13: Chapter 13: The Zerg swarm used materials from the Empire's own bombing to create a monster capable of taking on a Titan single-handedly.

The pupa shell split open exactly at the forty-eighth hour.

The Brood Queen crawled out from the fissure, her newborn carapace shimmering with a perfect gray-purple metallic luster under the faint light of the creep. The penetrating wound on her right shoulder had completely healed, and the density of the new lattice structure was fifteen percent higher than the old carapace—this was a targeted optimization driven by battle damage data. The joint torque of her left forelimb had recovered to one hundred and two percent of pre-battle levels; this slight excess was a temporary overcompensation of the new tissue, which would self-calibrate back to standard values within forty-eight hours.

The Swarm of Drones conducted six full-body scans around the Brood Queen, recording the thickness of every carapace plate, the density of every muscle fiber, and the signal latency of every Hive Mind node into the genetic template library. This data set would become the evolutionary benchmark for the next generation of combat units.

The Overmind reviewed all the data and then issued the first expansion order after the battle.

"Brood Queen, hatch new unit. Codename: Ultralisk."

This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. During the forty-eight hours the Brood Queen spent recovering, the Overmind had dedicated all its computational resources to one project—analyzing the kill mechanism of the Grey Knights' power weapons and then designing a combat unit capable of withstanding this damage head-on.

The principle of power weapons was broken down into three kill stages: first, psychic fire disintegrates the target's energy shielding; second, a disruption field destroys the material structure; third, physical impact force crushes the target. A Zergling's carapace could withstand the physical penetration of a bolter, but it could not withstand a disruption field—that was destruction at the molecular level, and ordinary chitin was like a wall made of sand in front of it.

A new material was needed.

The Overmind's solution was hidden deep underground. The rock layers deep within that dead planet were rich in a rare mineral the Empire called "Adamantium"—the Empire used it to build the armor of Titans and cast the ramparts of fortresses. The Swarm's Drones on the planet had discovered three Adamantium veins while expanding the underground nest; the content was insufficient to support the Empire's industrial-scale mining, but it was enough for The Swarm to use the Adamantium of an entire planet to build one Ultralisk.

The bio-smelting process took a full twenty-four hours. The Drones crushed the collected Adamantium ore into micron-sized particles, mixed them with Zerg chitin-synthesizing enzymes, and fused them at high temperatures within a specialized bio-smelting sac. The temperature inside the sac was maintained steadily at twelve hundred degrees—the melting point of Adamantium. The molten Adamantium combined with the Zerg chitin at the molecular level, forming a brand-new composite material: Adamantium-chitin.

The pupa of the first Ultralisk began to form at the sixtieth hour. The volume of the pupa was six times that of the Brood Queen's pupa, occupying more than half of the underground cavern. The pupa wall was half a meter thick, the surface was rough and uneven, and the internal temperature exceeded two hundred degrees. The air in the entire cavern vibrated with the rhythm of the pupa's breathing—it was a low-frequency rumble that pressed against the chest cavity, as if another heart were beating deep within the earth's crust.

The Brood Queen personally monitored the development process of the Ultralisk. Her Hive Mind node maintained a constant connection with the Ultralisk's neural center, compressing the kill model of the Grey Knights' power halberd, the combat data of Justicar Byrne, and the Imperial heavy armor tactics recounted by Caroline Valen—all this information was compressed into a complete set of combat instincts and written directly into the Ultralisk's neural synapses. The Ultralisk did not need to learn. The moment it broke out of its cocoon, it carried the entire Swarm's complete understanding of Imperial heavy units.

This was The Swarm's way of crushing its enemies. The more you fought it, the more it understood you. The next time you encountered it, it would be a monster specifically designed for you.

At the sixty-seventh hour, the pupa shell began to crack. A forelimb, thick to the point of being unnatural, pierced through the pupa wall. The bone blades at the end of the forelimbs were not the sickle-shaped cutting weapons of the Zergling, but a pair of massive mono-molecular bone blades—each as long as a combat motorcycle, with an edge as thin as a single molecule. What did a mono-molecular blade mean? It meant it could cut through almost any material—not by force, not by energy, but by absolute thinness.

The second forelimb broke out of the pupa. Then came the head. The Ultralisk's head was a solid plate of Adamantium-chitin, with no eyes, only a dense array of sensors embedded directly inside the carapace. Its mouth was not used for eating—the Ultralisk did not need to eat—but for emitting a low-frequency sonic pulse capable of cracking concrete and shattering internal organs at close range.

When the full body of the Ultralisk stood up from the pupa, the entire underground cavern trembled beneath its feet. Standing on four legs, it was twelve meters long from head to tail, four and a half meters tall at the shoulder, and weighed over sixty tons. The Adamantium-chitin carapace did not reflect any luster under the faint light of the creep—that grayish-black carapace looked like solidified volcanic rock, rough, dull, and completely unremarkable. But its hardness reached the level of Imperial Titan armor, and its toughness far exceeded that of Titan armor. A Titan's carapace was hard, but the price of hardness was brittleness. Adamantium-chitin found a balanced curve between hardness and toughness—a combination of properties that artificial materials could not achieve.

