The Emperor’s Angel of Death

"Them?"

Looking at Irriyan's confused expression, Solzhenitsyn smiled slightly.

"It's nothing."

Just then, the hovercraft stopped, and the two left the cabin and arrived under a silver-white dome. As soon as Irriyan looked up, he saw an array of thirty-meter-high mechanical arms dancing in precise rhythm. The cold blue and white light penetrated the dust-free glass curtain, cutting the entire factory into geometric spots of light. Hundreds of magnetic levitation conveyor belts weaved a metal torrent in silence. As soon as the crawler chassis left the laser welding station, liquid paint poured down along the nozzle of the robotic arm. Before the reflective surface solidified, the hydraulic rod pushed it into the assembly area.

The slight tremor on the ground seeped into the spine from the soles of his boots. Irriyan's visual eyepiece reflected the shadows of turrets piled up like mountains at the end of the production line. The suspended transport tracks in mid-air extended like transparent blood vessels. When the silver-gray trays full of composite armor plates passed by, only the very slight ticking sound of the buzzer was left.

The sour metallic smell was filtered by the circulation system to almost nothing. Only when his fingertips brushed against the alloy support could he feel the residual warmth of the coolant pipes.

Looking at the tanks being assembled at a rapid pace, Irriyan recognized their model. This was also one of the reasons why he felt that Solzhenitsyn was extraordinary.

"Solzhenitsyn Heavy Tank."

Hearing this name, Solzhenitsyn helplessly held his forehead and shook his head.

"Don't say that name, I'm so embarrassed I want to dig my toes into the ground."

Irriyan chuckled and turned to look at him.

"You dare to manufacture a main battle tank that is completely outside the Adeptus Mechanicus system. You deserve this title."

Then he looked at the fully automated production line.

"These are all being produced for the Orpheus Death Corps, right?"

"Yes, the Orpheus Death Corps is currently very short of heavy weapons, and the Adeptus Mechanicus' production capacity can't keep up. The new production line still needs time, so we can only mass-produce a part of it here to at least build up the framework of each armored regiment."

"Although the enemy has been repelled, do you still think the potential risk of invasion is very high?"

"Of course, after all, we don't know how much war potential that Necron Dynasty has."

The two passed through the tank production line and came to the fighter production line. The entire row of newly produced Vindicators were sliding into the testing channel along the guide light belt. The moment the wings folded, they stirred up tiny swirls of air, lifting the flexible panel suspended in front of the console. The dust removal device embedded in the wall was emitting a light blue mist—those mists disappeared as soon as they touched the conveyor belt, as if they had never existed.

Whether it was the previous production line or this production line, they always maintained the cleanliness of an operating room. The dark red indicator lights flickered at a uniform speed on the hundred-meter-high material rack, like the breathing frequency of some giant creature when it was sleeping. When the latest batch of engines rose from the transfer rack, the trajectory of the condensed water sliding down the mirror steel wall resonated with the rotation frequency of the coating robotic arm three hundred meters away.

"With such a sharp weapon, the enemy probably wouldn't dare to invade easily, right?"

"We can't be so optimistic. The Necrons also have weapons that we can't cope with. You probably also know how the Star Knights were forced to the brink of destruction."

"The World Engine? What exactly is that?"

"A mobile super fortress with terrifying firepower and amazing defense. It is the most terrifying space weapon I have ever seen, bar none."

"Can Gellan fight it?"

"I wouldn't make that choice. Why go for an exchange unless absolutely necessary?"

When they left this weapons factory, Irriyan asked how high its production capacity was. Solzhenitsyn replied that the production target for one standard Terran year was 150,000 Kheres Assault Tanks and 250,000 Vindicator fighters.

This number stunned Irriyan, because in his opinion, the Kheres Assault Tank was at the same level as the Leman Russ tank, and although many forge worlds were producing the Leman Russ, he had never heard of such a terrifying annual output. But he didn't know that this was only a very small part of Gellan's total production plan.

Afterwards, the hovercraft took the two to the outermost area of the planet. At the edge of the light radiation of the distant dying star, the surface of the iron planet flickered with a dark golden metallic luster, and a ring-shaped energy light band was pulsing at different frequencies.

As the gravity tugs dragged huge asteroid fragments towards the celestial body, Irriyan saw the metal mountains on the planet's surface begin to move, revealing gravity mouths as deep as a thousand kilometers below—those blue-purple energy beams twisting space ripples were dragging the passing asteroid fragments into the abyss.

A continuous low-frequency roar came from the depths of the gravity mouths. The towers surrounding the mouths burst out with flare-like electric arcs. The asteroid fragments entering the mouths then began to vibrate violently, disintegrating in a slow manner. When the size of the celestial fragments was suitable, thousands of mechanical fangs appeared on the inner walls of the gravity mouths. They began to rotate and collect, as if they were insects chewing on their prey, turning the fragments with a diameter of about one kilometer into smaller particles and transferring them to the decomposition channel.

No one misses a first, a first, an internal, a capacity, all in one look!

This behemoth's "feeding" made Irriyan's hair stand on end, both terrified and excited.

And beyond the gravity mouths was the entrance to the shipyard. The periphery of the shipyard was a ring of honeycomb-shaped gravity buffer layers.

Through the observation glass of the hovercraft, Irriyan saw tens of thousands of spider-shaped machines climbing along the super-alloy skeleton. The ends of their limbs drew blue trajectories like shooting stars. The giant furnaces on both sides of the shipyard spewed out the newly decomposed stellar material. Streams of silver-white molten metal flowed along the siphon pipes into some flashing equipment, and after multiple transformations, they became the forming ship keels and structures.

The hovercraft slowly slid into the interior of the shipyard, which was like a large canyon. On the cliff walls that were thousands of kilometers vertically, there were warships in various stages of formation. Irriyan could recognize most of these warships.

At this time, seemingly under Solzhenitsyn's control, the hovercraft approached one of the forming warships, allowing Irriyan to observe up close the shipbuilding technology that was completely different from the existing human empire.

The keel of this ship had been completed. It was placed in a huge glass cover. On both sides were funnel-shaped devices, with many silver pipes connected to the metal cliff walls, constantly flashing with faint green light patterns.

Immediately afterwards, many tentacle-like nozzles extended from the front and rear of the glass cover, and trillions of nanobots spewed out from them, like a cloud of silver smoke, weaving the metal embryo in a cage interwoven with particle beams. Irriyan held the handrail of the observation window, watching the material sintering device that he could not understand draw a fiery red trajectory in the vacuum, like a god holding a pen to paint, outlining the contours of the various cabins and equipment inside the ship. The nanocloud collapsed and formed under the constraint of the magnetic field, and the molecular structure of the ultra-dense alloy completed lattice recombination in the laser pulse.