150: Chapter 150 Stealing kills and incidentally eliminating two hundred queens

Just as dozens of heaven-reaching hurricanes forcibly gathered the descending Spore Pods within thousands of kilometers of the base into "Zerg Mountains" suspended in the air, the base's main gun array fired.

There was no warning, no charging indicator, and not even the harsh humming of energy accumulation typical before a conventional energy weapon fires. Chen Jingyi sat in the command hub, her expressionless face showing no ripples as she lightly tapped a virtual key.

Then, heaven and earth lost their color.

The thick beams of the Mega Particle Cannons were the first to tear through the air. They were loaded with a destructive torrent of neutron star matter converted by the Annihilation Engines. Each beam exceeded five hundred meters in diameter, a pure incandescent white, causing space itself to briefly warp under the energy as they passed.

Following closely behind was a volley from fifteen slightly thinner Genesis gamma-ray cannons. The golden beams were like spears of divine punishment, accurately piercing those Zerg Mountains built from Spore Pods.

The Mega Particle Cannon beams "flowed" through the cross-sections of the first mountain without resistance, like a hot knife through butter. That terrifying creation, made of countless stacked Spore Pods, began to disintegrate from the most basic particle level the moment it touched the beams.

The biomass armor of the Spore Pods sublimated directly into a stream of basic particles, and the Zerg units inside turned into ripples of void energy before they could even scream.

One second.

In just one second, the first Zerg mountain vanished. Not even a trace of ash remained.

The beams of the Genesis array displayed a different style of violent aesthetics. They accurately bored into the interior of the mountains, where the golden gamma rays repeatedly refracted, superimposed, and resonated within the confined space.

The energy intensity climbed exponentially, eventually exceeding the endurance limit of the Spore Pod shells. Consequently, those mountains began to glow from within, becoming brighter and brighter until they turned into small suns suspended in the air, then... they collapsed inward, turning into rapidly expanding clouds of energy.

The clusters of Spore Pods that Li Yuan had gathered by stacking Thundercloud Storm tens of thousands of times lasted less than five seconds before the base's main guns.

Five seconds later, the sky within three hundred kilometers of the base was as clean as a mirror that had just been washed.

Along with them, the Thundercloud Storm clouds that Li Yuan had worked so hard to maintain were also "washed" away—those thick, sun-blotting storm clouds vanished silently like pencil marks erased by an eraser as the Mega Particle Cannon beams swept through.

The sky revealed its original deep blue once more as sunlight spilled down. If not for the lingering pungent smell of ozone and charred Zerg in the air, one might have thought that the world-ending thunderstorm just now was merely an illusion.

The beams did not stop there.

After clearing the obstacles in near-ground space, the beams from the Mega Particle Cannons and the Genesis array continued to extend toward space. Like javelins thrown by gods, they pierced straight toward the battlefield higher up—where the Primarch clusters and the Queens Guard were locked in a tragic struggle.

Anserwe sensed danger zero point three seconds before the beams arrived.

It was the instinctive premonition of death felt by a battle-hardened warrior. The four pairs of insect wings on her back suddenly snapped shut, and her body forcibly shifted three hundred meters in a way that defied the laws of physics—not by flying, but through a short-range spatial blink.

The moment she completed her dodge, that five-hundred-meter-diameter stream of pure white light grazed past the left side of her body.

In that instant, Anserwe felt the breath of the Grim Reaper. Half of her body was severely damaged, and all neural perceptions were temporarily severed.

Her left arm, the left half of her torso, and three left wings had their surface bio-armor carbonized under the influence of the energy dissipating from the beam's edge. High-temperature ion flows licked at her wounds, making a "sizzling" burning sound.

If she hadn't concentrated all her psionic energy on her body's surface to form a temporary shield at the last moment, and if the beam had not merely grazed her but made direct contact, she would have been erased from the world by now, just like those Spore Pods.

The shaken Anserwe didn't even have time to check her injuries before she saw a scene that made her heart tremble with fear—

On the path of the beams, those members of the Queens Guard, Tyranid Warriors, and even the Gene Primordial Bodies themselves who were directly hit vaporized instantly without the slightest struggle.

Those in the peripheral areas were either heavily injured like her if they were lucky, or they struggled in agony for a few seconds under energy erosion before likewise turning into flying ash.

It was an indiscriminate slaughter.

The Mega Particle Cannon beams plowed a five-kilometer-wide corridor of death through the formations of the Gene Primordial Bodies and the Queens Guard.

Everything within the corridor—whether Zerg Queens, Tyranid Warriors, or the Gene Primordial Bodies of Holy Brilliance Purity—met destruction equally.

Immediately after, the beams of the Genesis array cut into the battlefield from different angles. Like surgical scalpels, they "excised" sections of the ongoing combat zones.

The units within those areas—whether Queens unleashing their ultimate moves, Tyranid Warrior squads in battle formation, or clusters of Gene Primordial Bodies resisting together—were all annihilated under the baptism of the golden gamma rays.

When the beams finally struck the Legion Shield jointly constructed by twelve leviathan motherships, creating ripples of pale purple energy before slowly dissipating, "voids" appeared across the battlefield.

Within a ten-kilometer radius centered on the paths of the beams, there was nothing.

No bodies, no wreckage, and even the space itself appeared "cleaner" than its surroundings—a result of the high-energy particle streams clearing out all free energy and microscopic dust in the area.

Anserwe hovered at the edge of this void, the intense pain from the left side of her body finally rushing in like a tide. But she couldn't care about the pain; her eyes reflected that absolute emptiness, and her mental network echoed with the final screams of the dying Queens and the cold, dead silence of the Tyranid Warriors. A bone-chilling cold spread from every one of her ganglia.

The Queens Guard, since the establishment of the Fourth Mother Nest, had dominated the sea of stars for thousands of years, participating in tens of thousands of battles large and small. They had faced the main fleets of humanity, the Holy Light Legion of angels, the Shadow Schemes of demons, and even the betrayals and sieges of other hives... but they had never suffered such heavy losses.

It wasn't in a decisive battle between equals, nor in a targeted decapitation strike, nor were they killed by a powerhouse of the same level.

Instead, they died from... artillery fire from a planetary surface that had come from nowhere and was treated as the aftereffects of clearing the field.

This way of dying was so frustrating it made her want to spit blood.

Of course, this absurd plot of "a powerhouse dying to an unknown AOE" was not an isolated case in the history of cosmic warfare.

She remembered historical records stating that three thousand years ago, a sixth-tier Cerebrate Lord of the Zerg, renowned for its cunning and survival abilities, was hit by a stray shell during a round of saturation fire from a human fleet. The shell hit the asteroid where it was hiding, blowing the entire asteroid into cosmic dust. That Cerebrate didn't even know who killed it until the very end.

History is always surprisingly similar.