Sacre-D: Reborn as the Swarm's Apex | Chapter 2 | The Core Strain's Instincts | Novela.app

The exploration of this strange playground did not last long before it quickly evolved into a battle royale. A new body always requires a breaking-in period. For instance, in the forty-seven years of Sakti’s previous life, no one had ever taught him how to keep a tail still. He crawled slowly along the pipes near the ceiling, approaching two figures that looked like Zerg. In an instant, the fine, black, alienated scales covering his skin perfectly masked his scent and heat signature. The two creatures below possessed such obvious physical characteristics of female worker bugs that it was impossible to mistake them for anything else. Imperfect mimicry, vestigial antennae and chelicerae that hadn't fully receded, and bulging compound eyes—two low-level genetic strains. Even among the bizarrely varied Zerg, they were considered bottom-tier. The Zerg had a habit of eating whatever they found. Their disregard for reproductive isolation meant their appearances were varied enough to cast a "Compendium of Universal Horrors." Constantly shifting their forms based on the environment during evolution was a racial talent and standard procedure. This race was not static; its social structure had undergone multiple rounds of transformation. It evolved from a single-core model to a system where low-to-mid-level bugs could reproduce freely in large numbers, and finally to a completely multi-core model. Once they had tasted the benefits of absorbing fresh genes, it was difficult to give up such a sweet deal. During the era of the Old Bug Kings, when the Broodmother held the primary responsibility for reproduction, the closer a strain was to the Broodmother’s core genes, the stronger its combat power and mimicry became. Even today, the direct-line female bugs belonging to the core genetic groups remained savage enough to easily tear through unenhanced human mechs or gnaw through a starship’s hull plating. Conversely, the lower the genetic grade of a worker bug, the harder it was for them to maintain stable mimicry. Their features were a contradictory pile of various mixed genes, making them look like a collection of stitched-together monstrosities. Decades of confrontation had allowed the core strains of the Zerg to stabilize in a humanoid form, with humans becoming part of their new evolutionary blueprint. If a core strain desired it, their outward appearance could be so similar to a human's that it was impossible to distinguish them with the naked eye. Humanity’s thorough understanding of Zerg anatomy was built upon countless slaughters and dissections; meanwhile, the Zerg’s increasingly perfect mimicry was built upon countless instances of consumption and parasitism. It sounded rather unfair—a bug only needed to move its little mouth and have a snack to acquire new genes, while humans had to fight tooth and nail to iterate their mechs over and over, and researchers in labs had to lose handfuls of hair staring at mountains of bug corpses. But understanding physiological structure was one thing; skillfully utilizing a new body was quite another. Right now, both instinct and experience were guiding Sakti on how to conceal his form and remain silent. However, just as he crawled directly above his targets, his damned tail flicked out of excitement. With a *bang*, it struck the metal pipe, producing a sound like someone striking a bronze gong. It was deafening. The two female worker bugs below instantly drew their weapons and pointed them toward the ceiling. Before the opposition could launch an attack, Sakti had already leaped down soundlessly. Fingers covered in fine black scales swiftly crushed one bug’s windpipe. Blood that wasn't particularly warm sprayed out like a fine mist, splashing across his face. The acidic blood carried a corrosiveness that humans feared, yet it was ineffective against the carapace of its own kind. The sweet scent enriched within the blood was far more potent than the impact of the pupal shell. The Zerg possessed tenacious vitality from adulthood down to the egg. When there was nothing to eat, they could survive on soil, wood, or even unrefined stellar core energy ore. By comparison, the body of one's own kind was practically a gourmet feast. He twisted the head off the broken neck. Even for the Zerg, with their staggering regenerative abilities, there was no way to resurrect on the spot after losing a head. As the other bug rushed forward, Sakti’s tail let out a *crack* at the same moment, snapping in a crisp arc like a whip. The hard stinger at the tip tore open the opponent’s chest. An insect’s heart was located in the center of the chest, though it shifted slightly up or down depending on the genetic strain. Instinct allowed his tail to slice through the opponent’s breastbone like a knife through butter, then hook upward, churning through all the organs along the way to eliminate any possibility of survival. Stunning reaction speed, leaping ability, attack power, and perception—these were the elements that constituted Sakti 2.0. This was undoubtedly a perfect body belonging to a core genetic strain. Sakti turned back. While the disemboweled wretch drew its final breath, he searched it from head to toe. There was no external bracelet, only an information connection device at the back of the neck. "This is a brand new model I've never seen before," he murmured, attempting to pull the device out of the body. It was like dragging out an intact spinal