The moment my consciousness returned to the small drone body, I could tell that something was different. I felt... more whole and powerful than when I was in VR or away as an avatar. It almost reminded me of the last time I had recovered from a serious virus or illness, only to wake up one day completely renewed.
"How strange," I muttered as I swept my gaze through the swarm around me and found that instead of being inside a representation of a human body, my void seedling was encapsulated inside an array of interlocking swarm. Everything around me was geometric shapes and precise angles, in stark contrast to the organic layout the swarm had always used before.
"What am I looking at?" I asked, rotating my vision in place and zooming out to get a broader perspective of the gigantic structure that was rapidly being created to facilitate my journey. "Two Hoberman spheres and a soccer ball." I mused as I noticed the gradual loss of size in each. For some reason, the sizing seemed off to me.
"Nurse, why is everything weighted this way? There doesn't seem to be enough swarm to counterbalance the amount used to launch me."
"That's right Kevin."
"So what? Why do it this way? Won't this setup put too much strain on stopping my crazy speed?"
"Yes. But it has to be done this way if you are going to get there as fast as I predict it will take you to save those children."
"You did it so that the majority of the swarm would survive and only need to heal, while the second group would most likely be blown to bits?" I asked, imagining what was coming.
"Yes."
"And there is no other way?"
"There are always other ways. What matters is the outcome. Every moment we continue to accelerate, and soon we will have to begin to decelerate so as not to simply fly past the entire battlefield. Doing it this way will essentially get us there much faster. It will just require a sacrifice of swarm."
The answer didn't bother me too much. The swarm had all become a part of me, an extension of myself. If saving the Blidda children meant losing an easily replaceable part of myself, then so be it.
I watched the structure nearing completion and prepared myself for the next stage of my journey. Soon I would be in the thick of it and able to make a difference.
"Kevin?"
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry I didn't store more Gold cr. It was a lack of oversight on my part. I outfitted most of your swarm with Obsidian cr, thinking that it would keep the Earth safe from anything that would be attracted to the emissions that Gold produced. In retrospect, I should have kept a larger supply on hand and placed it in Obsidian shells. In essence, I should have made batteries out of Gold cr. My thinking that I could always go to a star to replenish our reserves was wrong, and I am sorry."
"It's okay, Nurse. You're right, we're not emitting whatever #!&^^ energy is contained in Gold cr. I can only imagine the consequences of using so much of it to save Earth or even to get here. It would probably have created a superhighway for every creature to be drawn to near and far. By the way, does #!&^^ mean growth energy or something like that?"
"Mmm yes, a little. It might be more like progress or change energy though. Growth is one dimensional while change can be used in any direction."
I felt it as each of the giant structures were completed and locked into place, each of the swarms that made up the first Hoberman Sphere preparing to catastrophically release all of the available Obsidian CR energy at once. The arrangement tickled my mind and made me suspect something.
"You stole this idea from Invicta, didn't you?" I asked, focusing my vision forward to the tiny point of light that was the epicenter of the event. It felt like I was trapped on an amusement park ride and the insane conductor was about to throw the switch. A ride I suspected my dangerous, sparkly AI girl had created.
Nurse laughed.
"Yes. I raided her trove of ideas when you needed a quick solution. For a digital being, she is surprisingly creative. She always pushes things to the breaking point, just to see how they work, and to observe how, even in destruction, something can still be... used..." Nurse paused for a long moment, her attention demanded elsewhere.
"Nurse? What is it? I am ready to go. Launch me!" I said as the silence dragged on for several more moments.
"Kevin!" I heard Nurse say as I felt a dark emotion surge through my swarm and VR. It felt like a pheromone had been released throughout the swarm, a pulse to prepare for enemies. Instinct kicked in and I entered VR to investigate. My greeting area had been wiped clean by Nurse, and instead of the usual travel disk and diverging paths greeting me, I found myself floating in a vast star map of the known cosmos.
"What's going on? Why the delay?" I asked as hundreds of Meditati's flickered in and out of view. I could feel them working hard as they sifted through an unimaginable amount of data.
"Your dimension is being invaded!" Nurse answered as red dots began to light up around the stars of inhabited solar systems. More and more dots quickly spread to other solar systems as they both worked together to gather data from every system they had swarm and surveillance satellites in.
Only one thing came to mind as I imagined the Void somehow getting past the shield and spreading like an explosive cancer through both dimensions. I felt my heart drop to the floor.
