Warhammer: Empire Reboot

"The situation is extremely dire."

The intelligence officer pulled up a casualty data report and projected it onto the center of the round table. "To date, the number of Dark Elf civilians and low-ranking soldiers who have died directly from being devoured by these two great demons has exceeded three million. The number of slaves who have died indirectly due to panic, stampedes, and regional mental breakdowns caused by the great demons is countless."

"Three million deaths are nothing compared to the cost."

Fresk was indifferent to the lives of the lower classes. "What I'm asking is, why is your rapid response team like a bunch of crippled ghouls, unable to even catch a glimpse of the Great Demon?"

"Because their way of moving defies all the logic of any dimension."

"My Lord, you can see for yourself. Just a minute ago, they were hunting in the sewers of District Twelve. Our reaction force had just completed the encirclement with the dark matter annihilation device when they vanished into thin air. Three minutes later, their signal appeared at the supply distribution center of Hesar District, 60,000 kilometers away from District Twelve. Our existing tracking equipment simply cannot lock onto such an instantaneous jump over such a long distance."

"That's right, death isn't the biggest problem."

"What's truly deadly is the turmoil. The random jumps of the Great Demon have plunged the entire Comoros underworld into extreme panic. In order to defend against the Great Demon, the defense forces in each district can only fight on their own and defend their own territories. This has led to the complete collapse of Comoros' internal defenses, and the cross-regional joint defense system has become a mere formality."

As Victor listened to the commander's report, his fingers began tapping on the armrest again; he utterly loathed this uncontrolled chaos.

The existence of the Great Demon is like a rat dropping in a blood vessel; although not fatal, it significantly reduces the efficiency of the entire city's operations.

"Find a way to block their jumping area."

Victor gave the order, "Mobilize all available space jamming devices. I don't care what methods you use, corner them, and then use the vitrification virus to completely expel them."

“We are trying.”

"But the large-scale mobilization of the defense line has triggered another, more intractable crisis. The attack by the Great Lord and the Great Demon may just be a pretext. Lawson's real purpose is to use the panic to cover up his theft."

The faces of several high-ranking officials in the hall turned ashen at the same time; this was a problem that had been giving them a headache lately.

Theft and robbery are commonplace in Comoros; it's not unusual at all.

The conspiracies are constantly infiltrating and sabotaging each other in their struggle for resources; it's a zero-sum game of stealing from one another.

But recently, it's clearly not like that.

"Just yesterday..."

A high-ranking governor in charge of logistics in Comoros stood up: "Thirty advanced materials warehouses in District Seven have been emptied. The lost materials include four million tons of high-purity spirit bones, an entire production line for purifying dark matter, and one hundred thousand unassembled poison crystal rifles."

"This is not the worst part."

Another Blood Gate Master added through gritted teeth: "The biochemical sample bank of the Ninth District was also looted. The rare alien gene samples we collected from various star sectors over three centuries, including some endangered organisms, all disappeared overnight."

"The methods are exactly the same, my lords. While we are strengthening our defenses against the Great Demon in various districts, blind spots have appeared in our internal monitoring and patrols."

The lords exchanged glances, suspicious of each other.

"Don't look at me."

"My conspiracy group also lost three armories. The clean and efficient methods they used were something we could never do."

Victor connected all the clues: "Lossen was using those two Slaanesh demons to distract us, and then using his teleportation technology that can ignore spatial distance to empty our coffers."

He finally felt the fear of being silently devoured by a colossal creature.

Comoros's operations are highly dependent on external plunder and internal resource accumulation.

Every ton of supplies was obtained through bloodshed and surprise attacks.

The wealth piled up in these warehouses is the foundation upon which the Dark Eldar maintain their rule. Now, Lawson is treating Comoros as an undefended super ATM.

"Find out where those supplies went!"

Unable to tolerate his wealth being so easily plundered, Victor roared, "Send out all your secret agents to the underworld of the Empire, to those newly opened storage worlds! Find out where Lawson is hiding our wealth!"

