Ch.113113. The Great War

The Hive Mind, having torn apart the five Balbar gods with its tentacles, was leisurely digesting them while consuming them.

Throughout the Balbar planetary system, a massive war was raging between two forces.

The attacking Balbar Empire had mobilized 5 out of their 7 satellite-sized vessels—known as Attack Moons—solely to reclaim their ancestral motherworld, along with a total of 2,000 battleships measuring 20km each.

They had essentially thrown in every ship they had constructed by pouring all their resources and efforts without concern for the aftermath, and the Balbar species was not exempt from this madness of military production.

Most Balbar citizens without combat abilities had only their “psychic manifestation parts” preserved while control devices were implanted in them, turning them into power sources and operators for various psychic-mechanical soldiers and mechanical weapons.

Balbar soldiers, whose combat experience couldn’t be ignored, were spared from modifications that would erase their self-awareness, but they couldn’t avoid having their entire bodies—except for their brains and spinal cords—replaced with machinery.

The final military force consisted of 74.6 trillion mechanized citizens and approximately 790 billion cyborgized soldiers, with these semi-mechanical troops controlled by psychic-AIs directly created by the Balbar gods.

Meanwhile, the defending Hive Mind’s forces were inevitably meager in comparison.

Though they had fortified planets with space-reaching anti-air weapons and ultra-high-output psychic shield-field generators for planetary protection, as well as at least 100 billion monsters on each planet…

These were not fundamental countermeasures against invading forces, and the scale of their fleet that could serve as a countermeasure was only at a reasonable level.

It was woefully insufficient to stop the Balbar Empire’s forces, which had thrown in all their power after completely losing their minds. Thus, the Hive fleet, with its 20 interstellar Hive Ships as its main force, launched an all-out charge—to fight gloriously and be annihilated.

Their targets were the Attack Moons—the pinnacle of Balbar technology that had mined and mechanized satellites repeatedly until they transformed entire moons into machines, equipped with weapons befitting their size.

Each had 20 main cannons using Psychic Knights for planetary strikes, deployable defensive plasma fields from anywhere on their surface, and even 400 escort ships of 20km class each solely for protection.

Though these vessels were actively benchmarked from the monsters’ Doomsday-class Hive Ships, they had their limitations.

First, they were too large. While the Hive Mind could prevent approaches by embedding laser weapons evenly across its entire surface like a porcupine, the Attack Moons only had plasma fields for self-defense.

Therefore, when billions of Hive Ships targeted a single Attack Moon, performing space jumps to ram it, they had no choice but to allow hundreds of billions of monsters to enter the Attack Moon.

And the misfortune didn’t end there.

With a body length of 107km and a form that sparkled like cosmic space reflecting the Milky Way, providing a form of camouflage.

This named monster—known as the “Cosmic Dragon”—with an appearance resembling a fantasy dragon with three pairs of wings, invaded the battlefield with smaller Cosmic Dragons about 10km in length.

These ship-sized creatures, moving precisely to positions where Balbar vessels couldn’t attack for fear of friendly fire, were surrounded by psychic storms as they moved.

Psychic storms—energy torrents created when psychic energy spews from naturally occurring passages to the psychic dimension—were absolutely devastating to anything they touched.

Considering that compressed psychic energy weapons were commonly used as infantry weapons by alien species, a psychic storm was like a blender with thousands of energy blades spinning.

The “Cosmic Dragons,” deploying these troublesome storms around themselves and somehow riding the flow of the storms, neutralized one Attack Moon with just 90 individuals.

Though easily obscured by the psychic storms, each Cosmic Dragon was a strategic weapon-grade psychic user and a massive creature the size of a decent cruiser.

Even the non-adult 10km-class dragons could easily crush battleships with telekinesis, and their high-density psychic energy breath disintegrated matter at the particle level.

With this overwhelming offensive power, flexible maneuverability and evasion using psychic storms, and energy supplied from the storms…

An accident occurred where a Psychic Knight embedded in an Attack Moon’s main cannon exploded after being hit by a leader-class Cosmic Dragon’s breath, resulting in a magnificent explosion that shook heaven and earth, rendering the Attack Moon combat-ineffective.

Though not shattered to pieces, the Attack Moon—with its core power system and main cannons destroyed—became a floating hunk of metal, serving as a shield for the Cosmic Dragon group and allowing them to rampage further.

Meanwhile, strange phenomena were occurring on the remaining Balbar vessels.

With sudden dimensional rifts, powerful psychic flows would surge toward the flagship—the vessel containing the command center—and communications with the ship would frequently be cut off.

Of course, this was undoubtedly Seri’s doing, or more precisely, Seri aboard the Ironbreaker.

While flagship-class vessels typically had fields or coatings to block psychic interference and prevent enemy assault forces from teleporting inside, they couldn’t stop the Ironbreaker from piercing through space.

Upon entering, the Ironbreaker would transform into a mobile gun platform with about 10 flexible arms specialized for maneuvering in tight spaces—like Marvel’s Doctor Octopus—while Seri slaughtered everything in sight.

She would crush lower-level Balbar with telekinesis or collapse structures, and for skilled opponents immune to psychics, she would casually swing Anitheus to dismember them.

Having cut down countless powerful beings over thousands of years, Seri could control psychic flows with pure swordsmanship to create effects like something out of a shonen manga, making her exploits truly spectacular.

Despite the activities of these named monsters, the overall battlefield situation inevitably favored the Balbar Empire.

Orbital defense anti-air weapons and various shield generators were, ironically, powerless against the tactics primarily used by the Hive Mind—overwhelming with sheer numbers while accepting terrible losses.

As a result, more than half of the 7 terraformed Earth-like planets and 34 satellites had already been occupied by landing forces, and some satellites had been destroyed by Attack Moons.

Of course, “destroyed” doesn’t mean completely shattered.

Since the Attack Moons’ main cannons were psychic cannons that burned planetary surfaces, only the surfaces of planets or satellites had collapsed.

The maze-like underground facilities remained about half intact, requiring some effort even after occupation.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to withstand such overwhelming forces—too many for deployment in just one star system.

As planets were conquered one by one, and named monsters operating independently were gradually hunted down or withdrew from the battlefield…

CRASH!!!!!

Despite the near absence of air in space to transmit sound, almost everyone nearby heard something breaking, as a “crack” formed in “space.”

Like reinforced glass hit hard with a hammer, an enormous spatial rift formed around a certain “point,” visible even from the ground.

While spatial psychics existed, this was clearly an anomaly, causing psychic users who witnessed it to panic.

As fragments of broken space collapsed, a passage to a massive psychic dimension opened, spewing psychic energy, and simultaneously, “tentacles” appeared.

The “tentacles” resembled enormous purple flesh covered in flowing mucus.

The surface felt similar to a firm fruit jelly, but the issue was the size.

Moving at an unbelievable speed for its massive length—longer than an Attack Moon—the tentacle contacted a nearby Attack Moon and began to be absorbed into it.

This absorption, reminiscent of classic animation-cartoons, ended with the tentacle disappearing along with the spatial rift, but then came the problem.

The Attack Moon that had absorbed the tentacle, though certainly made only of metal and rock, began to writhe like a living organism—and slowly, its form began to change.