Toyed with

The swarm's unusual behavior immediately caught the Antill fleet commander's interest. The swarm had never feared death and rarely retreated. Unless its command system was destroyed first, it would fight to the very last creature.

This swarm still had strength to spare, yet it had chosen to retreat. Moreover, the optical telescopes showed that what it was protecting at its center was an enormous, never-before-seen bug.

Prolonged warfare had taught the Antill Empire that the swarm, like ants and bees, possessed a superorganism's hive mind.

Among them were highly intelligent central command units. As long as those were eliminated first, even the most powerful swarm would immediately collapse.

All this intelligence made the Antill fleet commander realize that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One of the swarm's brains was here!

The Stellaris Council had never captured a true brain of the swarm. What an enormous achievement it would be if he caught it.

The Antill Empire was a fanatically militaristic society that placed immense value on glory and military merit.

Thus, no commander of the Antill Empire would let an achievement slip away. Earning merit meant taking risks? Wasn't that only natural? Achievements did not simply fall from the sky. The greater the risk, the greater the merit.

One hundred warships were dispatched to pursue the swarm's fleeing fleet.

After all, resistance from the remaining swarm was already growing weaker and weaker. In the end, the most time-consuming part would be the ground war, digging out the swarm's underground hatcheries bit by bit.

Blowing them up was a lengthy undertaking, taking several months at the shortest and a year or two at the longest.

There had once been a planet whose subsurface was almost entirely filled with nests dug by the Zerg. The Council's fleet had bombarded it for five years before finally leveling them all.

Although the Council also possessed weapons capable of shattering a planet with a single shot, those weapons moved very slowly, and the universe was simply too vast. They had not actually proved useful very often.

After the pursuing fleet also jumped into hyperspace, the swarm left behind actually intensified its offensive.

In an instant, two Antill Empire warships were destroyed. The swarm's reaction only excited the Antill fleet commander further. It meant there was definitely something important aboard the fleeing swarm fleet.

This counterattack was the swarm providing cover for them.

There was no need for the fleet to launch fierce attacks now. It only needed to keep the swarm occupied, and victory would still be theirs.

Doing so would also reduce losses. It was true that the Antilians were warlike, but that did not mean they sought death in battle. That would be foolish.

The Antill fleet in orbit and the landing forces on the ground contracted their defensive lines together, adopting a defensive posture to counter the swarm's attacks.

Adopting a defensive posture meant narrowing the battlefront and concentrating their forces more densely.

A battlefield was a place of zero-sum competition. When the area occupied by one side shrank, the area controlled by the other expanded.

Thus, the swarm's territory expanded, forming a partial encirclement of the Antill Empire's forces.

The Antill fleet commander grew even less concerned. The data on his computer told him very clearly that although they were killing the bugs more slowly, their own combat losses were lower, and the exchange ratio had become a much more pleasing number.

Under these circumstances, the attacking side had to bear greater battlefield pressure and casualties if it wanted to gain an advantage.

A real-world example was a certain battlefield in Eastern Europe, where a major power reduced the intensity of its attacks and instead saw increasingly favorable results. (I hadn't expected its performance to get worse and worse lately. Making money from resources was too easy, and it lost the incentive to develop its industrial supply chains. It even went to the camels to import drones. Sigh, adversity sustains life, while comfort brings ruin.)

Soon, another swarm fleet took off from the far side of the planet. This swarm fleet was far larger than the first, moved faster, and had a clearer objective.

Damn it! The Antill fleet commander abruptly rose from his throne. His earlier ease vanished without a trace. Now he bitterly regretted his own stupidity.

The swarm had demonstrated exceptional intelligence more than once, though it sometimes did seem so rigid that jokes mocking it circulated even within the Stellaris Council.

But as a commander, he should never have made such an arrogant mistake!

He had studied many battles in which the swarm had used its intelligence to outwit Stellaris Council fleets. Most military academies had made these cases required coursework. He did not want to become part of that required coursework himself, especially as a cautionary example!

Fifty elite warships were dispatched. The weakness of the fleet's defensive posture was exposed: regaining the strategic initiative would come at a greater cost.

To cover these fifty ships and allow them to catch up with the enormous swarm fleet, the Antilians' fleet adopted the most aggressive attack pattern and suffered its heaviest casualties since the battle began.

Ultimately, relying on their sturdy ships and powerful guns, the Antilians still achieved their strategic objective. The forty-five elite ships were not far behind the swarm fleet and likewise jumped into hyperspace.

Watching the pursuing fleet depart successfully, the Antill fleet commander breathed a sigh of relief. He had commanded four hundred warships at the start of the battle. Now he had sent out 150 and lost fifty in combat, leaving his fleet with only half its original strength: two hundred warships.

What should have been an easy encirclement and annihilation had somehow become such a bitter struggle.

The battle had recording officers, and video footage would also reproduce its course perfectly. If the fleets he had dispatched failed to achieve substantial gains, then with the current loss ratio, his military career might face a serious challenge.

To keep matters from taking an even worse turn, the Antill fleet commander stopped sitting on his throne.

He began looking back and forth between the data and the screens, directing the battle attentively, destroying as much of the swarm as possible while minimizing losses. If he could keep his combat losses below fifty ships while annihilating the remaining swarm, everything could still be salvaged.

At the beginning, facing a swarm with a medium threat rating, he had planned to achieve victory at the cost of thirty to fifty warships.

Now, even as he gave it his all, he only hoped to keep total combat losses below a hundred ships. A bitter smile crept onto the Antill fleet commander's face.

Something even more painful awaited him thirty minutes later. Just as the battle was gradually stabilizing and taking a turn for the better, another swarm fleet, smaller but relatively elite, left the atmosphere.

It was over. It was all over. Despair covered the Antill fleet commander's face.

He had been utterly toyed with by the swarm. He would be nailed to the pillar of shame in the case studies of military textbooks.

However unwilling he was to accept it, this was reality. He no longer had the strength to dispatch another pursuit fleet.

If he did, he might be the one facing total annihilation under the swarm's fierce assault.

"Gunners! Charge the main gun!" He still had a secret weapon! This weapon should not have been used this way, as it would easily allow the swarm to obtain intelligence about it ahead of time, but he could no longer concern himself with that.

After a moment's stunned hesitation, the flagship's gunner immediately carried out the order.

Soon, blue light flashed across the Antill fleet's flagship, and a beam of blue light that illuminated half the starry sky shot toward the heart of the swarm fleet.