Chapter 4: Power Levels in the Warhammer Universe
The big man stood in place, waiting for orders.
Rosen let out a slow breath.
"Your name is Tw... forget it."
"You're Number 1."
Rosen gestured at the surrounding wreckage.
"Go scout the layout of this deck. Feed every scrap of metal you find into the system. Search for usable weapons while you're at it. Any greenskin you catch alone, kill it. Large groups, go around them. Don't be reckless."
Number 1 brought his hand up again in a sharp, clean salute.
"Loyalty!"
Then he stepped into the shadows of the side corridor and was gone.
Rosen turned his attention to the semi-transparent system interface.
[Host: Rosen]
[Death Warrior Count: 1 / 10,000]
[Life Point Reserves: 20]
[Refined Steel Reserves: 0.2 / inf]
Below that was a block of newly unlocked text. Rosen read through it slowly.
[Note: Limited by host's current strength tier and soul capacity, maximum Death Warrior count is capped at 10,000.]
Death Warriors can be deployed within a designated 50-metre radius centred on the host, or airdropped at any distance using existing Death Warriors as anchor points. However, at the current strength tier, airdrops beyond 100 kilometres are capped at one hundred personnel per deployment.
[Resource Acquisition Addendum: When Death Warriors eliminate xenos targets during independent operations, Life Points are also generated for the host. However, due to warp fluctuation and the host's current psychic link strength, this income is subject to strict distance limitations. Current zero-loss radius: 100 kilometres from the host. Beyond 100 kilometres, Life Point income will suffer severe degradation based on distance. The further the distance, the higher the loss rate.]
Three newly unlocked function panels were listed beneath:
[Shared Awareness]: Instantly access the full sensory feed of every Death Warrior under your command. What they see, you see. What they perceive, you know.
[Consciousness Override]: Project your consciousness into any Death Warrior's body at will, take full control of their senses, and direct their actions completely.
[Skill Transfer]: Share and assign any specialised skill to any Death Warrior without restriction.
Rosen stared at those three lines and was quiet for a moment.
He wasn't unfamiliar with these functions. He'd been using them for a long time before.
Shared Awareness was a sensor network blanketing the entire battlefield. As long as his Death Warriors were in position, the intelligence was there. No blind spots, ever. Consciousness Override meant he could slot his mind directly into a combat machine's body at any time and fight in person without putting his actual life on the line. Skill Transfer meant...
If even one of his Death Warriors learned to pilot a tank, operate a railgun, or repair the main drives on an Imperial Retribution-class battleship, he could push that skill out to every single Death Warrior under his command and they'd all have it instantly, at the same level.
Rosen thought: the best technical academies in the Imperium take twelve years to produce a trained artificer. He just had to learn something once and push it out.
But then another problem surfaced, and his brow creased.
Strength.
The system kept using the same word throughout its documentation: host strength.
Higher strength meant longer airdrop range, more personnel per airdrop, and a wider Life Point collection radius.
This was a leverage system built entirely around his personal power as its fulcrum.
And in a place like Warhammer 40K, the paths available for a mortal to get stronger were depressingly narrow.
He was a Catachan jungle fighter. That put him near the top of what a mortal could be. But mortal was still mortal. A stray round, a single bolt shell, could still turn him into a red mist.
Above mortals were the Astartes. Above them, the Custodes. Above them, the Primarchs. Above all of them, the Emperor himself.
Every step up that ladder was an order-of-magnitude jump in fighting capability. The gap between him and those beings wasn't something he could fill by grinding greenskin kills.
His options were either to survive the laughably low success rate of full cybernetic conversion, or embrace the warp and come out the other side as a Chaos-warped thing with eight tentacles and three heads.
Two paths. One was probably lethal. The other was worse than lethal.
Rosen felt a dull ache behind his teeth.
He had absolutely no idea how to get stronger.
"Continuously improve your strength..." Rosen curled his lip. Was he seriously supposed to be a Catachan who could barely manage a boltgun's recoil through sheer muscle, somehow killing his way past a Primarch? Past the Emperor? Kicking that ten-thousand-year-old dried-out corpse off the Golden Throne and sitting down himself? Give it a rest. Even Khorne would think he'd lost his mind.
"Right, forget it."
Rosen shook his head and threw those thoughts out.
For now, the ten-thousand-person cap wasn't remotely a constraint. He didn't have the resources to build ten people yet. Worrying about what happened after hitting ten thousand was a waste of thought.
"The immediate priority is staying alive in this damn iron coffin."
Then his perspective shifted.
It was like a surveillance feed had opened up in his mind.
He was seeing through Number 1's eyes.
Number 1 was moving quickly between several forward compartments, working like a tireless resource-collection machine.
Rosen watched as Number 1 approached a heavy blast door, half-melted by plasma fire, still hanging in its frame.
The thing weighed at least half a tonne.
Number 1 drove both hands into the gap along the door's edge. Every muscle across his body surged. The moment the door pulled free and Number 1 lifted it clear, a prompt immediately appeared in Rosen's system panel:
[Large-mass scrap metal absorbed. Refinement complete.]
[Refined Steel Reserves: +0.3 cubic metres.]
"Well done." Rosen noted it with quiet approval.
In just under fifteen minutes, Number 1 had swept through three abandoned maintenance bays like a wrecking machine.
Rusted drive shafts, discarded power armour plating, heavy reactor casing fragments, all stripped and fed in.
The Refined Steel number on Rosen's panel was ticking up fast, already closing in on 2 cubic metres.