"Is it the Void? Has the shield fallen? I thought we had more time!"
"No. It is something else."
"Something else? Like what?"
"They seem to be... solid tubes. They just started pouring out of stars all over the cosmos moments ago, practically at the same moment," Meditati said, as more and more dots were added to the vast map. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! Most species haven't even realized they've been invaded yet. Only the Jterg Science Family Core's security system went off first, because those things actually started interacting with their Tela network the moment they arrived."
"They, what? They connected to their wifi?"
"Basically, yes. They were attacking the network, or at least trying to hack in and lock down the AI. They were trying to crack through outdated exploits, and this attack caused the Jterg AI, my parent, to alert the rest of the Tela AI, thereby locking down the Tela network from further intrusion attempts. Each Core, Arbiter, and Remote Probe is now sending each other status reports on their individual systems regarding this invasion. I am using this data to develop the map."
"So these things are pouring out of stars where Tela also has cores surrounding them?"
"Strangely enough, no, only some of the older cores. A common theme is that they all passed through suns belonging to prominent alien species." One of Meditati's copies answered me before another spoke over her.
"Species that have existed in their systems for a very long time. I see no activity on systems that have recently migrated or on newly built cores."
"That means this could be a legacy army of Tela origin."
"What makes you say that?"
"Based on the fact that the first thing it did was try to break into a Tela system, using outdated methods and authority keys that haven't been used in ages, showing intimate insider Tela knowledge. It seems it got something through the network in the first moment of the initial attack. I don't have access to see what it was, though."
"Have there been any other attacks besides this initial hacking attempt?"
"Not yet, it was only a few minutes in real time."
The dots continued to spread out into the distance, revealing a force that boggled my mind. This was a true invasion force.
"Minutes? Nurse I need to focus on what I can do. I have to save the children!" I shouted as I left VR and immediately felt Nurse detonate the weapon I was attached to.
The action, simply the insane explosive nature of Invicta's strange device exploding caused me to instinctively flinch before I got my head in the game and my sight set back on the tiny dot in the far distance.
The entire detonation action would have been over in the blink of an eye had I not kept my Prime Speed Control Key on.
Even with my Prime Speed Control Key on, I noticed and felt the sudden acceleration as each individual swarm of the largest Hoberman Sphere extended its limbs in perfect synchronization.
"Wait?!? That was the compact version?" I asked as the already massive sphere suddenly exploded in size.
Invicta had created a biological nuke by harnessing the insanely powerful abilities of a dimensional creature that surpassed what could be achieved in my home dimension. Add to that the power and thrust that CR propulsion could generate, along with the robust muscles of my swarm army, and I might as well have been teleported light-years in a matter of moments.
Everything went temporarily dark.
It was as if reality had glitched.
The glitch lasted for a long moment until I felt everything explode in reverse as the orb in front of my smaller swarm mass went critical.
I felt my swarm die.
I couldn't help but clench my jaw as a searing pain shot through my mind. Each and every swarm in the second largest Hoberman Sphere gave up their lives, exhausting both their bodies and their ability to excite energy from the Obsidian cr particles in their clutches.
"Kevin!" I heard Nurse scream at me through the crazy burst of pain as my tiny soccer ball remnant of the swarm was slowed to an almost complete stop. Light was finally visible again and it was taking me a second to get my bearings after suffering such a painful experience.
"Kevin!" I heard Nurse scream again, wondering what she was so excited about. I could feel her trying to becon me into my private mental space that I shared with my swarm. I suspected that her intensity had to do with how much suffering she had to filter through to get us to this point. Had she not put up a barrier, I would have been hit with even more pain than I had just experienced, hard as it was.
I fixed my gaze on the now unbelievable sight of the remnants of the supernova and the many glittering fleets taking up sectors of space before jumping inward to see what Nurse wanted.
When my vision instantly shifted from my distant target to Nurse, her opal eyes glowing with violet hues, less than two inches from my own in my personal space, I almost yelped.
“Nurse! What is it? What is wrong?” I asked, finally noticing the way she was looking at me, the adoration in her eyes, the unbridled joy and excitement. It wasn't what I expected at all after what we had just sacrificed to get to the battlefield.
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"Kevin! You moved!" She shouted happily in my face, her smaller hands resting on my shoulders before rising up to cup my cheeks.
"What?"
