Warhammer: Empire Reboot

A beam of light swept across the stern of a Nurgle warship.

The rotting flesh, fungal carpet, and demonic organs covering the ship's hull instantly lost their subspace support, and large areas of tissue shrank and fell off as if they had been drained of moisture.

The Nurgle inside the ship didn't even have time to scream before its body turned into a pool of lifeless sludge.

The Ominous Ark of Vashtor began to turn.

Too late!!!

The Black Stone Death Ray struck its hull head-on.

The demonic runes on the surface of that massive ominous ark all went out at the same instant.

The demon that possessed the ship was stripped from its physical structure and then completely disappeared in the anti-warp energy.

Tens of thousands of demon engines shut down simultaneously, the Soul Furnace lost its core, and the mechanical tentacles froze in mid-air.

Immediately afterwards, the ship itself began to disintegrate.

The cracks spread outwards.

It never actually exploded until it completely disintegrated.

Because the demon reactor, which was capable of exploding, had already been reduced to an empty shell by the death ray.

Moments later, the Ominous Ark was reduced to a slowly spreading mass of metal ruins.

The black stone's death ray gradually dissipated.

A brief silence fell over the edge of the Eye of Fear.

The Seventh Blackrock Fortress only returned fire with one shot.

The ominous ark of Vashtor is gone.

Vashtor stared at the Seventh Blackrock Fortress, excitedly calculating rapidly.

The Chaos Lord in the Eye of Fear saw only a massive fortress blocking the exit; Abaddon saw an obstacle that had to be destroyed; and the Archmage Nurgle saw a black rock wasteland that suffocated demons.

Vashtor saw something different.

The complete black stone structure.

An energy transmission network spanning thousands of kilometers.

An ancient core capable of regulating the relationship between reality and subspace.

A geometric array of weapons that can fire Black Stone Death Rays without the need for cannons.

There is also a control system that has successfully taken over the entire fortress and can complete target identification, energy gathering and firepower release in a very short time.

This is an ancient technological relic that is still functioning!

For the creator of the Demon Engine, having a perfectly intact Seventh Blackrock Fortress before him was like a top hacker obsessed with knowledge suddenly discovering that the most advanced supercomputer in the entire galaxy had not been destroyed or buried in ruins, but was still running, connected to the internet, right in front of him.

Vashtor wants it!!!

This desire even overshadowed the anger stemming from the recent loss of the Ominous Ark.

If he could infiltrate the Blackrock Fortress's central control and seize even a portion of its control, he could make this behemoth shut down its suppression field on its own.

If he can further crack the Black Stone Death Ray, spatial deflection, and anti-subspace force field, they will all become his tools.

At that time, it will no longer be the Chaos Legion that is trapped in the Eye of Fear.

It's the Milky Way!!!

Vashtor's massive mechanical body hovered above the flagship's core, with countless cables extending from its spine and arms, connecting to the entire warship's demonic network.

A creation of his caliber wouldn't leave a data cable labeled "Central Entrance" hanging on the outside.

But all operating mechanical systems generate information.

Fire control arrays need to transmit coordinates, geometric spires need to synchronize angles, energy loops need to report loads, and defense systems need to distinguish between friend and foe.

As long as it is running, it will generate logic; as long as logic exists, there will always be gaps that can be contaminated.

The Soul Furnace behind Vashtor was simultaneously ignited.

Countless souls locked within the demon engine began to scream, their shrieks compressed into malicious data incomprehensible to mortals.

The subspace obfuscation storm is not an ordinary virus.

It doesn't need to know what language the other party uses, nor does it need to fully understand the target system structure.

In past wars, Vashtor had used this method to instantly destroy an empire's command network that forged the world.

The Thinker array began to modify its commands automatically, the turrets opened fire on friendly forces, and the repair mechanics grabbed the nearby technical priests and stuffed them into the still-running gears.

By the time the Cult of Mechanics discovered the intrusion, the entire factory's data core had grown into a monstrous tumor covered with human faces and pustules.

Now, a storm of obliterated codes, a thousand times larger, is hurtling towards the Seventh Blackrock Fortress.

