Chapter 268: The Evolution Game (Patreon)

Cumbersome. Heavy. Slow. Unstoppable.

Such notions flickered through the gestalt mind of the Hive Mind, a consciousness vast beyond measure yet sharply focused on a single conflict.

Even though the Tyranid swarm understood that this was a war of attrition it could not win, to meet the enemy head-on upon the open plains would only hasten defeat.

The Iron Men, those cold, unfeeling machine-warriors, resembled many of the mechanical foes the Hive had devoured before. They were precise. Cold. Reliable. Always equipped with pre-programmed counters for new forms of attack.

But these Iron Men were more than that. More precise. Colder. Deadlier. And above all else, endlessly adaptable.

Because of their inorganic nature, they could employ battle tactics that would seem suicidal to any living creature. They could tear themselves apart, burn themselves, and still keep fighting, for them, such actions were merely calculated maneuvers.

Yet the Hive Mind sensed a flaw. Whoever controlled these Iron Men relied too heavily on their mechanical resilience. Their strength was also their weakness: mass, rigidity, and the absence of true instinctive flexibility.

With the analysis complete, the Hive Mind shifted its strategy.

A splinter of the swarm peeled away from the main body, using the terrain’s natural ridges and collapsed structures to begin a silent flanking maneuver.

Above, the winged bioforms, Gargoyles, Harpies, and other chitinous fliers that had countless times hurled themselves at the Iron Men to no avail, were given new orders. They would become the bait: to harass, distract, and draw fire.

At first, the new plan worked.

Twenty Hive Tyrants led hundreds of millions of lesser organisms in a sweeping assault on the enemy’s flank, a tidal surge of claws and flesh that struck before the Iron Men could react.

As before, the Iron Men did not panic. They did not break formation. They simply turned with machine precision, unleashing arcs of crackling lightning and jets of volatile gas, immolating friend and foe alike to neutralize the encroaching swarm.

They paid for it, though. At least a hundred thousand metallic bodies were torn apart before their self-termination protocols triggered. Only a cluster of data-streams escaped the battlefield, returning to the Leviathan to be rebuilt.

[Clever.]

The Primary Command Intelligence of the Iron Men admitted as much. Strategy was not its strong suit.

Since its activation aboard the Leviathan, it had only fought two true wars: once against the Plague-Infested Reanimates, and now, against the Tyranids.

There was little empirical combat data to draw upon.

But an artificial intelligence has its own ways of compensating.

[Accessing tactical archives.]

[Dataset category: The Battle for Cadia.]

[Data subset: Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed.]

[Data import confirmed.]

Vast torrents of strategic data flooded into the Primary Command Intelligence’s core processor.

It was as if a new brain had been grafted into it, the Command AI instantly became a tactical prodigy.

All of it was drawn from the Battle for Cadia, from the records of Lord Castellan Creed himself, master of the Astra Militarum, whose commands had once guided both Cadian and Talon regiments against impossible odds.

When Creed’s orders were executed in that war, the power armor of the Talon soldiers recorded every tactical pattern and response. The surviving data formed a perfect model of Creed’s strategic logic.

By integrating this model, the Iron Men’s Command AI effectively became a machine-born Creed, one that could simulate every possible Tyranid tactic and devise counters within three seconds.

Creed had never faced Tyranids, nor had he ever fought alongside Man Of Iron. But his predictive model could project how he might battle a swarm, and how a Hive Mind might attempt to outthink him.

Every conceivable Tyranid maneuver was simulated, analyzed, and nullified before it was even conceived.

Across the field, the Hive Mind watched as the Iron Men shifted formations in ways that seemed meaningless: ten thousand units redeployed four hundred kilometers to the west; another contingent disappeared beneath the sands.

When the Hive Mind attempted to spring its next evolution of tactics, it found every path blocked. Every formation change was a counter to a tactic it had not yet employed.

Every potential move had already been anticipated.

The war once again devolved into the most brutal, purest form of conflict, attrition.

The Tyranid swarm and the Iron Men were like two colossal predators locked in endless struggle, each blow mirrored by another. The outcome would not depend on skill, but on endurance, on which could persist longer.

For the first time, the Hive Mind felt something akin to despair.

Its opponent was a predator seemingly crafted to annihilate all organic life. The Iron Men left no biomass behind when destroyed and their very weapons vaporized any remains that might otherwise be reabsorbed by the swarm.

An anathema to the Tyranids. Predators for predators.

Previous enemies, though capable of surgical strikes and decapitation tactics, had been mortal. They had been difficult, but ultimately, finite. Given enough biomass, the swarm could always overwhelm them.

But here, against these deathless machines, that logic failed. Even when the Hive Mind had fought against the Necrons, those ancient necrodermis constructs could not replace their ranks as fast, nor adapt so swiftly.

Still, the Hive Mind did not submit to hopelessness. Though its tactics and biomass were constrained, evolution itself was beyond the enemy’s control.

Gathering the collective consciousness of all synaptic organisms again, the Hive Mind envisioned two evolutionary paths.

Path One: Adapt to the arc weapons of the Iron Men. Develop thicker, fully enclosing chitinous armor capable of grounding or diffusing electrical discharges.

But such adaptation came with risks, completely enclosed organisms could not perceive their surroundings. Though this was a lesser issue, Hive Tyrant Guards fought blind, guided by synaptic command, the greater problem was cost.

Evolving such dense armor required massive resource expenditure, and with resources already scarce, this could accelerate extinction if the enemy adapted to it.

Path Two: Abandon defense entirely. Evolve lighter, faster organisms, armed with bio-weapons that generated molecular disintegration fields capable of slicing through alloys as if they were flesh.

If defense was meaningless, then embrace offense. Even the toughest Tyranid carapace shattered under the Iron Men’s arc weapons; better to strike first and strike fast.

But this path carried even greater peril: if the lighter breeds failed to gain momentum quickly, they would be annihilated outright.

After brief contemplation, the Hive Mind made its decision. This was no longer a war for victory, but for data, for evolution itself.

Both paths would be tested.

The surface swarm left only enough creatures to delay the enemy. The rest retreated to the digestion pools, where the oceans of bio-slurry churned under alien skies.

There, new organisms were birthed, sleek, blade-limbed predators lacking chitinous protection but capable of rending the Iron Men’s bodies apart.

Meanwhile, the higher caste, Warriors, Tyrants, and more were adapted toward total chitin encasement, becoming towering bastions of living armor.

And considering the enemy’s metallic nature, the Hive Mind added a new adaptation: resource-gathering organisms capable of digesting and repurposing metal. Though insufficient to birth full bio-forms, the recovered alloys could reinforce chitin layers and carapace plating.

Thus, the swarm’s strategy shifted once more.

No longer would the Tyranids meet the Iron Men in the open. Instead, they burrowed, carving vast networks of tunnels beneath the plains, striking from below.

Every second gained before facing the Iron man Arc Weapons was a victory, a fraction of survival, and another step toward the next evolution.