I Am The Swarm-Chapter 797: Shifting Tides
The anti-Ji alliance fractured, and the foreign races reformed into a new anti-Swarm alliance. Only Luo Wen understood that this new alliance was fundamentally different from the one that had come before. The new anti-Swarm alliance no longer harbored schemes, nor did it suffer from internal suspicion. They were far stronger than before.
A full-scale rout began. Besieged on two fronts, the Swarm forcefully carved out a path and withdrew from Ji territory, retreating toward the Inner-circle Alliance’s domain.
Thanks to the Inner-circle Alliance previously volunteering to take up a support role and handing over vast swathes of the battlefield to the Swarm, they had done a poor job sealing off the rear lines.
Though the Swarm army suffered heavy initial losses due to the pincer attack, once they regrouped, their well-structured combat formations began to show their strength.
The defensive chain formed by the Primordial bodies still retained decent mobility. The Puffer Cannonfish provided long-range firepower, and even the enormous Desolation-Class Motherships could perform basic operations like moving and firing at the same time. This gave the Swarm a fairly competent mobile combat capability.
In contrast, on the side of the new anti-Swarm alliance, the Inner-circle Alliance, now lacking Swarm defenses, left their own warships exposed to Swarm fire. Although their superiors had ordered them to block the Swarm retreat at all costs, it was clear that Lumina lacked sufficient control over the actual combatants. To preserve themselves, most of them opted to observe the retreating Swarm units from a distance.
Of course, some individuals rigidly obeyed orders and tried to stop the Swarm like moths to a flame—and naturally, the Swarm showed them no mercy.
On the Ji side, their Crystalline Barrier Network couldn’t be deployed while mobile, and their Battle Stars were relatively slow, leaving them in an awkward position in terms of mobility.
If they relied solely on warships to pursue, the Swarm’s troop numbers were still staggering. Without the restraint of Battle Stars, the Desolation-Class Motherships would inflict devastating blows on the chasing forces. After all, the Neutron Cannons they carried were a game-changing force.
As mentioned before, Luo Wen no longer cared much about the outcome of the war. What he truly desired was this pasture. As long as the pasture could flourish, it didn’t matter who managed it.
So, at the moment of the Inner-circle Alliance’s betrayal, Luo Wen’s first thought was simply to pull his forces back. He had no intention of entangling with the new anti-Swarm alliance any further.
The number of Swarm troops was simply too vast—just on the main front alone, there were nearly Eighty Billion Swarm units. Across the entire confrontation perimeter, the total number of Swarm units likely exceeded One Trillion.
With such an absurd number, it was impossible to throw them away meaningfully. Otherwise, if it helped the anti-Swarm alliance to recuperate faster, Luo Wen wouldn’t have minded showing weakness to reduce the Swarm’s presence.
But good intentions still required cooperation. Clearly, Lumina had no interest in cooperating with the Swarm’s plans.
Over more than two centuries of war, the Swarm had deeply embedded itself in both the Ji Race and the Inner-circle Alliance through various means. Moreover, due to the need to harvest Spiritual Entities, even though the transformation into Intelligent Entities was selective, body modification had no such limitations.
As a result, many members of the Ji and other races had unknowingly been converted into node-compatible bodies.
Initially, Luo Wen believed that Lumina’s goal was merely to control the leadership of the Ji Race and the Outer-ring Alliance, and then use them to dominate their subordinate institutions.
Even if it was about tightening control, that would only require seizing the governing chain. But Luo Wen discovered that Lumina’s nanite manipulation was extending into the civilian population.
Unless it was someone like the Swarm with special needs, controlling civilians was a waste of resources with little practical value. But since Lumina was doing it, there must be some benefit—otherwise, with Lumina’s intelligence, it wouldn’t be pursuing something so pointless.
Luo Wen speculated that perhaps Lumina was trying to create a virtual Divine Kingdom? After all, that kind of concept appeared often in film and television. Maybe Lumina was influenced by such stories and wanted to attempt it in real life.
Luo Wen didn’t particularly care what Lumina’s endgame was. What mattered to him was that this behavior clashed with his core interests.
Once transformed into node-compatible bodies, these individuals’ Spiritual Entities would only be harvested by Luo Wen after death. While he could initiate harvesting proactively, only a massive base population could maximize the pasture’s output. Proactive harvesting would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
The source of this c𝐨ntent is freeweɓnovēl.coɱ.
Despite years of development, the Swarm’s bases in the outer territories had already exceeded a thousand in number, but Luo Wen hadn’t found any signs of life among them.
Even if he terraformed planets and introduced relevant seed species, building a stable base like the one in the Genesis Galaxy would take untold years.
Therefore, as long as there was even a sliver of hope, Luo Wen wouldn’t engage in such short-sighted actions.
It seemed the war would have to continue. And though he couldn’t go all out due to certain reasons and unresolved mysteries, throwing out a few cards from his hand wouldn’t be a problem.
The Inner-circle Alliance’s sudden betrayal had already stunned many of the watching powers. But before they could even fully process the information, the battlefield shifted again.
The previously retreating Swarm units suddenly came to a halt and reformed their battle formations. Meanwhile, the Inner-circle Alliance fleet, which had been trailing the Swarm from a distance, suddenly accelerated and charged straight toward them.
As the onlookers struggled to make sense of what looked like suicidal behavior from the Inner-circle fleet, the Ji fleet trailing them suddenly opened fire—on the Inner-circle fleet.
The abrupt shift and lightning-fast change in allegiances left the bystanders speechless. All they could do was marvel at the sheer unpredictability of the situation.
No one knew what the Inner-circle Alliance was trying to pull. How could they betray the Swarm one day, only to run back into its arms a few days later? The only possible conclusion was that some unimaginable interest was involved.
But what could the Swarm possibly offer that would compel the Inner-circle Alliance’s upper ranks?
In truth, the Swarm had nothing to offer—because those leaders had already been pulled into Lumina’s virtual world, and their bodies were irreversibly taken over by nanomachines.
What the Swarm could do, however, was replace them.
The Swarm’s infiltration of the Inner-circle Alliance had long surpassed that of Lumina. Pulling off such replacements wasn’t particularly difficult. And so, in the blink of an eye, the management structure of the Inner-circle Alliance underwent a complete upheaval—entirely replaced from top to bottom.
As a result, new orders were transmitted to the front lines. The constant flip-flopping and contradictory commands pushed the frontline personnel to the brink of collapse. If not for the fact that the Swarm had quite a few of its own people embedded in those units, they might’ve outright walked off the job.
