Violence against children and the weak is the basest of acts. When such acts are committed by one’s own kind for the sake of intimidation or sadistic pleasure, the nature of the crime becomes even more heinous.
A leopard or a lion hunting an antelope fawn follows biological instinct; devouring a member of one's own species who poses a potential threat can be summarized as the dictates of nature. But the scene before him truly trampled upon Sakdi’s bottom line.
He had no need to tolerate the irrational; he chose instead to crush it.
The entirety of Angon felt like a graveyard—simultaneously empty and crowded.
The enemy had done a thorough job. Aside from the male they had intentionally left behind, they had missed nothing that could be salvaged.
Conversely, some females had survived. They were hidden in the nooks and crannies of the ruins, only to be dragged out before long.
Each member of the Limb-species remaining in the Great Sacrificial Ground reacted differently. Those who laughed with joy did not laugh for long; their heads fell along with splashes of corrosive blood.
Those who cowered and begged for mercy were detained together, awaiting later interrogation.
The last vestige of procedural justice inherent to the Core Species felt, at a time like this, like a shackling curse.
In moments, the bloody water rose past their ankles.
This act served as a warning, welding the inviolable iron law into the collective consciousness of the swarm.
The larva requiring medical attention had already been sent away.
Just as the pitch-black, mutated female turned to issue the next command, a silent, standby Gray-wing suddenly let out a cry.
"The underground structure is changing!"
This insect was young, having only recently stabilized in his adult stage. Consequently, he possessed a certain reckless energy. While all other members held their breath in concentration, he abruptly broke the silence, buzzing his report on the spot.
A scanning model appeared on his information linker. The hollow zone originally located beneath them was shifting at a silent, rapid pace.
This phenomenon was extremely bizarre.
The hearing and sense of smell of high-ranking females were incredibly sharp; a collapse of this magnitude should have triggered tremors that would have alerted them in advance.
Yet the reality was that every member of the combat unit, Sakdi included, had sensed nothing.
Even the blood gathered in puddles remained undisturbed and rippleless.
"Evacuate!"
Instinct acted before reason could provide a warning. This beast-like sharpness had saved his life countless times. In this instant, a sense of extreme unease swept over Sakdi, causing him to abandon exploration without hesitation and retreat immediately.
"What about these surrendering insects awaiting processing..."
An oblivious subordinate expressed confusion, seeking instructions on the specific steps to take.
"Retreat immediately!"
In the 3D model displayed by the young Gray-wing who had sounded the alarm, the underground void was only an arm's length away from the swarm members. It was about to breach the surface; the distance between the two was shrinking constantly.
The Core Species had only glimpsed such a terrifying scenario in one type of record.
The Akashic Rift.
Products of the abyss ignore space and time. The overlapping tremors of their collapse are distinct from "vibrations" as humans perceive them; it is a quiet, almost gentle process of devouring.
First comes the surging tide, followed closely by the collapse itself.
They are difficult to detect in advance, resembling a soft tide that easily washes over the embankments of life, sweeping away everything it touches before decomposing it.
All firearms and modern industrial equipment were strictly prohibited in the mining districts of the energy planet Ja; the females could only dig by hand. This was simply because the instability of the rift itself dictated that it was fragile and brittle, prone to causing collapses. Even the starport and all production chains were located on the far side of the planet, far from the energy stone collection areas.
Humans were the same, still mining expensive stellar core energy in the most primitive of ways to this day.
Yet, as they had swept through just now, they had used full firepower, leveling nearly half the planet.
Three overlapping rifts were enough to turn the entire Kamlan star sector into a ghost realm. The Akashic Rift torn open by artificial means centuries ago had directly swallowed Fahrena and an entire capital planet.
This was a calamity more unfortunate than any natural disaster.
Sakdi grabbed the nearest few Gray-wings, hurling them toward the aircraft.
Once the overlapping tremors began, they were difficult to stop; countless historical precedents had proven this. The spreading of the tide was merely a precursor, far from the point where it would pull everything in the vicinity into its depths.
The next second, with Angon as the center, the ground caved in.
The exponential sources of pollution climbed steadily. The tide was moving from the center outward, spreading slowly like ripples.
Once any tangible or intangible object is observed, there is a probability it will be added to the list of usable assets. Krisha wanted to extract the remnant model of Fahrena from Kamlan; the Broad-wing sub-king used xenogeneic-polluted beasts as sires to breed larvae.
And the reason the Limb-species sub-king researched new types of pollution weapons... was because its entire Great Sacrificial Ground was built atop a carefully hidden Akashic Rift.
Sakdi understood the enemy's plan.
His scales were bursting open one by one.
This was the true reason behind all their maneuvers.
They had used the males and larvae as bargaining chips to lure the commander-in-chief of the Gray-wing fleet down to the surface. It wasn't merely for a simple venting of grievances or a show of force.
Whether it was Sakdi or Clark who came, as long as they stepped into Angon, they would inevitably be enraged by what they saw.
From the very beginning, the enemy had locked their attack target onto the leaders of the Gray-wing swarm, and they had meticulously prepared a "gift" sufficient to make them lose their sanity.
