High in the smog-choked sky of the gray wasteland, a deafening, dull roar suddenly erupted.
The thick atmosphere seemed to be torn apart by a pair of invisible, giant hands.
Ripples of dark-red shockwaves cascaded downward, one after another.
A terrifying, high-pressure cyclone descended out of nowhere.
In an instant, the entire Sector 17 Ruins fell into absolute silence—the buzzing carrion flies and the whistling wind vanished without a trace.
A few kilometers away, atop the rusted wreckage of a discarded tank.
A rebel scout lay flat against the cold, hard steel, peering through a pair of low-grade binoculars.
The howling wind pressed down hard, making his chest feel tight.
He looked up, staring at the reddening sky as the light grew brighter, and froze for two seconds.
Then, slamming his hand against the rusted tank turret, he burst into a maniacal laugh.
“An orbital lance?!”
“Are those Imperial pigs glassing the surface again?!”
He turned to his companion, spitting as he roared, “That new piece-of-shit Commodore is a total lunatic! He didn’t even have the balls to fire a single shot before calling in an orbital fleet bombardment! He wants to drag us down with him!”
On the wasteland, taking the enemy down with you was nothing rare.
In their eyes, this was nothing more than the desperate, impotent rage of the weak.
However.
The red glow in the sky did not resolve into a pillar of destructive light.
Instead, it was a colossal monolith, hundreds of meters long and wide!
This massive iron behemoth friction-burned through the atmosphere at a violent velocity, dragging a blinding, kilometer-long plasma tail behind it.
Like a falling micro-asteroid, it plunged straight toward the center of Defense Sector 17.
*Rumble—*
The destructive sonic boom, mingled with a hurricane-force gale, swept across the ground like an unstoppable wave.
In the distance, the grin on the rebel scout’s face completely froze.
His cheap cybernetic eye whirred frantically, its red indicator light flashing wildly.
With absolute despair, he realized…
There was no artillery shell in his sights.
There was only a giant metal structure that defied all his military common sense!
At the eye of the hurricane, the anticipated physical destruction did not occur.
From the bottom of the colossus, a deafening roar of servo-motors suddenly erupted.
Eight massive anti-gravity thrusters fired simultaneously at full capacity, spewing bright blue plumes of energy fire.
Tens of thousands of tons of gravitational acceleration were forcefully canceled out by the blue flames.
The steel behemoth anchored itself firmly upon the earth.
As the dust began to settle, Yulia and Alicia looked up, trembling.
Their pupils contracted to pinpricks.
With the incredibly precise, heavy grinding of interlocking gears, it began to unpack itself!
Expanding outward!
Reassembling on the spot!
Absurdly thick, dark-gold composite armor plates flipped over layer by layer like the scales of a breathing beast.
To the lowborn natives of the Warhammer universe, heavy machinery had always stood for crudeness, clunkiness, and sluggishness.
Yet this behemoth came to life on this dead soil with a smooth efficiency that defied all known laws of physics.
*Clang—*
The primary radar tower rose like an unsheathed sword, pushing upward layer by layer to pierce the low-hanging toxic smog.
Hundreds of intricate energy circuits lit up one by one along the seams of the armor plates.
A holographic projection screen snapped open.
The flow of deep-blue energy completely banished the darkness for several kilometers around.
Yulia covered her mouth, her entire body shaking uncontrollably.
Growing up in the Spire aristocratic circles, she had seen the apex technology of the Imperial elite.
But the operational logic and precision of the machine before her smashed thirty years of her worldview into dust.
At the absolute base of the structure, a massive black steel blast door, dozens of meters wide, hissed with a sudden blast of high-pressure gas.
As the pressure hissed out, the door ground open with a heavy rumble.
Five colossal mechanical silhouettes stepped out from the cold blue light, walking with heavy, earth-shaking strides.
Over four meters tall, their left arms were equipped with thick, massive metal claws, while their right arms carried highly complex drill-cutters.
Using both treads and mechanical legs, they carried massive energy reaction tanks on their backs.
These were the core, foundational units of the StarCraft Terran faction—SCVs.
On the primitive Warhammer wasteland, machinery of this caliber would require a living human brain or a neural link to function as a Servitor.
Yet these five SCVs needed no native pilots; they were entirely operated by the system’s synthetic clones.
The moment they touched down, they headed straight toward the nearby mountain of mechanical scrap.
The high-energy mining laser cutters on their right arms instantly charged up.
*Bzzzzzt—!*
Five blinding, orange-red high-energy lasers swept ruthlessly into the pile of scrap iron.
Armor plating half a meter thick was like warm butter before the mining lasers, melting into pools of pure liquid metal in the blink of an eye.
With a sweep of their giant mechanical claws, the liquefied metal was perfectly reshaped and gathered into their cargo bays.
This ruin, which the Minister of the Departmento Munitorum had deemed a graveyard…
These useless piles of scrap, these geothermal vents oozing black water…
In the face of Seth Knight’s Terran Command Center, they became an endless supply of Minerals and Vespene Gas.
On the outskirts of the camp, thousands of remnants of the Planetary Defence Force (PDF), eyes green with hunger, stared blankly at the five heavy machines working with furious efficiency. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
The dead silence lasted for only three seconds.
*Thud.*
A veteran’s knees buckled, and he collapsed heavily into the mud.
He wept aloud, slamming his forehead against the ground with resounding thuds.
“A miracle!”
“It’s an STC from the Dark Age of Technology! The Emperor has sent us a sign!”
The fervor spread like a plague.
Thousands of soldiers threw down their rusted scraps in a frenzy.
As one, they turned toward the command center, toward Seth Knight standing high upon the tower, and bowed, frantically prostrating themselves.
This was the survival instinct of those at the very bottom, a raw, fanatic devotion to absolute, overwhelming power.
A few kilometers away, the rebel scout’s communicator slipped from his hand.
His jaw hung slack, drool dripping onto his flak armor.
“This is impossible… No human could build such a thing…”
Sheer terror gripped his heart in a vice.
That wasn’t an orbital strike at all; it was a mechanical deity capable of crushing them at any moment!
“Run! Run!”
The scout let out a blood-curdling shriek, scrambling frantically down the tank wreckage.
He abandoned even his remaining rations and bolted toward the depths of the wasteland.
He only wished he had been born with more legs.
Seth Knight walked straight into the command center, stepping up to the newly deployed giant holographic master console.
*Ding—*
The crisp electronic tone of the system rang out right on time inside his mind.
[Terran Command Center fully online.]
[Connecting SCV harvesting sequence… Metal conversion rate: 100%… Vespene gas extraction rate: 100%…]
On the holographic screen of the master console, the numbers representing Minerals and Vespene Gas skyrocketed like a racing stopwatch.
100…
500…
1,000…
3,000!
There was simply too much scrap metal in this ruin, and refining it was incredibly easy.
It was the equivalent of getting a massive, rich expansion base completely for free right at the start!
Soon, he would show those arrogant bureaucrats from the Departmento Munitorum what it meant to stream out a tidal wave of high-tech units.