A War Driven by Conspiracy

Humanity had a great need for extermination campaigns. The insects drifting everywhere were simply too irritating, and their numbers kept growing, causing ever greater losses and trouble.

At first, it was only the occasional unlucky human on some planet or space city who complained. Those were isolated cases, not enough to draw the attention of the various clans. Whoever ran into them could only count themselves unlucky.

But with no one dealing with them, the insects multiplied explosively. Isolated cases rapidly became countless, turning bug-clearing operations into an everyday occurrence.

For this very reason, Aburame Tetsumaru's Marine Corps incarnations were unable to retire according to military regulations. Instead, they remained in the Marines, shuttling between several star systems to clear out insects.

This ruined Aburame Tetsumaru's plan to serve as a local peace officer and, following the teachings of Dragon-Slaying Arts, nurture a new clan from the bottom up.

By now, the frequent outbreaks of insect plagues had brought even more serious consequences. Ships in transit were colliding with insects, and the odds of triggering an insect plague had risen to dangerous levels.

Unlike in games, many Terran facilities could not be moved. They needed to extract all kinds of resources from occupied territory to sustain their political, economic, and military systems.

The vast quantities of supplies delivered by advanced interstellar logistics allowed capital planets to support populations far beyond their own capacity.

For example, the capital planet of the clan to which Aburame Tetsumaru and Uchiha Itachi belonged was an artificial steel planet barely four thousand kilometers in diameter, yet it housed twenty billion people.

Those twenty billion included large numbers of powerful figures within the clan system, merchants, scientists, and highly skilled technical workers. They were not people who could simply be crammed into slums.

Moreover, this four-thousand-kilometer