cord; the long neural connection tissue looked like some kind of arterial embolism. Just looking at it was nauseating. "Zerg aesthetics... always so trendy." Then, in the next second, before he could further study the oddly shaped connector, an alarm blared through the entire corridor. Sakti completed his looting at maximum speed, which included but was not limited to stripping the connection devices from the two corpses and disarming them of all weapons—two crude laser guns that perfectly matched the dilapidated style of the ship. He also pocketed a few energy stones. The shell-like clothes worn by the corpses were so filthy that Sakti would rather remain naked for the time being than put them on. He couldn't help but pace in place for a few steps. They were truly too poor. When he had fought his way through the Bug King’s nest, the ones facing the human troops head-on were almost all core genetic strains—not only were their offense and defense incredibly high, but they were also well-equipped. The Zerg’s primitive, savage social structure seemed jarringly out of place when compared to their high-tech tree. It was likely that some of the races they had plundered were already at a high technological level. This had once led humans to believe that the Zerg’s martial prowess and technology shone equally upon every corner of their empire. Yet now, the two laser weapons in Sakti’s hands were like fire-poking sticks from the old era, radiating an aura of being "better than nothing." Dilapidated equipment, the absolute suppression of low-level strains by a core strain—everything instantly filled him with confidence regarding the future of his ship-hijacking plan. Ignoring the high-pitched alarm that sounded like it was about to run out of breath, Sakti pushed open every cabin door in the corridor he passed. The grand exploration adventure came to an abrupt halt, replaced by a joyful battle royale. From behind, the silhouette of the core-strain female bug looked like a crazed villain from a movie. Every time he opened a door and saw a living female worker, if the other party showed even the slightest hint of aggression, he would charge forward and twist their head off. If the Zerg had a film industry, this would probably be recorded in cinematic history as the pinnacle of horror movies. Sakti couldn't help but smile, which only made him look more like a naked, unburdened bug-slaying maniac, splattered head to toe in pale pink blood. When he had a human body, he had killed bugs single-handedly without the aid of a mech or a Tower Ship, but it was undeniably difficult. Human neural reflection speeds and Zerg neural reflection speeds were not on the same level. Even the strongest human soldier would have to pay a great price to annihilate low or mid-level genetic strains, and they stood almost no chance against a core genetic strain. Any human who had jumped out of the shackles of their physical body to enjoy the thrill of "mowing the grass" would find it hard to refuse such pleasure. This joy lasted until he tore open a door that looked like a residential cabin, where it came to a screeching halt. The sealed cabin door let out a piercing screech of metal friction as it was dragged, then was ripped apart like a hamburger wrapper. In the nest directly facing the door—on a tattered bed—a bug raised its head. It was a light-colored bug. It was in an incomplete humanoid state. Small, pulsing respiratory slits could be seen below the ribs. Beneath the corners of its humanoid eyes was a second pair of eyes that looked far too non-human; they were closed into two thin lines, looking like two red tear streaks painted beneath the eyes. It was also naked, its color so pale it was nearly white, like a faint dusting of grime on a wall—an obvious genetic defect. Sakti sized the other party up. The white bug seemed frightened. As it curled up, one wing drooped while the other bore a jagged tear. It lacked the hard carapace and thick limbs common to female Zerg, and its aura held zero aggression. Its joints suffered from severe sprains and bruising, and its thin tail appeared to have a section broken off. Sweet pheromones flooded the room. This was an injured male bug. When the door was pushed open, the frail fellow on the bed visibly shuddered, looking at the intruder splattered in blood. Then, before Sakti could make any move to restrain or kill the bug, the creature fluttered its tattered wings in a fawning manner and slowly spread its limbs. Sakti: ??? He didn't fully understand the other party's meaning, but he was profoundly shocked, even pausing in place for a moment. His silence was clearly misinterpreted by the other side, as the white bug began to rub its wings together more vigorously, and its half-broken scaled tail began to wag slightly. Intuition told Sakti that nothing good was about to happen. So, before the other party could fully splay its limbs, he strode forward and forcefully hauled the creature out of its nest. The male bug let out a small, terrified shriek. As expected, it had misunderstood his intentions; its broken tail fearfully yet fawningly tried to press against and coil around Sakti’s scaled tail. It emitted a sweet, fragrant scent, softer than the aroma of blood. Its frail, wounded forelimbs were carefully raised, attempting to reach toward Sakti’s chest in a gesture of cringing supplication. It opened its body, timidly and submissively exposing the vital areas from its neck to its chest to the other's view. What a familiar posture. It appeared