From the NPCs' perspective and the players' perspective, two major events had recently occurred.
Over at the Anti-Insect Alliance, the biggest headline was naturally the successful assassination—the Insect Queen had been temporarily killed.
Although they had not achieved the theoretically best possible result—the Insect Queen's death and the complete exhaustion of her authority—
The probability of this happening, according to the Anti-Insect Alliance's various calculations, had been extremely low, less than 1%. It had been practically impossible.
Yet they had achieved another result with an equally low success rate, but one that was, from a realistic perspective, the most likely to be accomplished.
That was the destruction of the Insect Queen's physical body, while simultaneously depleting a huge portion of the Queen's authority.
This was not merely a tactical achievement, but a strategic one.
Now, the armies of nearly ten civilizations were charging forward at full speed. They no longer had to worry about the Insect Queen suddenly descending and converting them into insects.
Without the Queen's authority bolstering them, every type of insect now carried a built-in 20% debuff. For the higher-ranking insects, the debuff was even more severe.
That was because they had been more deeply influenced by the Queen's authority.
At this very moment, these mechanical armies were reclaiming lost territory all along the front. As for the Insect Queen's several allies, neither the Many-Faced Ones nor the Virus Machines could be considered particularly adept at attacking fortified positions.
They could assassinate, convert, and isolate signals, but against mechanical armies comparable to a galactic tide, without the insect race holding the front line, these two vassal civilizations truly could not hold out.
Ironically, the situation had previously been the Insect Queen using an endless tide of insect armies to charge forward and sweep aside everything in her