“We’re already doing it.”

The intelligence officer replied obsequiously, "But Lawson has placed the storage world within the most stringent defense perimeter, and getting close is extremely difficult..."

Victor gritted his teeth.

We must take drastic measures; if this continues, the Dark Eldar will be so poor they'll be reduced to eating tree bark.

"We will reclaim our resources at all costs!"

…………

On the surface of Titan, a temporary logistics and clearing center on the flank of the Grand President's Palace.

Fio Thorne, chief engineer of Turks, stood in front of the suspended review table, holding a heavy data board in his hand.

Opposite him stood a cornerstone of the Empire, codenamed Tax Collector-1998, awaiting his reading of the first list of tithes to be delivered to the dark side of the Empire.

Because the planet TIA has just experienced war, its orbital facilities are severely damaged, and many transportation nodes and tax networks will need time to be re-laid.

Lawson displayed condescending leniency, approving a discount on the tithe for the first year of the Tau Empire.

The full collection of taxes will not be fully implemented until the third year.

Even with the discounted price, Thorne still felt a chilling sensation, as if his skin had been peeled off.

"The first batch consists of raw materials and energy reserves."

"Refined metals and high-grade alloys, totaling approximately 4.7 billion tons, including rare and stable elements such as tantalum, hafnium, and rhenium as specified by the Empire's Dark Side."

The tax officer recorded this set of data in 1998.

These elements are extremely expensive in the Forgeworld of the Human Empire and are essential for manufacturing advanced plasma reactors and starship core engines.

“Monocrystalline composite armor plates, approximately 80 million tons,” Thorne continued reading.

This is the Titanium Clan's proudest achievement in material technology. The lightweight and high-resistance properties of Fio-tak alloy will be directly used as replacement parts for the external armor of Imperial warships and heavy mechs.

"Fusion fuel, containing high-purity helium-3 and deuterium-tritium isotopes, totaling approximately 1.2 billion tons."

"Regarding power output..."

Thorne flipped to the next page, "The Titanium Empire has erected a superconducting transmission backbone through designated nodes, with a year-round directional power output equivalent to..."

He paused for a moment, then checked the parameters provided by the Dark Side of the Empire. "It's equivalent to three times the annual industrial energy deficit of the Dark Side of the Empire."

The delivery of raw materials is just the appetizer.

What truly stung Thorne was the subsequent catalog of industrial finished products.

"Anti-gravity drive core, 14 million units; ion accelerator components, 9 million sets; complete drones and backup AI cores, 320 million units; high-end medical units, 60 million sets."

These finished products will greatly alleviate the equipment pressure on the Imperial Dark Side's grassroots forces and directly improve the support capabilities of the logistics and medical systems.

All of these combined don't compare to the hidden item at the very end of the list.

Thorne's gaze lingered on the last line of the data panel, and he hesitated to read it aloud.

Tax Officer-1998 stood quietly in place, without urging him on.

Thorne forcibly suppressed the turmoil within him and finished reading the last item of the first year's tithe:

"Modular production line... 20,000 units."

After Thorne read those words, he felt completely drained.

The core of the Tau tribe's industry lies in its high degree of modularity. A production line can be completely disassembled from the surface, loaded into a transport ship, and then re-established on any suitable planet in just thirty days and put into full-power production.

By handing over these 20,000 production lines, humans wouldn't even need to train workers or debug equipment; they could simply plug in a power source to directly produce high-end equipment meeting the standards of the titanium group.

The command center is located far away on the Tri-Star network.

Lawson pushed the tithe list, which had been transmitted synchronously, to the center of the holographic projection.

He dragged UR-025 over again.

If the supplies and production lines handed over by the Tau Empire were a bountiful harvest, then the complete set of scientific research results that the Tau Empire handed over 100% of according to the armistice treaty were the real top-tier spoils of war.

