“You talk a big game, but if you’re so great, why don’t you wipe out Hive Fleet Leviathan yourself?” Stung by Vane’s dressing down, one of the staff officers couldn’t hold back anymore.
His face flushed bright red as he snapped back.
“He’s right.
You claim to be our ancestor with zero proof, and the first thing you do is lecture us.” “We’ll believe you when you actually destroy the Leviathan Fleet.” The others quickly chimed in, and even Dhrost silently agreed.
If this guy was going to claim to be a forefather of humanity and talk that big, he needed to back it up with hard evidence.
“I was going to wipe them out even if you hadn’t asked,” Vane replied smoothly.
“Consider this a front-row seat for you disappointing descendants to witness the true might of humanity at its absolute peak.” To be fair, Vane had absolutely zero idea what humanity’s Golden Age of Technology actually looked like, but that wasn’t going to stop him from using it as a convenient excuse.
Besides, his crafting recipe list included absurd endgame items like Aetheric Phase Engines and literal black hole generators.
No matter how you sliced it, his tech tree was easily on par with those ancient tech-barbarians.
Seeing his absolute confidence, Dhrost and his men started second-guessing themselves.
Does he actually have a way to deal with the Leviathan Fleet?
The Cryptus Campaign was a massive military mobilization.
It included the system’s local defense forces, Cadian Shock Trooper regiments, Armored Divisions, Aeronautica Imperialis wings, and an entirely fully-crewed Imperial Navy fleet.
Between the frontline troops and logistical support, there were hundreds of millions of personnel and an uncountable amount of weapons and armor.
And Hive Fleet Leviathan had treated them all like a speed bump, rolling right over them.
The Imperial Navy was annihilated.
The defensive lines collapsed completely.
The ground forces suffered catastrophic casualties and were entirely cut off from one another.
Total annihilation was only a matter of time.
How could one man possibly deal with a Tyranid swarm of that magnitude?
“General!
The swarm is back!” A terrified guardsman sprinted over.
The Hive Mind was connected to every single Tyranid bio-form.
It perceived every minute shift on the battlefield the exact second it happened.
The Tyranid Warriors and Genestealers that the Iron Golems had slaughtered were a dedicated strike force explicitly dispatched to hunt down Dhrost.
The Hive Mind was not a mindless predator.
It knew General Dhrost was the supreme military commander of the Cryptus System.
Eliminating him would deal a devastating blow to the morale of the surviving human forces.
An Imperial army without morale was infinitely easier to slaughter, which meant fewer biomass losses for the swarm.
Vane’s interference had completely derailed its plan.
The Hive Mind immediately adapted to the new variable, deploying a significantly stronger force to completely eliminate all rogue elements.
A dense, skittering sea of Tyranids breached the horizon, aggressively swarming toward Vane and the others like a rapidly moving ocean of chitin.
“What do we do?” A staff officer looked to General Dhrost.
“We can’t fight a swarm this size.” “We need to evacuate immediately and find a new fallback position to wait for extraction from Helios Spaceport.” “General, make the call.” The rest of the men stared at the incoming swarm, their faces grim.
Before Dhrost could even issue an order, Vane spoke up.
“Kids these days, I swear.
Your forefather is standing right here, what are you panicking for?” “Can you actually deal with them?” Dhrost looked at Vane, a desperate glimmer of hope in his eyes.
The rest of the men turned to him, clinging to him like drowning men to a lifeline.
The Imperium of Man was already in the toilet; if they had to accept one more ancestor to survive, so be it, as long as he could fix the problem.
“If I couldn’t even swat these bugs, do you really think I’d be talking smack about wiping out the Leviathan Fleet?” Vane kept his hands clasped behind his back, staring up at the sky at his perfect forty-five-degree angle, practically oozing the aura of a grandmaster.
“Take notes, kids.
Today, your Forefather will teach you how to restore the glory of humanity.” As his words fell, a deafening shriek tore through the sky.
Heavy Iron Golems plummeted from the sky, slamming into the earth with bone-rattling thuds.
Every single golem was decked out in enchanted armor and armed with an enchanted weapon.
“Kill them all.
Leave nothing alive,” Vane ordered, pointing at the Tyranid swarm.
Over the past fifteen days, aside from building automated resource farms, he had specifically set up an automated Iron Golem assembly line.