daily in textbooks regarding Zerg habits; most recruits would joke and make gagging noises when they reached this chapter. —He was being courted by a bug. And both he and the bug were in a state of "meeting with total honesty." Sakti thought that even for someone as unflappable as him, it was rare to feel such a slight wave of nausea. He forcibly suppressed the ensuing sense of collapse. Sakti’s abdominal cavity almost uncontrollably emitted a warning hiss as he forcibly pried the other’s clinging arms—forelimbs—away. This action unsurprisingly had the opposite effect, making the white male bug even more frantic. A look of despair even flickered across its face as it began to tremble neurotically in a stress response, yet it simultaneously pressed its body toward him with even more diligence, as if putting itself on display. More hidden wounds were exposed. Some looked like cuts, while others looked like bite marks. They weren't the playful nips shared between humans during flirtation, but large scars where flesh had been torn away; the marks of fine accessory teeth were clearly visible. Some wounds had scabbed over, while others were relatively fresh. They were layered one over another, spreading from the ankles and calves all the way to the hip joints, waist, abdomen, chest, and neck. Blood seeped from the split wounds. Bugs didn't just eat humans; they ate each other too. They certainly knew how to play rough. Sakti fell silent for a moment. He let go, throwing the other party back into the nest. Then, he roughly grabbed a tattered piece of fabric and wrapped the white bug up tight in three or four motions, leaving only its head exposed. He even tied a dead knot with the corners of the fabric. Between twisting the other's head off and asking questions first, he against his better judgment chose the latter. Just as he finished bundling the male bug into a cocoon, a rustling sound came from the cabin door. A squad of about ten semi-insectoid female worker bugs rushed in. Their antennae, covered in hardened carapaces, and their wings, which acted like circular saws, whipped up air currents, savage enough to grind an intruder to dust. Simultaneously, thermal weapon beams grazed Sakti’s head, burning a large hole directly into the bed. Cold and hot weapons were deployed at once; the room instantly erupted into chaos. In the next heartbeat, Sakti vanished from his spot. He leaped up, his limbs twisting into a bizarre shape. The ends of his arms had already transformed into black appendages. Like a beast, he scurried along the cabin walls and floor. Within a single breath, he broke their formation and plunged directly into the center of the enemy squad. His scaled tail, with its interlocking segments, blurred through the air. It instantly coiled around one female bug’s neck, tightening with enough force to snap a spine. As the enemy was flung away, a crisp crack of neck bones echoed. He snatched a sharp weapon from another female worker’s hand, then drove the dagger-like long spike into the base of the neck of the nearest enemy. He thrust it to the hilt, then churned it violently, slicing diagonally down through the shoulder and across the entire chest. The sound of breaking bones *cracked* all the way until the tip of the blade hooked the entire heart out of the chest cavity. The fervor and joy erupting in his blood eroded his reason. The Zerg’s combative instinct spread everywhere through the splashing blood, driving every creature in the room into a frenzy. Before reaching the stage of thermal weaponry, every bug could be seen as a powerful, independent biological weapon, possessing the ability to tear apart early human mechs with their bare hands. Sakti felt a power he had never experienced as a human. That power hammered against his heart, producing a rhythmic and rapid throb that carried a fanatical and intense bloodlust to every part of his body. Before experiencing the large-scale Zerg invasions, the greatest enemy humanity faced was the polluted Aberrants. During the reign of the White Emperor, almost all mechs and combat techniques developed by humans were aimed at isolating the pollution brought by the Aberrant tides. This also meant that after the Zerg appeared, the entire combat system had to be iterated and updated; the core of combat shifted from isolating pollution to enhancing mobility. The deeper the mental link, the higher the mech's adaptation. Red Taisui and Sakti’s mental link had maintained a high synchronization rate for years; the high-mobility combat exoskeletons were enough to compensate for the gap in physical strength and vitality between humans and Zerg. But it wasn't until he obtained the body of a female bug that Sakti truly experienced the enemy's perspective. The idea of a Zerg tearing a mech apart with bare hands became perfectly logical. Understand the enemy, become the enemy. The enemy is quite "fragrant." Alloy walls shattered like melting wax under the Zerg appendages. The hardened carapaces of the mutated female bugs, which humans needed external force to break, were easily torn apart by the whip-like scaled tail. Every cell was filled with violent emotions, both pathological and vigorous. When the distance became too close, thermal weapons were the first to be abandoned. Several female worker bugs surrounded him in a pincer formation, emitting intimidating hisses. It had to be said that when the Zerg swarmed, they were like ants in a colony—their division of labor was clear and their coordination seamless, as