As if in explanation, while still holding my face tenderly, she leaned back a little, creating a large swarm drone between us. Its body was quite large, about as long and wide as a hen's egg, and it looked like a warrior drone, all beefed up and armored compared to the usually lean killing machine look of my swarm. Where my swarm was all stabby stabby, this drone looked like it could take a beating and haul off whatever it killed in the process. A light coating of dust barely drifted off its body and limbs, not quite touching it, but staying a few millimeters away. Upon closer inspection, the tiny specks of dust turned out to be swarm.
My swarm, only in actual size.
"Wait. Are you telling me that this is me, or rather the drone body that I currently reside in?" I asked as I forced a view open to the outside world to verify her claims. Sure enough, my little drone body had changed.
"But how? When did this happen?"
“Right as I launched you! You moved!" She excitedly yelled as she stepped back and clapped her hands, replaying the moment when I flinched, causing my drone to surge to do the impossible. I had thought that I was trapped within the void seedling, seeing as moving had been impossible before. It seems that when I flinched, I had somehow caused my drone to move within the invisible shell of the seedling, naturally bending its six limbs outward to try to protect itself from being smashed into something when I was launched.
"But how? And why am I so big?" I asked, watching in slow motion as the tiny Ticktac-sized drone's body jerked and swelled like a bodybuilder on a before and after photo timeline. It looked like my kick of movement broke whatever was holding me back and was sealing me in concrete, allowing my drone body to swell and grow.
"You're still covered, though. I can't find a break in the seedling around you. It's like you're wrapped in Saran Wrap with no opening." She said, zooming in on a spot below the main thorax.
I squinted at her for a second, feeling that she had just shown me where her real body was in reality. Sure enough, she had stayed with me ever since they had found me, right on the shell of the Void seedling.
"I wonder if it had anything to do with how amazing I felt before you launched me when I re-entered my drone body?"
"I don't know? Might have something to do with the fact that you aren’t being siphoned from anymore? Some of Meditati's hypotheses about the Void and the Void Seedling are that it is a collective colony entity. Those wiggling living worms of light that burst forth from the seedling may have been the colony, fed enough to finally venture out of the shell. The black goo could be their place to reproduce. Since the shield destroyed the goo, the worms had to leave their shell to find more, using a perfect spherical delivery method that ensured they would spread over as much of our dimension as possible."
An image of an old video game from my childhood came to mind. It was a picture of a slime creature that adventurers would face when they ventured out of the main city. Of all the creatures, the slime was the weakest, yet when it touched the adventurer, the slime would surround the player and steal their ability to use a shield. My situation was the same, only the slime had died and I was still trapped in its gelatinous body.
I shared my thoughts with Nurse, and she laughed, cycling through my memories with me.
"So the slime swallowed you and you somehow killed or got rid of the brain?" She mused. "I wonder who drives the slime body now?"
We both paused and looked at each other in stunned silence.
"Huh... get all this data to Meditati while I go back to saving the children and the rest of the Blidda that are being taken. While I do that, I will see if I can drive the slime body at all." I said as I set up a map overlay of the space battle with the various fleets and where I needed to get to as quickly as possible.
"Let’s do this!" I yelled as I dropped into reality, letting time pass at a fraction of its current speed. To most of the armadas, both observing and currently in the heat of battle, I would look like a black streak of doom slicing through the middle of everything. Only those with the highest sense of time and perception would be able to track me or even notice that I had arrived. I drove my swarm around battleships that I could have easily punched holes through, instructing my swarm to warp and stretch to minimize casualties, diving through explosions and lines of weapon fire without regard.
My swarm was on another level and I felt invincible. Something was happening to my body and mind; I just felt... more alive than I had in a long time.
“Nurse, keep an objective eye on my thoughts and emotions, please. Something is going on and I don't know the origin of the heightened sense of self that I feel." I said as I reached the edge of the area where the Blidda fleet was fighting and being routed by the U'lennea. Although I felt great, I knew I needed an outside opinion, as I had been influenced before and nearly died from lack of supervision.
---
The vast brood of the Hive Mother were the first to sense the strange intruders, their keen instincts honed by millennia of blending seamlessly with the terrain. They were masters of camouflage, silently observing the native denizens as they cycled through their lives, oblivious to the watchers below.
