Chapter 172: Hive Mind: By the Holy Codex Astartes!!! (Patreon)

Now, while Heydrich carried on with his great farming enterprise, a stretch of the galaxy lay silent somewhere else.

Countless Hive Fleets had gathered there. Even the swarms that had been locked in a brawl with the Ork Octarius Empire had come.

And it wasn't only this one sector. The same thing was happening in many other places across the galaxy.

As for the Great Devourer in the Warp, he was on edge, to say the least. After all, he had lost everything at the Battle of Baal.

Heydrich had used a special virus and Path energy to turn the whole swarm around. Then, with the Dark Angels and Blood Angels led by Heydrich launching a peerless Boarding Action, nothing was left of it at all.

Just as Heydrich had been baffled about why the Hive Mind was fighting him so desperately, the Hive Mind, or rather the Great Devourer, was just as bewildered about why his own creations had betrayed him.

So even now, a year or so later, he was still wondering how on earth to deal with the matter.

This kind of corruption was simply too terrifying. He had lived countless years and claimed to have seen everything, yet this he had truly never seen.

So the Great Devourer was extremely depressed. The situation was that he had no idea what had happened.

The unknown is the most frightening thing. Horus was sent into that temple precisely because a whole group of people didn't know what was going on. If Loken had known what the Four Heaps of Crap really were, he would have fought Abaddon the Despoiler to the death before letting Horus be taken in.

Heydrich felt the outcome wouldn't have changed, but to be honest, killing Horus outright back then would have been better than the state he ended up in. After all, if Horus had truly died, the Emperor could still have saved him. Once he was tied to the Four Gods, it became impossible to handle.

That was the situation now. The Great Devourer had no idea what had happened.

But soon, from the information he had gathered, or rather the information he had gained from devouring far too many humans, he reached a conclusion: Corruption.

The wicked Guilliman, or the Emperor, had corrupted his loyal subjects. To fight that corruption, the swarm had to do something. It couldn't allow Chaos corruption to spread.

Because according to human memories, once Chaos corruption spreads, entire armies fall in droves. That was terrifying.

In that case, the original plan had to change. First of all, large-scale operations were out. If a fleet got corrupted the way the swarm at Baal had, the whole lot would be wiped out in one go.

So he had to split up his Hive Fleets. But how to split them and how to change tactics was a headache for the Hive Mind, since they had always lived off one trick.

That trick was to crush everything with sheer numbers. They did get stuck from time to time, but that was rare, given the Imperium of Man's almost mystical speed of reinforcement.

Sure, there were cases where reinforcements arrived the day before the day before they left. But most of the time, by the time Imperium reinforcements showed up, all that remained was a bare, stripped planet.

So even though they took a beating at some important worlds, their odds had never been bad. They usually had better than an eighty percent chance of winning, and there had been no need to use anything else. The problem was that this defeat had been far too brutal.

And more than brutal, it was baffling. How badly had the Great Devourer lost? Badly enough that every swarm, inside the galaxy and outside it, had stopped moving.

They say the Emperor was shattered into countless pieces, but under normal circumstances the Great Devourer is even more fragmented than the Emperor. The Emperor's fragments merely look down on one another, even long to kill one another, but at least they don't actually come to blows.

The Great Devourer was different. When different Hive Fleets meet, they devour each other. You could call it gu-rearing, but it was surely a form of internal attrition too.

On top of that, the Tyranid swarm's nature is what it is. To recover experience, they must bring the corpses back. All of their information comes from genes. Against the kind of swarms common in other works, they could rely on sheer numbers for the first wave, but if one wave couldn't finish the enemy off, they would die too.

And if you compared them to the Swarm Disaster of Star Rail, they were pure trash.

After all, even among all the fictional works Heydrich knew, the Swarm Disaster was the most broken of the lot. Even Heydrich would turn and run without a second glance if he ran into it.

In theory, Propagation had already lost the concept of multiplication. Yet what remained of it was still enough to force the Glamoth Empire to resort to Propagation creations. And remember, that time they didn't even have the Starcrusher Swarm King, an Emanator, and it was still that terrifying.

But if they split their forces and stopped crushing the enemy with sheer numbers, the Hive Mind would be in real danger.

So he racked his brain, or rather searched through all of his memories, and then...

An entity called the Codex Astartes appeared in his mind.

It was so sacred and so precise that with only a little adaptation, he could put it to use.

That way, if some Hive Fleet were corrupted, he would only have to cut that Hive Fleet off.

So the Hive Fleets began to move quickly. First, they set up the priests that had been gestated earlier, using their own kind to resist corruption. Swarm priests of this kind were of Tyrant Guard rank.

Mind you, Tyrant Guards are the Tyranid counterpart to Terminators. Every dispersed Hive Fleet needed at least enough biomass to gestate a Tyrant.

Then over a hundred Tyrant Guards were required, followed by over nine hundred Tyranid Warriors for every operation.

These Warriors could keep evolving to suit the environment. Below them came the Termagants and Hormagaunts.

To keep these lowest-grade bugs from being easily corrupted, the Hive Fleet severed their link to the parts of the fleet that bred Warriors and above.

Only if these inherited Hormagaunts and Termagants couldn't hold out could they call on the fleets that gestated units above Warriors.

Only by splitting them up carefully could they avoid rapid corruption, so whatever happened, every Hive Fleet had a safety net.

Even the biomass was collected separately. The Hive Fleet had no idea why it had been corrupted, but it had guessed that most likely it had eaten something it shouldn't have.

Before long, the once-massive Hive Fleets had been broken into segment after segment. Hormagaunts and Termagants remained the mainstay, and their targets were still the great worlds. The special-purpose fleets, meanwhile, had to pick weak worlds as bases and feed there for a long time. Once they had eaten enough to bring their ranks back to full strength, they could stop.