I Am The Swarm-Chapter 818: Mountain of Flesh

Sarah and Lumina’s little two-person tour hadn’t taken much time. With the presence of Star Gates, travel time was drastically reduced.

And though the highest leaders of both sides had just shared what appeared to be a cordial encounter, the war between their civilizations never paused for a moment.

The Swarm’s Star Gate network had already been fully established. The vast army, which had long been assembled, now poured onto the battlefield, expanding the front-line Swarm forces by several multiples in an extremely short span of time.

For the Ji, already in a defensive position, this development only intensified the pressure. With few other options, they could only continue their migrations—again and again—relentlessly shrinking the already limited living space of the Ji people.

The Ji had become increasingly adept at employing super nanomachines. As long as a star system completed its evacuation, within a year or two, all matter within the system—except for the star itself—would be harvested. In terms of raw efficiency, they were even faster than the Swarm.

With war already in full swing, minor skirmishes were a daily occurrence—tens of thousands each day. Against this backdrop, the Swarm’s sudden all-out assault hardly seemed out of place.

Across a frontline nearly two thousand light-years long, over eight hundred billion Swarm units launched a simultaneous offensive. Facing an enemy force several times its size, the Ji had no choice but to rely on pre-established formations to mount a difficult defense.

However, such advantages wouldn’t last. The key components of the Swarm’s chain defense system—the mobile Primordial bodies—were now steadily arriving at the front.

Once these Primordials reached the frontlines and assumed defensive formations, the Swarm rapidly pulled the battle from a minor disadvantage back to equilibrium, and then began tipping the scales in their favor.

But as the defenders, the Ji enjoyed terrain advantages that extended far beyond formation setups. Their Battle Stars soon joined the fray as well.

Due to the contraction of their territory, the Ji’s Battle Stars were now denser and more numerous. Once thirty thousand of them entered the battlefield, the advantage swung back toward the Ji.

The Swarm’s Planetary War Bugs, due to their immense size, could not pass through the Star Gates and had to be created on-site. Given their planet-like mass, breeding such monstrosities wasn’t something that could be done in just a year or two.

In short, the Swarm’s Planetary War Bugs were still some distance from the frontlines.

But it no longer mattered. This was now a ten of mine versus one of yours situation. The Swarm was utterly indifferent to losses. All kinds of Swarm units hurled themselves at the Ji defense lines with suicidal abandon—only to be torn apart by the Ji’s intense firepower grids, as if simply throwing themselves to death.

Shattered limbs and strange fluids drifted through space, scattering in all directions. As the intensity of the war continued to escalate, these broken remnants accumulated in ever-growing mounds across the battlefield.

To both sides, any material could be converted into combat power. But as the defenders, the Ji could only watch greedily as these mountains of remains floated nearby, unreachable.

Most of the debris lay within the Ji’s firing range, so the Swarm couldn’t easily retrieve them either. But that didn’t matter to the Swarm—they didn’t need to drag the remnants back to some safe zone to reuse them.

These remains weren’t truly dead. Packed together, they held enough energy for new fission. Thus, a peculiar phenomenon emerged on the battlefield.

From the heaps of flesh and metal, thick cannon barrels began to rise, emerging from the blood-soaked mountains and firing relentlessly at the Ji lines. These barrels, lacking any mobility or defense, were quickly shattered by return fire—only for new ones to rise soon after.

Depending on the size of each mountain of remains, the number of barrels ranged from dozens to thousands, even tens of thousands. Regardless of the count, these unexpected firepoints placed enormous pressure on the Ji.

And destroying the mountains was no easy task. Swarm units constantly hurled themselves forward, feeding the heaps with more biomass, causing the mountains to grow even under sustained bombardment.

Some of them quickly expanded to sizes comparable to Planetary War Bugs. At such scale, normal artillery was all but useless.

Yet the mountains’ firepower scaled with size. Letting them grow unchecked was not an option. Left with no choice, the Ji had to keep redirecting more and more firepower to suppress them.

The price was steep: while they bombarded the meat mountains, other areas of the frontline weakened, plunging into crisis.

Fortunately, the Ji weren’t entirely helpless. From the start, nearby Battle Stars had been storing energy. Now, they were finally ready.

A beam of eerie green light burst forth from a fortress’s three-kilometer-diameter cannon, and although this thick ray seemed puny compared to the massive mountain of flesh, the effect was devastating.

It was a type of energy that deconstructed biological matter at the molecular level, developed specifically to target Swarm physiology. The portion of the meat mountain struck by the beam rapidly decayed, collapsing in on itself.

Even more terrifying was the chain-reaction effect of the beam.

The corrupted zone spread rapidly, engulfing the entire mountain. Within seconds, the mountain ceased firing. Even its body began to disintegrate.

Most of it turned to ash, unrecoverable. The rest broke into visible fragments. When some Primordial bodies passed through, the corruption infected them as well.

Despite their immense size, the Primordial bodies were instantly turned to ash.

The Swarm quickly realized something was wrong. The advancing swarm flow split like water around a reef. At the same time, Intelligent Entities descended remotely, using Space Octopuses to analyze the dangerous area.

The findings came fast: this terrifying energy was indeed extremely lethal to Swarm units and nearly impossible to evade. But there was good news too: it only spread via direct contact with flesh, and if it didn’t reach new biological material within a certain time frame, it would lose its potency.

In short, quarantine the region, and it would become safe again.

Further, based on its properties, the Intelligent Entities concluded that each shot of this weapon required an immense amount of energy. Even with a Battle Star’s power systems, it would take several days of full charge to fire another round.

Such massive consumption meant that miniaturizing the weapon was impossible. Otherwise, if standard Ji warships could equip this, the outcome of the war would be far less certain.