Cataclysm: Undead Dragons and Zero Empire

Chapter 145 Activating Planets

Acid and laser collide, flesh and metal collide.

Both escort ships employed a swarm tactic, with the biological warships opening their massive jaws and biting down hard on the Purifier's warship. Sharp teeth tore through the alloy armor, injecting corrosive bodily fluids into the warship's interior, melting the entire warship from the inside out.

The Purifier's warships unleashed a barrage of fire from their close-in weapon systems, riddling the onrushing biological warships with bullets and vaporizing them one by one with their main cannons. Brilliant explosions erupted continuously in space, with metal debris and shattered biological tissues floating in the void, like a grand yet tragic dance of death.

After the Purifier's warships are destroyed, they execute a self-recycling process, with the metal wreckage being directly reforged into new combat units on the battlefield. Similarly, when the swarm's combat units are destroyed, they can evolve into new individuals even faster, and even devour their metal wreckage, fusing the metal into ions and adding them into their flesh and blood.

The battle between the two sides instantly intensified, and the Purifiers' fleet took advantage of the chaos on the vanguard battlefield to rush at full speed toward the gateway to human civilization.

At the heart of their logic, the swarms of bees have been fighting them in the sea of ​​stars for a long time, and the newly encountered human civilization is the primary target of this purification operation.

Just as the fleet was about to break out of the chaotic battlefield with saturation firepower, a violent spatial distortion suddenly appeared in the direction of another hyperspace channel.

A breathtakingly powerful life force swept out from the hyperspace channel as a planet with a diameter of over 15,000 kilometers entered the battlefield.

This is no ordinary planet; its entire surface is completely covered by a dark purple fungal carpet, as if the planet is wrapped in a viscous, living film.

Beneath the fungal carpet lies a crisscrossing network of biomass, resembling a spiderweb. This biomass forms a muscular carapace, beneath which blood vessels pulsate in unison with the planet's rhythm, delivering a thick, fluorescent, high-energy nutrient solution.

Beneath the surface lie countless giant hatching nests, resembling undulating mountain ranges or enormous, ever-opening abscesses.

Each hatchery contains biological warships and combat sub-units. As the hatchery opens and closes, brand-new biological warships take off and join the battlefield.

Numerous biological turrets, composed of muscle fibers, carapaces, and glands, resemble giant pythons writhing in space, with corrosive acid gleaming with blue electric light constantly accumulating deep within their muzzles.

Between the turrets, countless giant tentacles, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, extend from the planet's interior. The surface of these tentacles is covered with densely packed suckers and sharp teeth, and the ends of the tentacles have nodule-like protrusions, which are the launch ports of biological torpedoes.

These are the weapons sent by Sera, mobile fortresses of the Swarm Civilization that revitalize planets.

It is not life in essence, but a war planet fused and dominated by the swarm's mastermind. Sera implanted one of her mastermind sub-nests into the core of this planet, allowing the mastermind's neural cables to penetrate the entire planet's strata, merging with the entire planet and dominating those biological tissues.

This planet is the body of the mastermind, and the mastermind is the brain of this planet. Without an energy shield, the entire surface of the planet is covered with fungal carpet and shell, which are the most robust biological armor.

Those hatcheries are not fixed docks; they make full use of the mantle lava, and each nest moves underground, enough to avoid artillery fire.

The turrets weren't fixed either; together with those enormous tentacles, the planet resembled both a sea urchin rolling on the seabed and an abstract sun with all its spokes spread out, slowly rotating in space.

Like a war star descending from the sky, the skin of the activated planet exposed to the frigid space opened its gaping maw, as if countless eyes had appeared.

Countless projectiles carrying corrosive acid fueled by high-voltage bio-currents transformed into a spectacular meteor shower, tracing eerie blue trails across space before precisely striking the Purifiers' main fleet.

The acid projectile pierced through the fire defenses and struck a warship of the Purifier civilization. The outer energy shield reacted to the acid as if boiling water had been poured onto snow or acid rain had fallen on the grassland.

The shield instantly became fragile, corroded and thinned, like withered grass. Collapsing shield nodes appeared in a sporadic pattern and spread to other places.

High-strength alloy armor is no different from butter being cut by a hot knife in the face of this corrosive acid that Sera specifically developed to target the Purifier civilization.

The viscous acid seeped into the warship's interior through the breaches in the armor, corroding all metal in its path.

Streams of molten iron.

This acid evolved to not only melt metal, but its corrosive and polluting properties also meant that when the Purifiers tried to salvage the wreckage of warships, they found that the wreckage had been completely corroded by the acid, losing all structural strength and making it impossible to recast and reuse.

The Purifiers' fleet reacted instantly, turning their main cannons to target the living planet blocking the gateway to human territory, unleashing a barrage of attacks on it.

These cannon fires, powerful enough to destroy a fortress, struck the surface of the living planet like ripples spreading from raindrops in a muddy swamp.

The thick fungal carpet and bio-armor withstood all the attacks, and the damaged areas were repaired by the surge of biomass so quickly that the process was almost invisible.

The Purifier fleet dispatched a large number of carrier-based aircraft and escort ships using swarm tactics, and the tentacles on the activated planet, which had been swaying like seaweed, finally reacted to the approaching warships.

The tentacles, thicker than mountains, swung around, destroying the warships with the purest physical means, while the suction cups on the tentacles released powerful bio-currents the moment they approached the warships.

The sharp teeth on the edges of the suction cups snapped shut, crushing the warships. The explosions blasted holes in the tentacles, but the writhing flesh quickly regenerated, restoring everything to its original state.

Like an invertebrate hunting its prey, the tumor-like biological torpedoes at the ends of its tentacles resembled "fruits" bursting open after ripening, launching seeds out like raindrops.

These biological torpedoes are living organisms carrying highly corrosive spores. They skillfully evade the Purifier's close-in weaponry in space and explode upon impact with a warship.

The torpedo releases corrosive spores that spread like a cloud, attaching to metal surfaces and multiplying rapidly, turning these metal cans into petri dishes for bacteria.

The incubation nests of the activated planet continue to produce new biological warships and combat sub-units, like an inexhaustible arsenal, a behemoth with its jaws wide open waiting to devour flesh, blocking the way for the Purifier fleet and making it difficult for them to advance.

Humanity's frontline observers, watching the powerful, activated planet in space and the fleet battle between the swarm civilization and the purifier civilization, gained a deeper understanding of space warfare.

Human civilization's fleet did not stop either. After solving the problem of the electronic plague, the fleet built under Howard's insistence on shipbuilding also joined the battlefield, complementing the swarm's defenses.

The two civilizations, humans and bees, had no direct communication or tactical coordination on this battlefield. Yet, they acted like comrades-in-arms who had cooperated countless times, each fulfilling their duties and tacitly filling in the other's weaknesses, forming an unbreakable Great Wall of Steel.

This war has only just begun.

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