“Which Relic would the Marshal like to activate?” Grey Wind asked softly.
“The Cybrex Warforge.”
“Understood!”
With Grey Wind’s confirmation, a section of the massive warship hummed to life.
The corridor Russell was walking down soon came to an end.
Turning a corner, he continued downward under the guidance system.
Soon, a door so tall it seemed built for giants appeared before him.
“The vault is just beyond here.”
Russell was a bit puzzled.
The path he had walked was quite short and nowhere near the core section of the warship, so how were they already at the vault?
This confusion was quickly resolved.
As the heavy doors parted, the interior of the vault storing the ancient Relics came into view.
The first thing that caught Russell’s eye was a massive mass of flesh suspended in midair.
It was confined to the center of the chamber by a dense network of force field generators on the walls, its twisted flesh radiating a chilling, ravenous hunger.
Looking closely, it was actually a bloated, obese giant maggot.
Its body was curled into a ball, and its skin looked dry and shriveled, as if dehydrated.
This was the Prethoryn Queen.
The Prethoryn Queen was so colossal that even though she was curled up and in dehydrated stasis, Russell still couldn’t see the end of her body at a glance—she was practically a minor asteroid.
By a rough estimate, this curled-up giant worm took up nearly a third of the size of the warship housing it.
The seemingly majestic, gargantuan vessel was actually a hollow shell, with the vast majority of its internal space used to imprison the Prethoryn Queen, like peaches packed in a can.
And the door Russell had just opened was actually more like a small window in a wall.
Sailing the cosmos in such a dangerous, hollow warship—was Grey Wind really not afraid that some accident would blow her apart?
Well, she probably didn’t fear being dismantled at all.
“What a mad design. Only nanorobots could pull this off,” Russell muttered.
“This is the largest of all the Relics; she almost fills my stomach completely.”
Grey Wind’s voice remained light and cheerful, sounding utterly carefree.
“The other Relics don’t take up much space. Only the Cybrex Warforge the Marshal wants to activate is slightly larger… It’s in another chamber. I’ll take you there.”
Russell nodded.
Following Grey Wind’s guidance, he crossed the chamber holding the Prethoryn Queen and arrived at another vault located at the stern.
As the vault doors opened, Russell saw a massive steel behemoth lying quietly inside another chamber equipped with a stasis field.
Its general shape resembled a human armored tank, but it was far larger and more complex.
Calling it a modern metropolis wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
The intricate mechanical structures all over its body were dark and lifeless, clearly in a state of power deprivation.
The Cybrex Warforge.
True to its name, it was a war factory.
This was the legacy of the Cybrex, war machines once used to conquer the galaxy in ancient times.
Within this steel beast lay a complete industrial ecosystem, capable of directly processing raw ore into alloys and casting them into the strongest ground force in the galaxy: the Cybrex Warform.
Judging by the descriptions in Stellaris, the towering height and devastating firepower of a Cybrex Warform should be on par with an Imperial Titan.
In short, this was a fully automated industrial production line capable of mass-producing Titan-class ground forces starting from raw ore.
Russell took a deep breath and stepped forward.
As the stasis field deactivated and the power core restarted, the various structures of the Cybrex Warforge reawakened, entering standby mode.
Looking up as he drew near, he couldn’t see the top of the warforge.
The steel behemoth crouched on the ground, the operation of its machinery producing a low, faint hum.
Its gaping maw was like an abyss; as long as enough minerals were fed into it, it could continuously churn out Titan-class war machines.
So, where could he find enough minerals?
The southern continent of Faya did have some mineral deposits that had been excavated for a while, making it a suitable candidate.
However, after a moment’s thought, Russell decided against it.
“What do you need me to do, Marshal?”
Grey Wind’s voice pulled Russell back from his thoughts.
He fell silent for a moment before saying:
“Faya has two small moons in orbit. I need you to place the Warforge deep underground on the First Moon, the one closer to the planet, and hide it to manufacture Warforms.”
“Understood. But Marshal… according to the drone scans, that asteroid does not possess particularly abundant mineral resources. Even if we completely strip-mine it dry, we won’t be able to produce a full-strength Warform unit.”
Grey Wind softly voiced her opinion.
“Furthermore, once the resources are depleted, relocating the Warforge again will be quite troublesome. I cannot guarantee that the hollowed-out moon won’t collapse and disintegrate during the process.”
If that happened, wouldn’t it contradict Russell’s requirement to keep it “hidden”?
Russell nodded.
“But this is the most convenient and fastest way. The drawbacks you mentioned do exist, but they are within acceptable limits.”
“Alright, I understand.” Grey Wind said no more.
Next, the people of Faya, who had just emerged from their state of emergency, watched in astonishment as the colossal warship that had been hovering in the sky began to move again.
It altered its course, slowly leaving orbit and vanishing from the horizon.
The giant vessel, which was Grey Wind’s avatar, arrived at the dark side of the First Moon facing away from Faya and stopped there.
No one knew what she was doing.
While the Cybrex Warforge was being deployed, Russell returned to the surface first.
Landing with him were more than twenty unmanned fighters—this was a necessary show of force.
For a long time, the planet of Faya had been divided and ruled by various local nobles.
Even the Planetary Governor only held nominal jurisdiction over them, finding it difficult to even collect taxes.
However, when Grey Wind arrived and the panic-stricken nobles fled in all directions, Russell was finally able to cut the Gordian knot, seizing the moral high ground and shooting them all down.
This significantly reduced the resistance to his subsequent plans for integrating the planet’s forces.
Faya had few resources.
Aside from the heavy machinery left behind by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the most valuable asset on the entire planet was its population.
The ideological ethics of Faya’s population were mainly divided into three factions: the Ecclesiarchy, the Cult Mechanicus, and the Imperial Truth.
Indeed, here, there were actually people who still supported the Imperial Truth.
The most direct reason why the people of the Imperium worshipped the Emperor as a god was the increasingly deteriorating state of the galaxy.
After the Horus Heresy, the Imperium, which had to rebuild everything from scratch, was tottering under the onslaught of various forces.
On the verge of collapse, it desperately needed a spiritual pillar and a shared faith to unite everyone and prevent total ruin.
That faith was the Emperor.
It could be said that the more miserable and desperate the lives of the people in a region were, the more passionate and steadfast their faith in the Emperor became.
Faya did not belong to this category.