He was the General of a thousand battles, he had waged wars more brutal than anything sapient minds could imagine, and he had died thousands of times in battle and the infirmary alike. The Ant-Termite General Collective or the Antmite General as he was sometimes known, was among the most successful and well-established Collectives in the Swarm. Once he had been two distinct Collectives set to battle against an ant hive and a termite hive respectively. In time the two Collectives had become one as their Sovereign gave them the responsibility of continuing the battle and conquering the remaining hives of the forest.
To an individual, the Collectives would be strange at the baseline level. A sort of ad hoc mind created by the excess mental capacity left in hundreds or thousands of tiny little Fragment minds that all together form a single intelligence would be difficult enough to grasp for the most open-minded of people. The General stretched that even further when one looked at how it had lost and replaced about 70% of its entire being over the course of that period.
War was brutal already, but the one waged by insects and apocalyptic entities created to conquer entire realities, well they were on a whole other level compared to most. Antmite had sent thousands of itself off to die in mere moments, all to win a single battle and that choice would be repeated many more times until it was hard for him to recognize himself. If Mar had felt inclined to share it, they could have remarked that he was a living example of the Ship of Theseus. Each bit of him being replaced truly was a separate shard of consciousness after all and in time he would truly be a different person as the original pieces fell to the side.
Unlike other Generals, he was his Soldiers, each and every piece of him was built up out of the army he commanded. Every minuscule insect and every Soldier and every Fungal Zombie were all an equal part of himself. With each loss and each conversion, something was lost and gained each time. Antmite could appreciate that and knew that he would once more be changed. The order had come down from the Swarm itself and he moved to obey as he had done once before.
War was coming. He was sent out to do battle against the enemies of the Sovereign Swarm and he obeyed without question. Which was why he and his forces marched out of Hor and left with the initial army. 4000 large Fungal Zombies, 50 Swarm Champions, 3000 Soldiers, 500 Workers, 10 Human Subjects, and the most important asset of all, 4 hives. A beehive, a wasp hive, an ant hive, and a termite hive. Each of them containing between 20000 to 50000 specimens respectively. While Antmite had come to incorporate and use non-insect-sized Units over the course of his duties, he still retained a fondness for the small soldiers he had been created to battle and later use for himself. It was not as large of a force as he would like, but for the initial assaults, it would more than suffice.
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The first true army of the Sovereign Swarm was on the march and Mariam marched alongside the few other Subjects who had volunteered. After having killed Henry in battle she had endured many torturous hours of having insects slowly eat her insides and having her body slowly crushed by pigs crushing her beneath them. It finally ended once she had given in and complied with being transformed into another Subject of the Sovereign Swarm.
But that had not been the end of her story, the Swarm had spent time on her after the conversion. Several days had gone into the project that her master had begun. Adapting her body into becoming an even more effective combatant than Henry had been, the Swarm had been able to transform Henry from a mediocre fighter into a terrifying warrior capable of matching skilled duelists with the blade. Mariam was much better and her unorthodox style of combat was more suited to be improved by the Sovereign than the traditional longsword fighting that Henry had brought to the table.
They had spent an entire day on her arms alone as the inscrutable god had worked to fully transform her into a living weapon. She could feel just how deep and invasive the changes to her form had been with each passing movement she made. Her sinew had become more elastic, her bones reinforced, her muscles made both larger and more efficient, her senses had been sharpened and expanded, and her body was now armored and built to cause real damage in battle.
She was unlike the other humans who marched alongside her as the army made its way towards the neighboring Barony. While the Swarm had claimed them, their bodies were mostly unchanged by the process. The group was walking with a sense of dejection hanging about them, while the Units marched in perfect unison the humans pottered about more than trying to match the precision with which the rest of the army moved.
Knowing that one was destined to die would do that to you. The Swarm had made it known that it wished to send some Subjects to fight alongside the Units and once the call had come down from the Hor Collective, the ones it had picked out couldn't resist it and with that, they marched out. None of the conscripted people spoke or even cried as they marched, none attempted to sabotage or desert the army, or just be willfully incompetent. The General would not let them do any of these things and each of them was now part of him.