They wanted the high-and-mighty war maniac to go completely mad, falling into hysteria and rage, before simply pushing this invincible enemy into the abyss, letting him sink forever into the tide of pollution.
The Core Species were not the only ones who understood that sniping the head could turn the tide of a war.
Thus, the enemy had offered up such a massive number of the swarm's males and larvae as bait, even going so far as to leave behind a portion of their direct female units as camouflage, all just to bury the Gray-wing leader and his allies here forever.
It was a trap laid out in plain sight. Because it was executed with such savage decisiveness and at such a high cost, it had prevented anyone from reacting in time.
But the Limb-species' objective had clearly not been achieved in the perfect manner they had hoped for.
Because of his injuries and the persuasion of the humans, Clark had temporarily halted his conquest, rarely choosing to remain in space to wait.
The only one present on the scene was Sakdi.
Unlike the previous small-scale pollution, this collapse caught almost every insect off guard.
The few Gray-wings near the central area instantly fell into a viscous quagmire.
The invisible tide rapidly eroded every inch of the surface it touched, soaking into and clinging to the piled corpses.
Having experienced the battle that had previously injured Clark, all Gray-wing members carried small-scale devouring weapons at all times. They were roughly the same as what they had used on Kamlan, but the efficiency of those spreading filaments could not keep up with the speed of the crumbling collapse and the spreading pollution.
The brightly colored, thin tentacles withered in patches, consumed and partitioned before they could even compete for nutrients.
They had not anticipated this situation; the amount they carried was insufficient to deal with an outbreak of this scale.
The Gray-wings near the center were seized on the spot, unable to move an inch. A cold resistance clung to their bodies, tightly binding and restricting all possible movement.
Next, this initial chain reaction affected the perimeter. Every living thing—including plants—began to coil and entangle prey like mad. Black liquid dripped continuously, trailing wet marks behind.
The Zerg had devoured enough mixed genes to be highly adaptable; even if exposed to the tide, they would not suffer negative effects immediately.
However, a head-on encounter with a rift in a state of fragmentation was a completely different story.
"Have all units return to base!"
Grabbing several unlucky, dazed subordinates and shoving them toward a subordinate who had entered a deep state of mutation, Sakdi vibrated his wings and turned back, charging deeper to fish out the immobilized swarm members.
The human fear of the Akashic and the xenogeneic tide was practically bone-deep.
Now that Fahrena had returned to the sea of stars, no one could close those tiny fissures anymore; one could only isolate and stay far away from them.
When he was in Kamlan, the Core Species had not personally come into contact with the source of pollution.
That stuff was truly "dirtying to the hands." The instinct of caution had been well-preserved; even after moving into a brand-new body, he couldn't muster the enthusiasm to try it.
As it turned out, he was now diving headfirst into it for a freestyle swim.
The tide and pollutants swirled around him like flowing water, lingering for a moment.
It was a sensation difficult to describe.
Things that were inherently formless and colorless became as viscous as if they possessed physical substance. No matter how thin it was, it couldn't withstand such a high-density blowout.
He reached out to pull out several Gray-wings who were unable to move. Pulling them felt like wrestling with a bottomless mire—an exertion the Core Species had not expected.
When several "radishes" were pulled from the bottom of the pit, those gray scales were already stained with mottled black marks.
This was a sign of pollution.
Sakdi couldn't worry about anything else. The Zerg's resistance was strong enough, and their technology was advanced enough; as long as they could return to the battleship alive, there would always be a way to heal them.
"Go," he said.
No one knew exactly how much time would pass from the first signs of an overlapping tremor to the actual collapse. Staying any longer would surely result in the total annihilation of the force. It had been a long time since he felt the sensation of his head hanging by a thread while running for his life; it almost made him relive old dreams.
However, in the next second, a massive suction force yanked him downward.
Beneath his feet, the ground that had been supporting his weight shattered completely.
The entire upheaval happened too suddenly. The space fleet, which had been monitoring the surface conditions, was also caught off guard.
The swarm waiting in the distance monitored this irrational development. In an instant, alarms blared frantically, nearly shaking the entire bridge.
The survivors delivered earlier had been sent directly to the accompanying combat logistics ship for emergency rescue; no insect thought anything would go wrong.
The silver-gray female was currently repairing his wings. The process had been going on for a long time, but the results were hard to describe.
Until the shrill, long cry of the warning echoed through every vessel.
The tide was excessively cold, yet when it erupted, what appeared on the giant command light-screen was a distribution map of extremely magnificent colors.
It was as if a giant Styx jellyfish were gliding gracefully across the planet's surface, easily covering the original location of Angon, sending out ripples of water that spread outward ring by ring.
It also looked like a drifting aurora, the brilliant airglow showing new changes every second.
The sub-king, who was in the middle of treatment, sat up.
"Sa hasn't returned yet?"
It was an obvious fact, yet it was still posed as a question.
After receiving an affirmative answer, he looked at the screen and fell into silence.
***
Glossary
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