Ever since the Successors decided to "give" Man civilization a push, the entire war had become even more of a headache for the Man Empire.
The Successor swarms were so immense in number. They never engaged the Man Empire's main forces head-on; every time they made contact, they fled at once, never giving their enemy an opportunity.
They roamed throughout the Man Empire's territory, scattering tiny individuals everywhere. Each time the belated Man Empire fleets arrived, they had no choice but to painfully carry out destruction orders and obliterate entire colonies.
Thus, the Man Empire's colonies dwindled at an astonishing rate.
Did the Man Empire have many colonies?
It did, but even that could not withstand destruction on such a massive scale.
Not every star was surrounded by planets to begin with. Some might never have possessed enough remaining mass to form orbiting planets, while in other cases, unusual celestial conditions had eventually swallowed every planet whole.
Even possessing planets did not necessarily mean they could become colonies. If they were too close to or too far from their star, they were either lava worlds hot enough to melt steel or frozen worlds where even the atmosphere condensed into snow. Even with atmospheric terraforming technology, there were still issues with the planetary crust, climate, and more.
And even if every Man Empire star system had one colony, that would only amount to a hundred billion. It still could not endure the Successors' deployment of tiny individuals.
The Amoebas alone already possessed a hundred billion supergiant-mass organisms. They had completely taken control of one galaxy... no, two galaxies now. Due to Perpetuity's strategy, those hundred-billion-scale supergiant-mass organisms had dispersed into other galaxies, so their numbers in the Man Empire's galaxy did not reach a hundred billion. However, faster-than-light organism swarms could