209: Chapter 210 The Insect Swarm Arrives

Mobius Prime, the Cathedral of the Supreme Astropath.

This is the only hub for the entire Yuanwang Star System to conduct Warp psychic communications with the outside world.

Towering Gothic spires pierce the clouds, perpetually wreathed in a faint psychic glow.

"Bang!"

The heavy cathedral doors were kicked open violently.

Archon Elena, guarded by Cork, walked in with hurried, large strides.

As the newly appointed Archon of Mobius Prime, Elena had naturally received the despair-inducing news in advance through the Spark Alliance's internal channels:

The main force of the Swarm was about to arrive at the edge of the gravity well!

Even though she had never seen true Tyranids in reality before.

Elena could still deeply feel from the message what a terrifying cosmic catastrophe this was.

When the Tyranid vanguard fleet arrived last time, natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis occurred in many remote areas of Mobius Prime.

With the main force descending this time, such physical-level disasters were inevitably occurring again.

At this moment, Elena could even feel the heavy granite floor beneath her feet vibrating continuously and slightly.

But fortunately, due to the new policies she had implemented during this period, she had already made rigorous preparations for disaster relief supplies and established psychological expectations among the populace in each Hive City.

Therefore, there was no widespread collapse or chaos in the grassroots disaster response like last time.

However.

Physical disasters were easy to defend against, but the impact on the mental level was impossible to resist.

Elena forcibly endured the sharp headaches and physiological nausea rising from deep within her brain.

She felt as if she were being stared at intently by some unspeakable behemoth lurking in the abyss, and her heart was pounding uncontrollably.

"Damn it! The psychic fluctuations here are too chaotic!"

The veteran Cork held his shotgun, scanning the surroundings vigilantly.

When they walked into the cathedral's prayer hall.

The scene before her eyes made Elena feel as if she had fallen into an ice cave instantly.

At this moment, the cathedral hall was filled with hair-raising, tragic wails!

Those blind Astropaths, who were responsible for transmitting the Empire's messages on ordinary days.

Were all rolling and writhing on the ground in agony like crazed beasts!

They screamed in despair, clawing desperately at their own cheeks, even tearing their eye sockets into a bloody mess.

Large amounts of fresh blood gushed out from their nostrils and ears!

Several weaker Psykers even suffered ruptured cerebral blood vessels due to extreme pain, falling to the ground twitching until they died.

These sensitive Psykers, through the ripples of the Warp, seemed to have seen some unspeakable, terrifying images in advance!

It was the destructive noise generated by billions of bugs, frantically scraping and chewing within these Astropaths' minds with their Hive Mind that was vast enough to distort reality!

When the small Tyranid vanguard fleet arrived last time, there had been no such terrifying scene that made one's scalp tingle!

The oppressive feeling of the main fleet had shattered human sanity before any contact was even made.

Marshal Miller, chewing on a cigar, led a team of heavily armed Adeptus Arbites shock troopers as they rushed into the cathedral, beginning to forcibly set up a cordon in an attempt to control these maddened Psykers.

The Battle Sisters squad sent by the church's new bishop also received the distress call and quickly arrived at the scene.

"Seal the hall! Administer sedatives to those Astropaths who are about to lose control!" Miller ordered loudly.

However.

It was right at this moment.

An unexpected change occurred!

An Astropath who had fallen in a pool of blood and was not yet dead began to twitch violently!

Accompanied by the teeth-grinding sound of shattering bones and tearing flesh.

The Astropath's body began to deform and swell like a melting candle!

In just a few breaths' time.

A tall, deformed monster covered in thick tentacles and sharp bone spurs, exuding the foul stench of the Warp, tore through that thin layer of human skin and stood up while roaring!

"What is that monster?!" Elena turned pale and stepped back.

"Damn it! It's a Chaos mutation!"

Miller cursed, immediately drawing the large-caliber Bolter from his waist and pulling Elena behind him to protect her.

"The psychic shadow of the Hive Mind is too strong; it tore through this poor soul's mental defenses! The Warp took advantage of the opening and used him as a sacrificial vessel for a daemon to descend!"

Miller raised his Bolter and roared at the stunned shock troopers and Battle Sisters:

"Don't just stand there! Organize your tactical formations! Prepare for combat! Purge it!"

Accompanied by the deafening roar of the Bolters, the cathedral instantly descended into a brutal meat-grinder battle.

...

Meanwhile, on the other side.

The Prison Planet, which was closest to the Swarm's invasion route.

At this moment, this planet was presenting a completely different scene.

Because the entire Prison Planet had now become territory under the Scourge Legion.

And the Scourge Legion held direct and absolute jurisdiction over all resources and personnel on this planet.

Therefore.

Over the past few months, these players had carried out sweeping social reforms on the Prison Planet.

One of the most core innovations was the representative assembly system they created.

To facilitate the management of the native inhabitants.

The players forcibly divided the population on the Prison Planet into 64 districts, with each district electing a representative from among the natives;

In addition, they established 512 industry representatives and 128 guild representatives.

All important laws, commercial decrees, and construction decisions on this planet were no longer the sole prerogative of the governor, but were all put to a vote in this representative assembly!

Of course, the prerequisite was that any decree must be based on the Spark Alliance's supreme constitution as the underlying logic and could never violate it.

At first, the Scourge Legion players guided the natives hand-in-hand to establish this system.

Later, upon discovering that the system was running very smoothly.

The players found holding meetings too troublesome, so they simply played the role of hands-off managers and completely handed over the trivialities of daily management to the natives themselves.

The Scourge Legion players, on the other hand, transformed into transcendent figures similar to foreign investors.