if they shared a single brain. But Sakti was best at breaking through encirclements. He directly tackled the strongest enemy, moving so fast he was a mere blur. He slammed the opponent into the floor with immense force—physically embedding them into the ground—and casually snapped off their antennae. Before he could even stand up, an attack from behind swept toward his head with the force of a gale, strong enough to deform his skull. He ducked to dodge the attack, grabbed the attacker’s forelimb, and used an over-the-shoulder throw to slam them hard onto the previous victim. He then drove the broken limb he held in his hand straight down through the chests of the two overlapping wretches. The complete encirclement was instantly torn open. His black-boned scaled tail *cracked* like a whip, lashing through the air like a cobra with its head held high, waiting for a chance to strike—proclaiming that the tail's owner was excited by the hunt. The hard stinger sliced through high-speed vibrating bug wings. A few small, mottled scars appeared on the tail, making this excitement seem even more pathological. The air was thick with the specific pheromones of female workers, made dense by their high battle intent. Five, four, three... As he silently counted the remaining enemies, he once again felt the sheer power of this body. A core genetic strain—high attack, high defense. Unlike humans, who required massive amounts of training and tempering to accumulate skill, the Zerg were born knowing how to hunt. After snapping a worker's hardened wing with his bare hands and using that half-wing to slice off the last enemy's thermal ray gun along with half its skull, Sakti stood in the middle of the room, which now resembled a messy slaughterhouse. He took two deep breaths, the respiratory slits at his waist slowly opening and closing due to his heightened emotions. He pulled his feet out of the sticky mess on the floor, then forcibly suppressed the fine tremors and fanatical excitement. Ten enemies had turned into an uncountable pile of fragments. From a purely numerical standpoint, it was a delightful "super double." Blood rushed to his head. His eyes, though he couldn't see them, had turned a beastly golden-brown, the pupils shrinking from near-circles into vertical needles. The suppression of low-level bugs by a high-ranking core strain was even more terrifying than he had imagined. His brain said *calm down*. But his tail had its own ideas, wagging back and forth like an excited puppy. When a small, thin wail sounded, the gaze Sakti turned toward it still carried lingering aggression. Being watched by such a gaze, the white male bug, huddled in a corner and unable to move, fell into a state of terrified madness. Its teeth chattered with a rhythmic clicking, and the hysterical scream squeezed from its throat was barely audible. Even though it was tightly bundled in soft fabric, the respiratory slits at its abdomen emitted a loud, rasping sound, like an old exhaust fan. Like a kitten being strangled by the neck, it could only emit a faint wail despite using all its strength. Sakti thought of the mute white cat in the Red Deer Palace. The human-habitable planet V217 had been destroyed in the war. It wasn't destroyed by a Zerg attack, but rather because the Federation Consul at the time had ordered the use of a Star-Swallowing weapon against the Reformists, which accidentally affected V217 on the periphery of the combat zone. This scandal was almost the fuse that caused the second split of the Human Federation. A white cat was the only surviving creature on V217. It had been taken away by Red Taisui, who had descended to V217 for post-disaster rescue work, and later moved into the Red Deer Palace following the Federation's split and the restoration of the Dynasty. The cat’s throat had been eroded by pollution during that disaster, and it had lost the ability to meow ever since. Every time, it would silently huddle by Sakti’s feet and rub against him. And this male bug, which was trembling so violently it couldn't make a sound, looked just like that white cat when it was first found—covered in injuries, terrified, and a complete mess. Sakti walked slowly to the nest and crouched down to look at the creature. His expressionless face combined with the dripping blood made him look like a perverted beast, as if he had just been dug out of some horror story. Zerg blood appeared pinker than human blood, like the color of raw brain matter mixed with a few stirs of fresh blood, carrying a slight acidic corrosiveness. The unlucky white male bug was gasping for air due to terror and the thick scent of pheromones. Rasping, choking sounds came from its throat and chest. Its limbs were motionless, twitching occasionally; it had almost entered a state of paralysis induced by extreme shock. It looked like it was going to die in the next second. *** **Glossary** Chinese | English | Notes/Explanation ---|---|--- 雌性工虫 | Female worker bug | Low-level Zerg responsible for labor and basic defense. 核心基因种 | Core genetic strain / Core strain | High-level Zerg with superior combat abilities and humanoid mimicry. 雄虫 | Male bug | In this setting, often physically weaker and used for reproduction/social roles. 信息素 | Pheromones | Chemical signals used by Zerg for communication, combat, and mating. 红鹿宫 | Red Deer Palace | Likely Sakti's former residence or a significant location in his past life. 吞星级武器 | Star-Swallowing weapon | A high-level weapon of mass destruction mentioned in the backstory.