Long ago, the Hive Mother had learned the secret of optimal existence: let life flow around you, unnoticed and undisturbed. She had perfected this art by dwelling beneath the vein's crust, nestled among the minerals and burrowing creatures, while keeping a watchful eye on those who crowded the surface. This hidden vantage point allowed her to monitor the relics and potential genetic advancements that traversed her territory, ripe for her Absorption.
But these new intruders were different. They were not of this world. They moved with a cold precision, devoid of the natural impulses of life. They advanced in disciplined geometric clusters, breaking formation only when the tunnels forced them to diverge. They did not leap, fly, or possess gas-filled sacs to lift themselves off the ground like other creatures. Instead, they maintained an unnerving, perfectly centered mobility that defied the natural order.
The Hive Mother immediately recognized the nature and origin of the threat. These invaders were no strangers to her; she had encountered their kind before. Long ago, when her brood first encountered the mechanical swarm, the outcome had been decidedly in her favor. Her swarm, with its superior numbers and instinctive cunning, had overwhelmed the enemy with ease, dismantling their strange forms and scattering their remains into the depths of the tunnels.
In the early encounters, the Hive Mother had sought to Assimilate the invaders, to unravel the secrets of their design and incorporate their strengths into her own. This was her way—understanding an enemy by making it part of her, turning their strengths into her advantages. But the enemy had quickly learned this about her. In their relentless drive to adapt, they began to self-destruct upon defeat, reducing themselves to nothing more than scrap and smoke. Each attempt to glean insights was met with frustration, the remnants of their shattered forms yielding no secrets, no advantage.
What she had once thought to be mere machines were proving to be far more insidious—capable of learning and countering even her most intrinsic strategies. The invaders’ ability to deny her this knowledge was not just a tactical move; it was a deliberate strike against the very nature of her existence. The Hive Mother could feel the sting of this, a rare sensation of being thwarted in her eternal pursuit of dominion.
The enemy was stubborn. Over time, they adapted, evolving with each encounter. What had once been an easy victory became a battle of attrition. Her swarm began to take casualties, the once easily crushed invaders now countering their strategies with increasing effectiveness. It was as if they were learning, growing stronger with each clash. The Hive Mother had even considered diverting a Super Swarm to wipe out the threat entirely, to rid her domain of this increasingly dangerous foe.
But just as she had gathered her forces for a decisive strike, the enemy retreated. They vanished into the labyrinthine depths of the endless veins that formed the backbone of this dimension, slipping beyond her reach. For a time, they became little more than a shadowy presence, appearing only occasionally, as if content to observe. Her brood would encounter them in passing, in brief and inconclusive skirmishes that seemed designed to test, to probe.
The Hive Mother knew this was no ordinary retreat. The enemy was not simply fleeing; they were watching, waiting. She had seen this behavior before, a prelude to something more insidious. They were gathering information, biding their time for reasons she could only guess at. And in the dark recesses of her vast consciousness, a flicker of fire raged through her being—a maddening bloodlust that was her birthright, the very force that had earned her brood its fearsome name: The Swarm of Death.
Her domain was vast, a sprawling network of tunnels and veins that stretched across unimaginable distances, far beyond the comprehension of any human mind. The enemy, though formidable, had only just begun to encroach on the farthest reaches of her territory. It was a distant threat, so far removed from her core that it should have been insignificant. And yet... and yet they kept coming.
More and more of the invaders poured into her monitored veins, an unending stream that flowed as if some unseen spigot had been flung wide open. What had begun as a trickle had become a flood, their numbers growing with each passing moment. They surged forward with relentless determination, advancing deeper into her domain, threatening to breach her carefully maintained order.
The Hive Mother could sense the scale of this incursion, the sheer volume of the invaders pushing the limits of even her vast consciousness. It was as if the enemy had discovered a way to bypass her defenses, to exploit a weakness she had not yet identified, rushing through the heart of the tunnels and flooding them with their relentless numbers without slowing. The magnitude of the threat grew, and with it the embodiment of rage that had taken hold in her mind. The outskirts were no longer safe. The enemy was advancing, and if left unchecked, they would soon be at her doorstep.
It was the perfect moment to annihilate this enemy and to demonstrate why she was the most feared of all the Creations.
Like a virus rupturing forth from a cell, her swarm burst forth from the ground, launching themselves at the invading probes.
---
“There you are,” Helvlad muttered, a grim satisfaction coloring his voice as the trigger he had meticulously engineered finally yielded the result he sought. His armada had hit the nerve he'd been searching for, the exact response he knew would occur if pushed just far enough.