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Mariam could feel his presence in her connecting fragment, and she felt him in all the others around her. The Ant-Termite General was everywhere in his army, and with that, it made petty displays and rebellion impossible. As such the closest to it that the Swarmsworn could come with was wandering dejectedly down the road while the mindless Units marched. The reason why they were dejected was obvious enough; they were all going to die. Even with the sizeable force that the Swarm had sent out they all instinctively knew that they were not meant to succeed. Dying was part of the plan and they had been selected for it.
Unlike the other humans that she walked with Mariam didn't let the prospect of dying keep her spirits low. She had been ready to die once, and that was before she was transformed. If the Swarm required her to die then she would die, but until then she would fight to live and enjoy each passing breath of life that she could.
She was disappointed when she realized that it would be a while yet before she got to actually fight.
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The Village of Tlair had seen the passing messengers that Heraclius had sent out along with the bands of refugees and "refugees" that had fled before the Swarm. But the village had not taken the threat seriously, or maybe they were simply too indecisive to make a decision before the enemy could arrive. Regardless of the intent or reason behind it the result ended up being the same. A village was caught off guard as a Swarm descended on it and the nearby hamlet like a crashing tidal wave.
Antmite General had a simple but effective process when handling the assaults. He sent out flies, wasps, bees, and other flying Fungal Zombies after all who fled and infected them. The settlements were assaulted but minimally damaged by a combined force of the Soldiers and the fiercest Fungal Zombies and Swarm Champions he had in his army. Specifically, the buildings were minimally damaged and all the life forms that could resist were taken down. No serious fighting actually took place on the account of the spore clouds combined with the massive numbers that he had at his disposal.
When the population of Tlair and the connected farms and hamlets were accounted for, he then ordered the Subjects to take a team of Workers and begin the process of looting the houses of anything that could be of value. It was best to leave the Subjects in charge of that part as it was difficult at best for a Unit to identify valuables. Books, letters, magical items, currencies, and other similar items would be looted and moved out of the way.
Once the Subjects were done then the Workers would begin demolishing every structure and converting what they could into Biomass or other relevant resources. Workers were also gathering all the infected humans and animals and herding/carrying them off to where they could go through the conversion process in relative safety. This would of course take time but the army had other things to do in the meantime as sapients were only one enemy that the Swarm was contending with.
Tlair became a temporary basecamp that Antmite used as the central gathering point, while he sent large portions of his forces out to scavenge for resources and pacify the local animal population. He of course also sent out birds and flying insects to scout ahead of where they were planning to go, but the brilliance of being in a Swarm was that you could do a lot of things at the same time.
A project he took a special interest in was sending Units to dig up and mass infect as many of the nearby insect hives as they could find. He was almost amused at the thought of how he had handled such foes in the past...if it was he who had done that. The first social bugs that the Swarm fought he challenged them to a fight on their terms, a massive underground battle with insects fighting insects. Why bother doing that, when you could send Fungal Zombie badgers to dig up their colonies and mass infect the entire population through rigorous uses of toxic spore clouds.
He took immense satisfaction in sensing the multitudes of insects being converted to loyal Units in the Swarm. Sadly, he could not bring the majority of the insects with him as they would be needed for logistical projects. They would still have a role in reinforcing and growing his troops, but not the premier one that he could have had made for them. It was funny how the weaknesses of the large creatures were tiny insects while the opposite held true for said insects.
These projects would keep a large bulk of his forces occupied, but they would be by no means the only thing that he did with them after the conquest of Tlair. After all that would be wasteful and if there was one thing he had learned from his multitude of wars with various social insects, then it was that waste was a terrible thing.
So, after only a day of stabilizing the Tlair area of the Barony then he sent out a vanguard of Soldiers and Fungal Zombies to nearest settlements to Tlair. Rapid expansion was the goal here after all and he would not have it said that he had failed the Sovereign in that regard.