The lesser demon within the dagger reacted the instant Er Gou's hand touched the hilt.

A purplish-black corrupting energy surged from the blade, climbing upwards along Er Gou's fingers, attempting to penetrate the skin, invade the meridians, and reach the soul.

The shrieking sounds of the subspace echoed through the hall.

"It's noisy."

Click!

Er Gou used pure muscle strength to break the demon dagger in two.

The purplish-black corrupting energy lost its carrier the moment it broke apart.

The lesser demon within the dagger screamed as it was severed in half, its soul burned to ashes by the remnants of the Emperor's golden fire released from the broken shard.

The demon's corrupting energy tried to penetrate Er Gou's skin, like a cup of water trying to seep through a dam.

Er Gou threw the half-piece of scrap metal on the ground and pried a thumb-sized pigeon blood ruby ​​off the broken handle.

Er Gou wiped the gemstone on his clothes and stuffed it into his pocket.

Then, he walked to the safe in the corner of the hall.

The safe's door bore the sacred seal of the court, signifying that the court had asserted jurisdiction over the asset.

Er Gou didn't even glance at the seal.

The half-meter-thick door panel broke off from the hinge and crashed to the floor.

The courtroom seal on the back of the door was sandwiched between the metal and the ground, crumpled into a ball of waste paper.

There were quite a few things in the safe.

The governor's private collection included some ancient coins, several small antiques of unknown origin, a stack of high-denomination Imperial Credit notes, and three sealed containers of black stone ore samples.

Er Gou squatted down and started rummaging through the armory.

"This is nice. What era is it from? Never mind, I'll take it back and use it as an ashtray for the boss..."

He muttered to himself as he took away the valuables from the safe one by one.

Titus stood to the side, the two Astartes hearts beating at a rate 20 percent higher than normal.

The death penalty was a key piece of heretical evidence that destroyed the hallmarks of the court.

Unauthorized direct contact with the Chaos Relic is a capital offense.

Damaging assets sealed by the court is a capital offense.

Looting the personal property of a rebellious governor is a capital offense.

To openly commit all of the above acts in front of law enforcement officers in court—double the death penalty.

Titus did a mental calculation: the crimes Er Gou had committed in the past three minutes, if punished according to the laws of the Imperial Holy Land, would probably be enough to warrant seventy or eighty executions.

The judges in the shadowy corridor were also counting.

His face changed from a gloomy expression when he entered the hall to a grim one, and then from a grim one to a complex expression that was somewhere between anger and bewilderment.

His right hand was always gripping the explosive pistol, but the muzzle was always pointed at the ground.

He dared not fire because of the insignia on Er Gou's breastplate.

The Imperial Dark Side Supreme War Commander's Direct Guard Order!

After Er Gou had ransacked the safe, he stood up and dusted off his hands.

He pulled a cigarette from the pouch at his waist; he didn't know what kind it was, but it smelled like it was rolled with some kind of spicy plant that was a specialty of the dark side of the empire.

He put the cigarette in his mouth and flicked a wisp of flame with his finger.

Er Gou took a deep breath and exhaled a gray-blue smoke ring, which drifted into the dark corridor.

Er Gou tilted his head and looked at the judge in the shadows.

The judge looked at Er Gou.

Er Gou grinned, his teeth shining white in the firelight.

"The courtroom! Time to clean up the mess!"

A vein was throbbing in the judge's temple.

Hecate-IX has been handed over to Lawson by Dante.

This means that from now on, this planet belongs to the direct territory of the Supreme War Court.

In the few minutes that the judge stood in the shadows, struggling with his thoughts, his servo skull transmitted back a new scan: On the landing platform outside the Governor's Mansion, the Keystone sequence was pouring into various key locations in the hive city through the teleportation nodes—water stations, power centers, food distribution stations, communication hubs, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements. Takeover had begun.

As Titus walked out of the governor's mansion, he looked back once more.

In the shadowy corridor, the judge finally emerged from the darkness.

His face had changed from ashen to a tired, ashen white.

He turned his head and looked at the group of Storm Assault soldiers standing straight behind him.

"Didn't you hear me?"

The judge lost his temper.

"Activate the hot melt spray gun, execute the cleanup protocol, and clean up the bloodstains and... garbage at the scene."

The Stormtroopers silently retrieved their heat-blowing guns and began cleaning up the bloodstains and the remains of the Chaos Altar.

Servo skulls hovered above their heads, and red scanning beams illuminated every corpse and every piece of debris in the hall.

The judge suddenly felt a strong urge to write a letter to the Grand Judge of Terra.

The letter contained the following content: