The Tyranid Swarm was losing...
The elite Tyranid Swarm units awakened earlier had succeeded in only a few decapitation strikes. Only five percent of the designated Ork Warboss targets had been killed. Every other attempt had failed.
The Ork Warbosses who defeated the elite Tyranid Swarm units ambushing them grew stronger and larger. The Tyranid Swarm was familiar with this phenomenon: Orks grew stronger and harder to deal with after every victory.
The Hive Mind still had not figured out this strange Ork trait. Could a creature really evolve and grow stronger through subjective belief alone? Perhaps it had something to do with that special energy called psychic power.
After handing all the intelligence and battlefield data over to its collective brain for calculation, the Swarm Consciousness discovered to its astonishment that its calculated chances of victory had fallen from above sixty percent to below thirty percent—and the figure was still dropping!
The Tyranid Swarm was even losing its numerical advantage...
Its total biomass was running at a deficit... After committing hundreds of millions of Warrior Bugs at the outset, the Tyranid Swarm had only just begun turning its biomass losses into gains when it started suppressing most of the Mushroom Farms.
But as the fighting wore on and the battle lines shifted, more and more Tyranid Swarm units died beneath the Orks' absurdly overwhelming firepower. Most did not even leave corpses behind.
Meanwhile, as the Tyranid Swarm lost ground on the battlefield, it killed fewer and fewer Orks. With losses rising and gains shrinking, the Swarm Consciousness calculated that it had already lost the biomass equivalent of a hundred million Warrior Bugs. That deficit continued to widen with every passing moment.
All of this was far removed from the Great Devourer's predictions. The Tyranid Fleet had come to this