Night raid

To keep its casualty ratio from worsening, the Frost Serpent had no choice but to send the flying magical beasts into battle.

Although the flying magical beasts gave the Beast Horde an overwhelming advantage, the Needle Crawlers' steel needles also tasted their blood for the first time.

These small-scale battles lasted more than three hours. The Beast Horde wiped out six thousand Swarm troops at a cost of eighteen thousand of its own, while its already meager force of five hundred flying magical beasts lost several dozen.

These losses made the Frost Serpent extremely irritable. If word reached the big fellow, he would definitely mock it.

The one consolation was that all those bugs had been wiped out. Not one had escaped.

No, rather, those bugs had never intended to flee at all. They had chosen to fight the Beast Horde to the very last moment.

The ruthlessness and resolve the bugs displayed sent a slight chill through the Frost Serpent.

It would have been best to thoroughly investigate these bugs, especially to find their mother, before attacking. Snakes had always excelled at ambushes. It was not accustomed to fighting powerful enemies to the death, down to the last drop of blood.

Now it was beginning to want to back down.

I shouldn't have unleashed the Beast Tide so readily. Behemoth still needs some time to awaken, the Frost Serpent thought as it looked at the bugs' corpses on the ground.

After the bugs that had emerged were wiped out, the depths of the slime grew much quieter.

At first, the Frost Serpent cautiously chose to have only a few High-Level Magical Beasts continue burning the Creep, but as time passed, especially once the sky began to darken...

It too lowered its guard. To burn away this infuriating sea of slime as quickly as possible, it ordered all the High-Level Magical Beasts to get to work burning the Creep.

To prevent them from being attacked, it merely had them spread out a little more.

After night fell completely, the Frost Serpent's Beast Horde began eating and resting. Quite a few of the eighteen thousand dead beasts still had intact bodies, enough to fill the Beast Horde's stomachs. As for the herbivores, going a day or two without food would not hurt them.

When the Beast Horde was at its most relaxed, a wicked smile rose at the corners of Chloe's mouth in the shadows inside the Hatchery.

On the green map formed within the Hatchery network, Chloe marked five points with her finger among the red dots representing the Beast Horde.

Instantly, a powerful surge of Psionic Power was drawn from the Swarm Network. With the Hive Mind's assistance, Chloe felt as though the entire Swarm and all the Creep had become extensions of her consciousness.

The Swarm's Psionic Power was converted into powerful psionics, spreading forward along the Creep network. Even the air carried sparks and the smell of searing heat.

What Chloe did was truly very simple: construct the spell model for Psionics Shock and release it at the five points she had marked.

The Hive Mind handled every detail for her. It delicately coordinated the Psionic Power of twenty thousand Warrior Bugs, guiding that power along the model Chloe had constructed to shape the offensive spell, Psionics Shock.

Unlike when Stars had controlled it, this attack did not manifest as meteors. Instead, psionic energy condensed directly at the five points where the Beast Horde was most densely packed, then exploded.

Five purple suns, each with a radius of twenty-five meters, lit up among the Beast Horde. This strike was more precise and more sudden. Not only did it eliminate most of the High-Level Magical Beasts, but the shock waves from the explosions also sent the Beast Horde tumbling in chaos.

Large numbers of Enhanced Zerglings burrowed out of the ground and lunged at the Beast Horde stunned by the blasts. Their goal was to inflict as many casualties as possible on the Beast Horde's elite fighters before they could react.

Their appearance also explained why the Psionics Shocks had lit up here: they had been lying in ambush underground long before.

When the magical beasts' flames burned the Creep, the Creep provided them with one layer of protection, and the soil provided another.

The Hive Mind had used them as nodes to unleash Psionics Shock as targeted detonations. There was no need to guide the attacks toward their targets, making the spell easier to cast.

Of course, quite a few Zerglings had also been roasted alive underground. They had not made a sound before dying. Because of their sacrifice, more Zerglings had survived to launch this attack.

To inflict more damage on the Beast Horde, the Swarm army on the perimeter also launched an all-out assault in coordination with the Enhanced Zerglings' surprise attack.

Within just a few minutes, the Beast Horde, thrown into confusion by Psionics Shock and the Zerglings' ambush, came under assault from twenty thousand Warrior Bugs.

The Beast Horde, which had originally been able to fight the Swarm head-on, was now as vulnerable as an unarmed infant.

During the first ten minutes of combat, large numbers of the Beast Horde died beneath the Zerglings' bone blades and the Needle Crawlers' steel needles. Some powerful magical beasts tried to resist, only to be surrounded by even greater numbers of Warrior Bugs.

A giant mammoth magical beast coated its skin with psionics, then broke into a run, swinging its pair of long iron tusks as it tried to crush the Swarm in front of it.

The result was that the Zerglings ahead scattered with uncannily nimble movements, then ran around to the giant mammoth's flanks. They attacked its legs with their bone blades, or used those blades to gain purchase and climb onto its back, finding vulnerable spots and striking them repeatedly.

The mammoth charged a hundred meters forward, but only managed to kill or injure two or three Zerglings. Had its defenses not been truly outstanding, the bone blades would have slashed it to death long ago. Seeing that their bone blades could only cause superficial wounds, the Zerglings immediately changed tactics.

An agile Zergling leaped onto the mammoth's head and tried to attack its vulnerable eyes. The mammoth closed its eyes and began shaking its head, trying to throw the Zergling off.

Closing its eyes also meant losing its vision. An Enhanced Zergling rammed the hardest part of its body into the mammoth's front leg, blocking the moving mammoth like a stumbling block.

Although the mammoth still kicked the Enhanced Zergling away, it stumbled and lost its balance. Five Zerglings that had long been ready suddenly slammed hard into its flank. The towering mammoth toppled instantly, exposing its vulnerable belly.

The instant the mammoth's belly was exposed, three Needle Crawlers released their needle sacs, which they had been charging for a long time. Dozens of steel needles shot into it.

In fact, as the Swarm spent more time fighting the Beast Horde, it had already collected a vast amount of combat data on the magical beasts through the Swarm Network.

Methods for dealing with most magical beasts were stored in the Hive Mind's database. When facing the corresponding magical beast, Warrior Bugs could quickly learn from combat experience through the Swarm Network and effectively target its weaknesses to inflict damage.

As long as the Swarm kept fighting, its combat strength would continue to grow.

Releasing Psionics Shock just now had only left Chloe slightly tired. She glanced at the Hatchery brains surrounding her. Of the four subsidiary brains, one had melted away by a fifth.

The Hive Mind had paid the price for her. She wanted to comfort it, but held back.

It was not just the Hive Mind. Even the most ordinary Swarm units considered sacrificing themselves for the Swarm a matter of course. It was their instinct.

And it was precisely because of this instinct that, on the Hatchery network's virtual map, large numbers of red dots representing the Beast Horde were dissolving like snowflakes.