"Roya, you're already at death's door, and yet you still dare waste your focus on protecting those useless supplies?!"
Seeing the swarm held back by an invisible barrier, unable to immediately tear into the ten massive transport ships, the Silent King was not angered, but rather delighted.
For this proved that Roya was splitting his attention—foolishly expending himself to resist the furious assault of nearly fifty thousand hive beasts.
To the Silent King, this was the best possible news!
If expendable swarms could drain away vast reserves of Roya's psionic power, he could hardly ask for more.
But from the moment he unleashed the hive shadow, the Silent King had felt a distinct tremor in the psychic field—one belonging uniquely to the Hive will.
That realization sobered him. If this battle dragged on too long, if the hive shadow lingered unrecalled, then even without the Hive Will's direct attention, its instincts would detect that these three hive warships were engaged with a formidable foe.
And should the Hive Will's gaze fall here, it would soon discover that the Silent King had disobeyed orders.
Which meant he had to end this quickly.
Just then, a sudden disturbance rippled through the psionic field. What had moments before been a seamless web, stretched across the battlefield at no cost thanks to the swarm's nodal network, abruptly tore open, leaving a wide blank space.
"What's going on?!"
Startled, the Silent King hurriedly traced the feedback—only to discover that his strongest Cyclopean Behemoth had severed its psychic link!
There were only two possible explanations.
Either Roya had completely destroyed the beast.
Or—Roya had unraveled the swarm's operational pattern itself.
Both outcomes were beyond the Silent King's expectations.
"That one-eyed giant's combat power surpassed even my mightiest overlords. It felt no useless emotions, no hesitation—purely a machine of war! How could it be destroyed so quickly, leaving not even a trace behind?!"
"And if it wasn't destroyed, but rather erased from the psychic network… that's even worse! Doesn't that mean Roya has already seized upon the key to countering the swarm?!"
For a moment, the Silent King's composure faltered.
He still hadn't forgotten—nor recovered from—the last time he'd had Roya at a disadvantage, only to suffer a sudden, crushing defeat.
"Brain-bug units! Move in at once and replace the Cyclopean node! Reconnect that section of the psionic web!"
At his command, a rare formation of brain-bugs was launched from the hive battleships, plunging into the battlefield.
This squad consisted of one Brain-Bug, one Psi-Leech, and one Mind-Beast.
The Brain-Bug acted as the vital node to relay and stabilize the psychic link.
The Mind-Beast projected a local zone of hive shadow, shielding the squad.
The Psi-Leech drained life force from any nearby organism, funneling it into the Brain-Bug and Mind-Beast to mend their injuries and prevent them from overloading and burning out.
Meanwhile, Roya manipulated his psychic threads, dragging the now "offline" Cyclopean Behemoth into the nearest transport ship.
Having studied both the Necrons' structural framework and the Mythic Squad's psionic networks, Roya had all but instantly cracked the swarm's psionic linkage model.
With his threads of sense, he wove a barrier into the network, neatly isolating the Cyclopean Behemoth from the hive-wide psychic field.
Once cut off, the primal instinct that powered the creature's energy circuits immediately plummeted. Its activity collapsed, leaving it utterly inert.
This sight confirmed Roa's suspicion—the Silent King had somehow borrowed this swarm, but it was not truly his.
Though their architecture bore great similarity to that of the Necrons, the swarm still had essential differences.
The Silent King clearly did not understand this key distinction. As a result, he could not unleash the swarm's full potential, nor even maintain basic control.
That was why Roya could so easily dismantle the Cyclopean Behemoth, a node of critical importance.
"If this army were still in the hands of its true master, even with my current strength, I could still force that giant offline—but it would take at least ten times as long as it just did!"
"And in that time, a proper commander would react, deploying countermeasures against me—instead of standing there slack-jawed while I dismantle his forces unnoticed!"
A weight settled in Roya's heart. The Silent King himself was no longer a true threat—but whoever had supplied him with this hive army would surely become a grave enemy in the days to come.
"No need to keep unraveling the swarm's links. Leaving the network intact is a burden in itself—dragging down the Silent King's already feeble control."
Roya adjusted his strategy accordingly. And just then, the three living battleships belched forth a new trio of bizarre creatures.
Each one bore an enormous, swollen head.
Clearly, their internal energy conduits must be vastly reinforced, capable of channeling far greater power than ordinary swarm beasts.
Roya scarcely needed to probe them with his senses—he knew at once that these were psionic assault units.
Sure enough, the three clustered together, swiftly flying to a chosen point. The central monster's head swelled to more than double its size, and a powerful wave of psychic force radiated outward from it, spreading across the field.
The void in the hive's network, left by the fallen Behemoth, was neatly bridged once again.
"So it's just a wireless relay station?"
Roya chuckled coldly. At this point, the Silent King could only be described as a fool.
To command psionic reserves equal to three stellar cores, yet squander them on endless swarms that could never breach his defenses—had the man lost his mind?
Or perhaps… when his soul self-detonated last time, had his intelligence exploded along with it?
What Roya did not know was this: reborn within the body of an alien swarm beast, the Silent King's consciousness had been slowly and inexorably assimilated by the Hive Will.
Even he himself was unaware that many of his decisions were no longer his own, but the reflexive instincts of a true hive-lord—no longer the dread Necron King who once strode the galaxy.
Thus, almost from the very start, this battle had already begun to drift off course, without the Silent King even realizing it.