Who Would Be Willing to Become a Vassal

What was war? War was slaughter.

And there were many ways to achieve slaughter, so why limit it to massive warships and heavy artillery?

Against the more than one hundred thousand warships of the invading Dalim Fleet Union, there were no high-energy strikes, nor any of the fantastical weapons so science-fictional they could be called mystical that Dalim military experts had imagined. There was only the sensible application of basic knowledge and strategy.

After the Dalim Fleet Union issued its declaration to the Collectors' cluster, the Collectors used faster-than-light travel to scatter tiny organisms along the enemy fleet's route in advance.

The tiny organisms were extremely small. Even the largest was only the size of a coin. The radars of Dalim capital ships could not detect such small objects; they fell outside the radar's alert range.

Powered by metallic hydrogen batteries within their bodies, the tiny organisms attached themselves to the outer armor of the warships as more than one hundred thousand vessels passed by. Using chemical coordination, they infiltrated the ships, followed their internal structures to the Dalims' life-support systems—places such as ventilation ducts—and spread spores.

As long as a single tiny organism successfully infiltrated a warship, it could silently parasitize every Dalim aboard with Collector spores. During the parasitization process, the Dalims would not notice anything unusual.

Only after every Dalim aboard all one hundred thousand warships had been infected did the Collectors bare their fangs.

Information was transmitted over a special radio channel rarely used by the Dalims. As the radio signal spread, the entire Dalim fleet lost its combat capability at the speed of light.

Finally, in order to recover material resources, faster-than-light storage megastructures arrived near those warships, creating the scene witnessed by Dalim civilization.

Dalim civilization's military experts would never have imagined that the