The Empire's database is rapidly downloading and deconstructing the culmination of six thousand years of civilization accumulated by the Tau race.

The complete set of blueprints for anti-gravity and gravity manipulation technology, the full spectrum of parameters for ion acceleration weapons, drone swarm AI and high-speed collaborative algorithms, optical camouflage coating formulas, the structure of deflector shields and phase field generators, the molecular-level molding process for nanocrystal armor, and a complete set of medical and life support systems for the Titans that are distinct from the human empire.

UR-025 paid no attention to the mountains of metal, fuel, and finished weapons; these conventional weapons of the Titanium Clan seemed rather rudimentary to it.

However, UR-025's attention eventually settled on a lengthy database titled "Modular Mass Production Methodology of the Titanium Empire".

It retrieves the basic framework and cross-compares it with the drawings in its memory.

"boss……"

UR-025 spoke with an extremely rare kind of technical excitement: "The Titanium group of aliens has indeed limited breakthroughs in basic science, but their obsession with engineering applications is simply amazing."

Lawson gazed at the star chart, awaiting its conclusion.

“I have the blueprints of the golden age in my hands, but those designs were based on an extremely prosperous material foundation. Every creation required extremely high craftsmanship, extremely rare superconducting materials, and a long processing cycle.”

UR-025 pointed to the Tau mass production model on the holographic projection: "And the only thing the Tau have done in these six thousand years is to take something with 'just enough performance' and make it infinitely mass-producible across galaxies and species. Their talent lies not in how well they make weapons, but in how fast they make them, how low the cost is, and how uniform the standards are. With this mass production methodology, plus those 20,000 modular production lines..."

UR-025 performed a high-speed computing simulation and provided a precise figure.

"Boss, by merging these two systems, using the design of the Golden Age as the upper limit framework and the mass production logic of the Titanium Clan as the basic lower limit, the overall production capacity of the Dark Side of the Empire can be directly increased threefold on the existing basis."

The chain reaction brought about by the submission of the Titanium Empire is completely changing the underlying strategic logic of the empire's dark side.

Massive amounts of refined metals, fusion fuel, armor plates, anti-gravity drive cores, and readily available arms production lines were all sent to the Empire's warehouses as taxes.

The deeper strategic significance lies in the fact that the dark side of the empire finally has a mature and stable R&D outsourcing provider.

Looking back on his technological accumulation, Lawson realized that it was almost entirely based on plunder: stealing and modifying Orcish scraps, stealing Eldar network technology, stealing Tau Empire mechs, and rummaging through wrecked ships to find the remnants of the Golden Age.

While this kind of plundering is extremely profitable, it lacks systematic theoretical support and the ability to self-iterate.

Now, a treaty has turned a civilization whose technological iteration speed is more than ten times that of the human empire into the empire's exclusive research and development department.

Lawson granted Oshowa a great deal of autonomy.

O'Shovar is a true leader. He is eager to rebuild Vision Enclave after the war and to make the Tau strong again in the shadow of humanity. He will surely use all the wisdom of the Tau to develop more efficient engines, stronger armor, and more lethal weapons.

Meanwhile, the Empire's tax officials and technical auditors stood outside the Tau laboratory.

The more O'Shovar strives to make the Tau powerful, the more advanced the research blueprints he submits at the end of the year become, and the higher the value created by the Tau Empire. The Empire can simply sit back and reap the benefits, directly integrating their new technologies into those 20,000 production lines.

This is a calculated, open strategy.

The more the Titanium Empire struggles to survive, the more it pushes the empire to higher technological peaks. The benefits of this technology also extend to the empire's darker aspects of people's livelihoods.

Lawson's New Human Project is being rolled out across all star sectors.

The growth of a large population requires a large medical, nutritional, and basic industrial system as support.

The 60 million sets of advanced medical units, along with the complete life support and civilian production lines handed over by the Titanium Empire, became the most timely supplement.

These readily available devices were quickly deployed to the dark side of the Empire.