They enclosed land and built factories and assembly lines on the Prison Planet;

The natives willingly entered the factories to work, providing labor.

And as long as one became a formal employee of an industry under the Scourge Legion, they would generally receive benefits like free education and free basic medical care, which were considered luxuries in this universe.

This mutually beneficial model made the cohesion of the Prison Planet unprecedentedly high.

Furthermore.

Besides frantically building factories.

The Scourge Legion also established their own Scourge auxiliary army among the local natives.

Since the vast majority of the natives on the Prison Planet were originally ruthless gang members from the lower hives of Mobius.

These people were all desperate gamblers, so the recruitment for the auxiliary army was extremely smooth.

Currently, the number of this auxiliary army had expanded to nearly two hundred thousand!

With the cost-free support of the Scourge Legion's assembly lines, their weaponry was naturally far better than the junk used by ordinary Hive City Defense Forces.

All of them were equipped with laser rifles, plasma cannons, and composite bulletproof armor.

However.

Because the training time for the army was still relatively short, these green recruits had not experienced real, cruel warfare.

Therefore, in the players' eyes, they could not yet be counted as reliable frontline combat power and could only be used for miscellaneous tasks and guarding bases.

At this moment.

On the Scourge Legion's massive open-air starport, more than seventy thousand players from the guild were densely gathered!

The reason why these people were not fighting monsters or mining, but all gathered here, was very simple.

Because.

The blood-red countdown on the system backend was about to hit zero!

This meant that the first true legendary-level battle since the server opened was about to officially kick off!

In the starport's massive operations room.

Praise Ming Shen, Why Panic When I Have Flash, Liver Emperor, Miracle Walker, and other core legion bigwigs were standing with their arms crossed, staring intently at the giant screen on the wall.

In the top right corner of the screen, the countdown was ticking down its final moments.

"3... 2... 1!"

"Beep—!"

"It's here!" Ming Shen said in a deep voice.

Outside the operations room, the wind was howling.

Fortunately, the surface of the Prison Planet had long been planted by the players with various radiation-resistant mutant plants, which firmly locked the soil and water, so it did not kick up a sandstorm that blotted out the sky like last time.

On the giant display screen.

It transmitted live cosmic footage captured by the high-precision optical detection array deployed in deep space.

It was a deep, boundless, cold, and dead deep space.

Because the detection array had undergone active filtering processing by 73, the starlight from stars that were far away and prone to causing interference had been screened out by the system.

Therefore, the entire background of the image appeared very dim, with only sparse starlight flickering.

Just at the moment the countdown hit zero!

Several eerie red bright spots suddenly appeared out of thin air in the dim cosmic background!

"Zoom in on the coordinate image!" Ming Shen issued the command.

On another split screen, the camera zoomed in rapidly, and the specific physical appearance of those bright spots was finally clearly displayed!

"Holy shit!"

The moment Liver Emperor saw what those things were, his pupils constricted.

"It's the damn Tyranid Narvhal! They cut directly into the gravity well!"

Following the appearance of those few scouting Narvhals.

Immediately after.

The starlight in the distance of the screen began to be completely obscured, piece by piece, by something massive and constantly writhing!

Looking from the screen.

That scene was as if the cosmic background itself was rapidly rotting, forming patches of disgusting, viscous purple blood scabs!

In space.

Tens of thousands of living biological ships of all sizes were floating!

They did not have the cold armor of Imperial warships, nor did they have the hot working fluid exhaust trails sprayed by nuclear fusion engines.

Replacing them were bodies covered in thick, purple-black cuticles, huge biological blood vessels pulsing on their surfaces, spiracles constantly spewing toxic spore gas into space, and thick tentacles writhing and exploring like deep-sea behemoths!

These densely packed living warships, like maggots swarming on a piece of rotten meat, or like a swarm of locusts blotting out the sun in an autumn field, were crushing toward the camera with an unstoppable momentum.

Liver Emperor stared at the densely packed, uncountable Swarm fleet on the screen.

He couldn't help but gasp, feeling his scalp tingle.

"Holy shit..."

Liver Emperor swallowed his saliva.

"Brothers, why do I suddenly feel that the meager anti-aircraft fire array we painstakingly built on the surface... is like a ridiculous water pistol in front of these monsters? The number is just too damn high! Damn it!"

"According to the official background lore settings."

Ming Shen's expression was grave. "What we are seeing now is just an insignificant, tiny tentacle branch of the Hive Mind extending toward the Galaxy! This damn sense of oppression is really not for show."

In the footage, the Swarm's fleet was boundless, with living ships of all sizes crowding and writhing together.

And in the very center of that sea of bugs.

Stood a terrifying living mothership, dozens of kilometers long, with a giant maw at the front!

"Who cares which damn tentacle branch this is!"

Flash, this hardcore war maniac, not only didn't feel scared but instead his eyes lit up, and he slapped the table and stood up in excitement.

"This grand scene can only mean one thing! That is, the game's production team is too damn conscientious and too damn capable!"

Flash pointed at the vividly detailed bugs on the screen.

"Look at that texture! For this one battle, this shitty game company actually used supercomputers to render billions of independent Tyranid models for us in real-time! How many graphics cards must have been burned for this?!"

"Hey! Enough talk! Praise Immortal Lin!"

Just as the group of players was still shocked by the grand oppression of the Swarm's main force, while also frantically praising the dog-like developers' technical prowess.

Suddenly!

"Ding-dong!"

In the operations room, including on the pv terminals of all online players across the server.

A pinned, highest-level notification flashing with dazzling golden light popped up simultaneously!