Warhammer: Empire Reboot

As it fell, it crushed large swarms of insects, hatching sacs, and heavily armored guard insects, collapsing like a fleshy tower inside its own stomach, another planet.

The same biomass transport pipeline is in operation.

Golden flames swept across the sky, and shadow blades coalesced into a shadow wheel, severing the giant tower from over a thousand kilometers away.

One after another, the massive biomass blood vessels were severed; leaving them was a waste.

Lawson gave the order within the swarm network.

"Take over the biomass pool."

The combat sequence is to act immediately.

Rather, it is the most secretive green-skinned farm in the dark depths of the empire, in Lawson.

The highly concentrated biomass processed by the Tyranid swarm is a foul-smelling, polluting toxic liquid for ordinary humans.

However, it is the perfect feeding material for green-skinned animals.

The swarm painstakingly squeezed the entire planet into concentrated biomass, only to have it intercepted by Lawson, who then used it to feed the giant mushrooms in those green-skinned farms.

The static force field has a dedicated independent channel.

One biomass pool, two biomass pools, ten, twenty.

The thick slurry, as if sucked into a blue-white light curtain by an invisible water pump, crossed battlefields, planets, and galaxies, directly entering the closed breeding area in the dark side of the Empire.

The Norn queens sensed that the biomass recycling chains they had painstakingly built on various planets were breaking down.

The transmission pipelines were cut open, the digesters were pumped out, and the processed biomass did not return to the Zerg hive fleet; instead, it disappeared from the battlefield.

More accurately, it was stolen.

For Tyrell, this behavior is almost equivalent to reaching into their stomachs and taking food.

Synaptic communication among the Norn queens became more intense than ever before.

Kill this individual, cut off his movement, and create a sniper unit.

Capture psionic trajectories and deploy heavy interceptor creatures.

Countless solutions surged within the Hive's will.

However, the most critical problem remains unresolved.

Lawson moved too fast!

When the synaptic nodes of a certain planet detect his golden fire and the signal is transmitted back to the Zerg fleet, he has already left that planet.

By the time the Norn Queen determined that sniper units needed to be deployed, he had already severed two transmission pipelines on another planet.

Once the heavy spore sacs were adjusted to orbit and prepared to crash onto the surface, he reappeared on the edge of another galaxy's battlefield via the XV25 anchor point.

The swarm can evolve to kill units.

It can create monsters specifically designed to deal with powerful psionicists.

It can hatch behemoths with thicker armor, faster speed, more venomous nature, and better suited for ambushes.

But the premise is that the target must remain somewhere.

Lawson, like a black-gold calamity, leaped through the Terran battlefield network.

Each appearance is brief and fatal.

The sky was burned out, the nodes were severed, the transmission pipes were cut open, and the digestion tank was drained.

When the swarm of insects turned back to bite him, they could only find a piece of worthless remains.

Worse still, the Terran fleet cannot possibly deploy Overlord-class executioners, heavy sniper units, and high-level synaptic guards on every planet.

It can't hatch!

The Norn Queen has already deposited a large amount of biomass into the Overmind Executioner, suspending the hatching of many lower-level swarms.

If every planet is filled with these heavy units, the Zerg swarm's numerical advantage will be eroded.

The Norn queens have finally made a new judgment.

All branch tendrils begin to adjust.

Some of the secondary tentacles that were originally devouring the marginal agricultural world were forced to turn around.

Some smaller fleets, which were supposed to continue providing biomass replenishment to the main tentacles of Nautilus and the flanks of Prometheus, began to move toward the most active theater of operations of the Lawson forces.

More spore swarms, larger swarms of flying insects, and denser heavy unit breeding sequences were brought in from all over.

The Norn Queens reached a new will in the Synaptic Sea.

Since we can't capture that black-gold individual, we'll devour his army.

Since we can't stop him from seizing a biomass pool, let's turn the entire battlefield into a swarm of insects, crushing all anchor points, all foundational sequences, and all Flying Bear Motorcycles!!!

Many Imperials have a misconception about the Terran Swarm.

They assumed the swarm was cold, ruthless, and absolutely rational, like a biological storm devoid of emotion, making optimal choices based solely on biomass gains, channel efficiency, and battlefield losses.

This judgment cannot be said to be entirely wrong.

Tyrannosaurus is not angry like a human, excited like a greenskin, or driven by desire and obsession like Chaos.

The will of the swarm is vast and ancient; it will not be driven mad by the provocation of a single warrior, nor will it waste an entire fleet for a banner or a throne.

But Lawson knew very well that the Tyranid swarm was not without emotions.

Or rather, it possesses a predator's paranoia that runs deeper than human emotions.

The Battle of Barkol years ago is the best example of this.

Before that war, the Leviathan fleet had already torn apart the Red Scar Sector, swallowing countless human worlds.