In the game, having too many Iron Golems would tank your framerate, drop your TPS, and fry your CPU hotter than the girl next door after chugging a succubus potion.
But reality didn’t have a framerate limit, nor did it lag.
So, Vane had ruthlessly cranked out an army, stockpiling a massive reserve of Iron Golems.
Since they didn’t need to eat, he never had to worry about logistics.
He could literally just spawn them until the end of time.
The Iron Golems silently charged into the tide of bugs.
Their enchanted weapons were terrifyingly sharp, effortlessly cleaving through Tyranid chitin and violently tearing them limb from limb.
Wave after wave of Iron Golems were launched from the mobile fortress, crashing down like meteor strikes.
Their massive weight generated terrifying kinetic energy during their freefall, creating devastating shockwaves upon impact that instantly pulverized the surrounding Tyranids.
The second they landed, they seamlessly joined the slaughter.
The battlefield instantly escalated into a brutal meat grinder.
The Tyranids had no fear of death, but neither did the Iron Golems.
Every single golem was an absolute killing machine.
They swung their weapons with a frenzied rhythm, and within moments, they were standing ankle-deep in severed limbs and a horrifying amount of gore.
Yet, in the distance, the bugs just kept pouring in, their numbers swelling to a terrifying scale.
Clearly, the Hive Mind was attempting to bury Vane’s Iron Golem army under the sheer weight of absolute numbers.
That tactic might have worked against the Imperial Guard or any other conventional army in the galaxy.
But against Vane, it was utterly useless.
At his command, the automated assembly lines inside the fortress kicked into overdrive, dynamically scaling up production and constructing new manufacturing lines on the fly.
As the minutes ticked by, more and more Iron Golems flooded the battlefield.
“Hive Mind, your zerg rush isn’t going to work on me.
You’re bleeding biomass by the second, but my Iron Golems are infinite.” Watching the endless stream of golems dropping into the meat grinder, Vane couldn’t help but smirk, incredibly pleased with himself.
A mere Tyranid Hive Mind trying to flex on an aristocratic Minecraft player?
Know your place.
“Incoming Tyranid flyers!
They’re heading straight for the fortress!” someone screamed, pointing at the sky.
Dhrost looked up.
A dense swarm of black dots, furiously flapping their wings, was sweeping in from the east like a tidal wave of darkness, completely blotting out the sky as far as the eye could see.
The sheer, overwhelming scale of the incoming aerial swarm was enough to instil pure despair at a single glance.
“The Hive Mind figured out the fortress is the source.
Since it can’t break our ground lines, it’s going straight for the spawner to take it out first,” Dhrost immediately deduced the alien intelligence’s strategy.
Vane didn’t look worried at all.
Instead, a massive, excited grin spread across his face.
“Don’t sweat it.
So what if they can fly?
You really think I didn’t plan for that?” “Activate the Thousand-Machine Tower board wipe protocol.” “Today, I’m going to beat these damn bugs so hard they’ll finally learn that humanity isn’t something you can just push around.” The heavy grind of mechanical gears echoed from above the fortress.
Dhrost and his men turned to look, watching in awe as the cathedral and surrounding structures on the fortress’s surface rapidly folded away, exposing the hyper-complex machinery underneath.
Umbrella-shaped turret arrays ascended from below, completely replacing the previous architecture.
High-tech, mechanical forcefield blocks lit up in a sequenced chain, projecting a humongous, glowing blue defensive energy shield.
The Thousand-Machine Towers fully deployed.
Their massive barrels tracked the blackened sky, slowly charging up condensed particles of light before violently erupting.
They unleashed obscenely powerful energy beams that tore straight through the Tyranid aerial swarm.
Alongside the energy turrets, heavy gatling arrays and massive electromagnetic railguns also opened fire on the sky.
Vane had already stockpiled a mountain of ammunition for these turrets, and the automated factories inside the fortress were continuously churning out more by the second.
As the order to open fire was executed, a literal torrent of bullets formed iron serpents that violently thrashed through the air.
Artillery shells detonated across the sky, their blinding explosions flaring like short-lived, unnamed constellations.
Pierced and shredded, the lifeless bodies of the Tyranid flyers rained down on the earth with heavy, wet thuds.
As the battle raged on, the corpses on the ground began to pile up, layer upon layer, transforming the entire area into a hellish slaughterhouse.