He watched as the signals flooded in, the Hive Mother's domain aflame with activity. The response was swift, just as he had predicted. But this was no ordinary defensive maneuver - it was an explosion of violence, a torrent of aggression that could only come from the being he had studied so thoroughly.
Fight or flight, the primal instincts of any creature. But with the Hive Mother, there was never a choice. There was no flight, no retreat in her nature. She was pure, unbridled fury—a force that would never back down, only strike with lethal precision.
Helvlad leaned back, his eye stalks fixed on the screens displaying the chaos unfolding in her domain. The war platforms he had painstakingly crafted were doing their work, pouring into the Hive Mother’s territory in an endless stream, provoking her to unleash the full might of her Swarm. This was the response he had been waiting for, the proof that his strategy was working.
He had known from the start that to defeat the Hive Mother, one didn’t simply outmaneuver her—you had to corner her, force her to bare her fangs, to reveal the depths of her ferocity. Only then could she be truly understood, her weaknesses exposed. And in that understanding, Helvlad saw the potential for victory, a way to turn her greatest strength into her ultimate downfall.
Helvlad began his assault with calculated restraint, allowing his armada to advance gradually, pouring an unending stream of bots deeper and deeper into the Hive Mother's territory. He let her believe that he was unprepared, that her swarm was surging forth from all directions, seemingly overwhelming his forces. It was a ruse, a tactical ploy to make her underestimate his true capabilities.
As the Hive Mother's swarm erupted in furious retaliation, Helvlad’s weapons appeared to flicker and evade the attacking swarm with uncanny precision. Each burst of aggression from her was met with an equally deft counter, his defenses shifting and adapting with a fluidity that made their actions seem futile. He played with her, toying with the swarm as he steadily encroached further into the heart of what she considered her domain.
“Time to turn up the aggression and make her lose control,” he muttered, his eyes gleaming with cold determination. His weapons sprang to life, intercepting and attaching to the swarm that dared to launch themselves through the air. He decapitated the drone warriors with ruthless efficiency, blocking their ability to regenerate and rejoin the fray, their headless bodies falling to the ground as his bots made off with the heads.
“Show me where your Hive Mother is,” he commanded, his voice a sharp edge of focus. His instruments drilled into tissue and attached to antenna, going to work on the captive drone heads—decapitated yet alive, their consciousness still linked to the Hive Mother. His weapons seized many of these heads, securing them and transforming them into living reference points. These captured drones still received signals, their minds becoming crucial nodes in a network that Helvlad used to triangulate the Hive Mother’s true location.
With each new signal, Helvlad’s plan crystallized further. The Hive Mother’s domain was no longer a mystery but a map unfolding before him, the intricate web of her territory revealing itself through the scattered fragments of her once-dominant swarm.
---
The Hive Mother watched with a growing sense of unease as the movements of her enemy unfolded with an unsettling efficiency. The machines seemed to outpace her swarm, their advance swift and deliberate, slipping through her defenses with alarming ease. It was an affront to her carefully maintained order, but it was the sudden intrusion into her network that overwhelmed an already seething fury within her.
She felt the disturbance—an invasive presence breaching the very core of her mental awareness, a direct attack on her ability to perceive and control her swarm. This was no mere invasion; it was a violation of her sanctum, the intimate space where she maintained absolute dominance over her creations. The enemy had not only intruded upon her domain but had reached into the deepest recesses of her consciousness where she held vigil over every movement, every heartbeat of her swarm.
Such an infringement was unforgivable. It was a declaration of war against her very essence, and it demanded a response of equal measure. The Hive Mother’s thoughts burned with a relentless resolve. She would unleash her most feared and deadly swarm strains—every strain she had ever conceived, every strain that had earned her the fearsome title of The Swarm of Death.
As she prepared to call upon her full arsenal, the air within her domain thickened with the anticipation of impending carnage. The hidden, lethal strains began to stir, responding to her call with a primal hunger for retribution. They were the ultimate expression of her wrath, a storm of destruction that would sweep through the invaders with an unrestrained fury.
The Hive Mother’s resolve was ironclad. The breach of her sanctuary had crossed a line that could not be undone. She would show this enemy the full extent of her power, and in doing so, reclaim the sanctity of her domain with a vengeance that would leave no room for doubt about her supremacy.