If only considering biomass gains and navigational safety, the swarm could easily choose a more lucrative route with less resistance and continue to expand its predation.

There's no shortage of weakly defended agricultural worlds, nested worlds, and mining planets in the galaxy; there's no need to actively gnaw on a bone that's almost certainly doomed to break your teeth.

But it still went to Baal, the homeworld of the Blood Angels.

It gathered one of the largest Leviathan tentacles the Empire had ever seen, and charged straight at Baal, pushing the Blood Angels and their many minions to the brink of extinction.

To the average recorder, it was a Tyranid invasion.

In reality, it was because the Blood Angels and their sub-groups had been fighting Leviathan in the Red Scar Sector for a long time, disrupting the Zerg's advance and killing a large number of Zerg, which aroused the Hive Will's resentment.

Therefore, the swarm did not choose the fattest prey, but instead chose Baal.

This is the cold-blooded retaliation by which hive predators, after marking a target as a "long-term threat that must be eliminated," are willing to change their course, concentrate their forces, and take on higher risks.

Now, Lawson has been marked, along with his entire faction.

The swarm of insects died, and their corpses cannot be recovered.

The swarm established a transmission pipeline, which was then severed.

The biomass pool, processed by the insect swarm, is pumped away by the stasis channel.

The swarm uses low-level units for trial and error, while Lawson replenishes chitin and biomass reserves using the corpses of these low-level units.

This is no longer an ordinary enemy.

This is another devourer.

The Norn queens could not tolerate such a thing continuing to exist.

They abandoned some of the biomass that should have been readily available, abandoned the more efficient routes of consumption, and began to press on the war zones marked with dense black and gold symbols at any cost.

Lawson was not surprised when he received the change.

If the swarm remains completely dispersed and continues to gnaw at the edges of the entire Pacific Starfield with hundreds or thousands of secondary tentacles, he will have to constantly divide his forces to put out fires.

But now, the swarm is enraged by his battle formation, or rather, its instincts have been stimulated by his method of devouring, and it has begun to actively gather its power, trying to eliminate him first.

This is exactly what he wanted.

Inside the frontline command post, the Taiping Starfield star map was re-unfolded.

The originally scattered purplish-black tendrils are gradually shifting in several fixed directions.

Like a group of deep-sea monsters that have caught the scent of blood, they abandon the smaller fish that are easier to swallow and instead swim toward a hard bone that will bite.

The cornerstone sequence marks out the swarm's turning paths one by one.

At the end of those paths, the world that Guilliman and Leontus had once included in the scorched earth plan had been completely changed.

The white cylindrical grain storage towers that were originally standing on the plain have long been stripped and re-shelled by drones.

Millions of construction drones crawled along the tower walls, like a swarm of silvery-gray insects.

After landing, they first use a group of probes to drill into the soil, rock, and foundations of old buildings to measure the distribution of silicon, iron, aluminum, carbon, rare minerals, and groundwater, and then the matrix behind them directly provides the construction plan.

The planet itself is a material repository.

Next to the old granary, rows of mining drones drilled into the ground, continuously pumping soil, sand and rock to the surface.

The screening machine vibrates like a giant metal intestine, separating useful minerals from waste soil.

The small furnace array unfolds directly on the spot, with blue and white electric arcs dancing inside the protective cover. The sieved iron sand and old farm machinery debris are fed into the furnace and turn into molten steel a few minutes later.

Molten steel flows into the mobile casting module through a temporary ceramic trough and is pressed into armor plates, support beams, turret bases, and track chutes.

Another batch of drones, carrying the freshly cooled components, flew to the outer wall of the grain silo, where they were secured with magnetic locks, pulsed welded, and the structure calibrated. The next second, a new drone was already climbing up to continue thickening the structure.

The open space between the granaries was cut open.

The wide roads that were once used to transport wheat and fertilizer have been dug into three layers of intersecting anti-insect trenches.

The top layer is an open fire trench, with ceramic fuel pipes and sensor valves laid at the bottom. The middle layer is an armored passage for the lateral movement of XV8 units and cornerstone troops. The bottom layer is the power supply and maintenance line.

The drone sprayed an acid-resistant coating along the ditch wall, sintering the ordinary soil into a black ceramic shell. Even if the knife insects jumped into the ditch, they would first hit a slippery, hard inner wall, and then be pressed to the bottom of the ditch by the flames and the cross-shaped cannon muzzles.

The once neat wheat fields on the plain were not completely cleared away.

They were left behind, becoming a camouflage layer.

Hidden beneath the wheat fields are low-profile turrets, folding heavy explosive arrays, induction mines, and drone repair nests.

Once in combat mode, the armored panels flip open, the cannons rise, and the entire farmland transforms into a barrage of fire close to the ground within seconds.

The changes underground are even greater.