Chapter 3881 Fish Abattoir
The battle between the Swarmers and the Phasers turned into an immediate massacre!
Neither Ves nor Joshua were able to pull their attention away from the grand slaughter that they had purposefully engineered.
"All of that slaughter…" Venerable Joshua uttered as he eased the Everchanger into a gentle glide. "Did we do all of this, sir?"
"Yup." Ves grinned as he reveled at the unfolding slaughter. "It is impossible for two sides to stop this confrontation. Both sides believe that the other has targeted them. The Swarmers and the Phasers aren't friends to begin with so there is no chance for reconciliation at all. Both sides will fight until one of them has buckled!"
The two fish-whale subspecies fought according to the methods that best fit their conditions.
To the Phasers, that meant exercising their phasewater abilities without any restraint!
Thousands of light blue fish-whales converged upon the battle site and immediately stimulated the most important organs of their bodies.
What distinguished the Phaser fish-whales from the other fishes was that harnessing phasewater was baked into their genetic code!
Even the most ordinary Phaser fish-whale possessed considerable talent in utilizing phasewater for offensive and defensive purposes.
While that meant that they were incomparably weak if they failed to fill their bodies with enough phasewater, the upside was that the Phase Kingdom did not need to invest any effort into training or augmenting its soldiers.
This was different from the Evolvers whose bodies were more malleable than normal but did not possess any inherent abilities when they grew into maturity.
A single ordinary Phaser fish-whale was not that intimidating, actually. They were good at area attacks but fared poorly when bombarded from range or getting attacked up close.
However, when they began to group together, the Phasers became more and more formidable.
The reason for that was quite simple.
"Their spatial abilities are overlapping." Venerable Joshua observed. "The reason why they're so hard to deal with when there are so many of them is because they can combine their efforts!"
A typical spatial storm was nothing more than an attempt to shake the fabric of space.
A single Phaser fish-whale wasn't able to completely destabilize an area of space by itself. The phasewater and energy requirements were too great for a single creature.
Yet what if another comrade joined suit?
If the second Phaser performed the same technique as the first one, then the space that had grown slightly unstable became even more dangerous!
The first fish-whale lowered the threshold of destabilizing space, allowing the second one to push even further!
The best part of it was that this was a stackable phenomenon.
The damage that ten Phasers could inflict upon an area was qualitatively greater than what a single fish-whale could accomplish.
If the difference was already great with ten Phasers, what about a hundred Phasers? What about a thousand Phasers?
As the sole continent in the possession of the Phase Kingdom, a lot of phasewater-rich fish-whales were already in the area. The invasion of the Swarmers completely alarmed them to the point where they did not hesitate to bend and stretch the space above their heads until they formed a lethal blockade!
Even though the Phaser fish-whales had to spread out their attacks across a wider area in order to prevent the Swarmers from circling around, a huge stretch had literally become a fish grinder as Swarmer after Swarmer continued to dive headlong into the destabilized areas of space!
Shredded pieces of flesh and bone exploded from the forbidden space on a continuous basis as the Swarmers did not relent in their determination to brute force their way forward!
Ves and Joshua both turned queasy at the disturbing sight.
This was hardly their first contact with death and slaughter, but the scale and magnitude of the current collision was beyond proportion!
"I thought fighting against a meat mountain like the Titania was already bad enough. This… is worse." Venerable Joshua softly remarked as he witnessed the continuous decomposition of entire hordes of Swarmers. "Something like this would never be possible with humans. There's no way that mech pilots are willing to dive into certain death just to make their opponents tired."
Ves found the sight to be disturbing as well. Even if the white fish-whales were exclusively grown to serve as cannon fodder, the method the Swarmers used to break open the defenses of the Phase Kingdom was probably the stupidest one imaginable! The potential of so many bodies and so many lives were being squandered without ever having the chance to live for themselves.
The Hive King clearly did not show any empathy towards its footsoldiers. The elimination of thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of grunt fishes was not a serious loss in its eyes.
As long as the sacrifices of so many bodies allowed the Hive King to obtain an even greater advantage, then everything was worth it. Only the outcome mattered.
As for the happiness and wellbeing of the poor fish at the bottom? Their wants and needs were completely irrelevant in the Swarm Kingdom!
The lives of the grunt fishes could easily be replaced. The Swarm Kingdom only needed to invest a bit of resources and time to replace the losses that it had suffered today!
Since the white fish-whales weren't precious at all, the Hive King saw no need to take extra care into preserving their numbers.
To the aloof and powerful alien sovereign, its soldiers were literally resources that it could expend in order to achieve strategic goals!
Such a sight was a total nightmare to someone like Venerable Joshua.
Ves could already tell that the expert pilot had entered into a more contemplative if somber mood after seeing how an alien leader callously used up so many living individuals.
"Humans aren't so different from these Swarmer fish-whales as you think." He eventually said to Joshua. "Although our highest leaders aren't as obvious and direct about it as the Hive King, I can most certainly tell you that there are lots of humans that are willing to throw away the lives of their subordinates in order to get ahead. Why do you think the Vesia Kingdom was so eager to invade the Bright Republic over and over again? Why do you think the Hexadric Hegemony started a massive sector-wide war against the Friday Coalition despite the formidable strength of its opponent? Even the most optimistic warmongers could see that starting those wars will lead to the deaths of lots of good men and women, but that did not stop them from going forward."
"Good soldiers die while bad leaders get to live and enjoy all of the benefits." Joshua flatly stated.
Ves shrugged. "That's an oversimplification. In an ideal situation, both the grunts doing all of the fighting and the leaders who are in charge get to profit from their actions. Not every war is driven by greed or hatred."
"I think that still applies to most wars."
"Touché."
The two continued watching the ongoing battle. Although the Swarmers had already driven over 300,000 fish-whales to the spatial death zones erected over the Lake Continent, their efforts were not in vain!
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