The Overmind issued a brief command: Test.

The Ultralisk's first charge target was the rock wall of the underground nest. Its four limbs exerted force simultaneously, accelerating its sixty-ton body to forty kilometers per hour in one second. A gap with a diameter of eight meters was smashed into the rock wall; before the shattered rocks could even hit the ground, the Ultralisk had already passed through the gap, plowing a twenty-meter-long tunnel through the rock layer. Wherever the mono-molecular bone blades passed, the ore of the Adamantium vein was sliced through like butter, leaving behind cross-sections so smooth they could reflect images.

The second round of testing was for defensive capabilities. Zerglings and Hydralisks launched continuous attacks on the Ultralisk's carapace; bone blades slashed against the Adamantium-chitin, sending sparks flying, but the carapace did not budge; bone spine shots didn't even leave a white mark. The Brood Queen compared the test data with the kill model of the Grey Knights' power halberd and reached a conclusion: a Grey Knight's power halberd striking the Ultralisk's carapace would be equivalent to hacking at a tank with a kitchen knife.

"Formed. Awaiting battle."

The Overmind incorporated the Ultralisk into The Swarm's combat sequence. This was The Swarm's first super-heavy ground unit in the Warhammer universe, born specifically to destroy the Empire's heavy defense systems. It was not adept at dealing with agile light infantry, but the Empire's most prized heavy armor—the leman russ tank, Land Raiders, and even Knight-class Titans—were all just sardines waiting to be canned by the mono-molecular bone blades in front of the Ultralisk.

But this was not enough. One Ultralisk could tear apart an armored company, but the Empire had more than one armored company. The Overmind committed all remaining Adamantium vein reserves to the same task node—the embryos of the second, third, and fourth Ultralisks were taking shape, expected to complete incubation within the next two hundred hours. Each Ultralisk pupa was fine-tuned according to the complete combat data of the first one; charge angles, carapace ratios, and bone blade widths were all directionally calibrated according to the weaknesses of Imperial armored units.

The Empire did not know that deep underground, monsters designed specifically for their tanks were being mass-produced on an assembly line.

The Necron Node's active communication arrived at the seventy-second hour. This time it was not a short signal, but a complete data packet. The Brood Queen received it in the backup storage chamber, and decoding took less than three seconds. The communication efficiency of the Necrons was more than an order of magnitude higher than that of the Empire, with extremely high information density and zero redundancy.

"New variable. You have mined three Adamantium veins in the past seventy-two hours. Adamantium has only two uses: the Empire uses it to build armor, and you are clearly not the Empire. Therefore, you are building some kind of attack platform capable of slicing through heavy armor at the molecular level. Your bio-smelting technology combines the advantages of carbon-based life and silicon-based materials—this is a combination that has never appeared in the history of The Galaxy."

"The initial stage of my awakening sequence is complete. The tomb's main control system is charging. I have retained the full record of your battle with that psychic entity. The energy pattern it used matches the target you are currently studying. I possess further relevant data. If you can assist in repairing my Warp communication array, I can offer this data as payment."

The Overmind did not reply immediately after receiving the message. He maintained a precise judgment of the Necron's motives—it was not a matter of trust or distrust, but a matter of efficiency. The Necrons needed The Swarm to fix the antenna, and The Swarm needed the Necrons' psychic anti-data. This was a transaction. A transaction does not require trust, only that both parties believe the other is still useful.

"We can verify your data ourselves. Your antenna requires our help to be repaired. We will talk again after our ground reconnaissance confirms whether your judgment of Imperial psychic power is accurate."

The Brood Queen encoded the reply into a concise, formatted signal and sent it out. The green light deep within the Hive City Ruins shone for a moment, flickering faster than before, seemingly less calm than when it received the first reply.

A moment later, the second message arrived.

"Your resource collection efficiency is several orders of magnitude higher than I estimated. I am willing to add a signal of sincerity—the complete map of the fourth level beneath the Hive City Ruins. It is outside the scope of the Empire's database—in the deepest part of the map, there is an Adamantium-rich vein that has never been discovered by the Empire. The location coordinates are as follows."

The Brood Queen opened the coordinate file. The data on the vein showed that the reserves exceeded ten times the total amount of Adamantium The Swarm had mined so far.

The Overmind re-evaluated the value of the Necron Node. Ten times the scarce strategic mineral—enough to cause a qualitative change in the entire Ultralisk incubation project, and even support subsequent plans for even larger units. And the price The Swarm had to pay was just helping a ten-thousand-year-old machine that had overslept fix its antenna.

"Agreed. Cooperation confirmed. Send Drones to enter the fourth level."

The first batch of Drones had already turned within the Hive City Ruins and were crawling toward the depths of that black stone gate, which was older than the Empire's colonial history. Behind them, three hundred meters underground, the massive Ultralisk embryos were slowly rotating in the Adamantium molten liquid, like a dormant capital ship waiting for its first ignition and sea trial.