The void surrounding the Chaos Fleet was covered by countless green and dark red characters.

Those characters can penetrate physical armor, searching for any accessible interface along detection waves, fire control feedback, and energy disturbances.

The anti-subspace force field on the surface of the Seventh Black Rock Fortress reacted immediately.

The demonic power on the outermost layer of the code storm was rapidly weakened, and many screaming faces shattered under the suppression of the black stone before they even got close to the fortress.

But Vashtor was prepared; it wrapped the demonic code in countless real mechanical signals and hid the useless code in the captured fire control echoes and space mapping data.

The contamination from the warp alone can be dispelled by the black stone.

Then let's put a mechanical shell on it.

The first batch of invalid codes successfully made contact with the outer control network of the fortress.

On the black geometric plane, hundreds of lines that were originally flowing steadily suddenly flickered.

Several low-level monitoring nodes malfunctioned, and distorted human faces appeared in the data channel.

They open their mouths and gnaw at the access control wall, pouring unresolved commands of pain, hatred, and submission into the system.

Vashtor grinned maliciously: "Too ordinary, ancient, but not closed off."

It has found the entrance.

The demonic code rapidly split, each screaming face transforming into thousands of tiny worms that burrowed deeper into the fortress network.

They attempted to contaminate the fire control nodes, tamper with the coordinates of the geometric apex, and seize the output direction of the anti-subspace force field.

It only takes a few seconds.

The fortress would then point its cannons at itself.

However, the demonic code suddenly stopped after passing through the second layer of permissions.

It was an extremely clean logical space, with nothing that could be tempted or corrupted by demons.

Only one line of cold characters appeared before all the junk code.

[Unknown low-level contamination has entered the quarantine zone.]

Vashtor's smile froze for a moment.

Subsequently, another consciousness connected to the network.

Compared to the demonic consciousness that Vashtor spread throughout the warp, that consciousness seemed almost too quiet.

But when it appears, all the faces that are gnawing on the system wall are simultaneously frozen in place.

UR-025 stared at the wriggling pile of junk in front of him.

It had been a long time since it had seen such a filthy program.

This is not an adjective!!!

From a purely technical perspective, Vashtor's invasion methods heavily rely on subspace contamination.

To the Iron Man of humanity's Golden Age, this technology was probably equivalent to a primitive man who couldn't open a safe, so he stuffed a piece of rotting flesh that would scream into the keyhole, hoping the safe would open itself out of disgust.

UR-025 inspected 327 contaminated nodes.

Then, it connected to all channels of the Chaos Fleet.

"I originally thought that something that claimed to be the creator of the Demon Engine would at least bring me some engineering surprises."

The mechanical sound of UR-025 echoed throughout the entire battlefield.

"So what you call an invasion is just mixing subspace emotions, soul remnants, and low-level tumors together and stuffing them into someone else's data interface."

"You call this code?"

Vashtor's eyes blazed with fury: "What are you?"

"An old machine that's cleaning up your trash."

UR-025 paused for a moment, seemingly re-examining the scrap code structure.

"Correction is very low-level garbage."

Vashtor is injecting more power into the code-breaking storm.

The immobilized faces began to struggle frantically, their fangs tearing at the barriers of the quarantine zone. New demonic symbols surged in along the invasion channels, attempting to overwhelm the isolation layer established by UR-025 with sheer numbers.

UR-025 did not directly close the entrance; it even proactively enlarged the isolation zone to allow more invalid codes to enter.

In reality, UR-025 is just sampling.

Three seconds later, it had already figured out the underlying command structure of the Vashtor fleet.

The demon engine is powered by souls.

The fleet is under unified control thanks to Vashtor's mechanical curse.

In order to enable tens of thousands of demon engines to operate in unison during the same war, Vashtor had to retain a set of highest-level interfaces within them.

That interface is hidden behind the return path of the subspace obfuscation code, and under normal circumstances only Vashtor himself can use it.

Now, it has personally delivered the path to UR-025.

Vashtor immediately noticed something was wrong.

What did you do?

"Look at the code."