Chapter 7297: Voribug Siege Weapon "What the hell am I looking at?" Ves asked as he stood close to the center of a secure and darkened command center. "That... is the surprise that the Goliath Hive has in store for us." Lord Richard Brownstone grimly responded. "It is... a moon. An organic moon." The description sounded... apt. In the final days before the Goliath Hive would likely commence its final assault on Philaster Crestia III, an innumerable amount of bug swarms departed from their hidey holes in the outer system and converged in orbit of a planet that served as the bridgehead of the insect invasion. Nobody knew what the voribugs had in mind at first. They initially feared that the voribugs had chosen to launch an all-out assault at that point. Then they saw what actually happened. The cannon fodder bugs collided against each other. They mashed together until they turned into a 'meatball', and soon this meatball kept growing larger and larger over time. The meatball grew at an astonishing pace. It was initially the size of a sub-capital ship, but only took less than a minute to reach the volume of a large RF battleship. Then it kept growing and growing in size. Although the expansion rate of its radius gradually slowed down, its volume continually expanded at a prodigious rate. The long-range recording went into fast-forward. Hours passed by. The amalgamation of bug flesh continued to grow and expand until a brownish-black sphere started to take shape. Its size began to rival the small moons orbiting the remote planet! Not just Ves, but all of the other Rubarthan staff officers gathered in the command center looked horrified or aghast. Those who witnessed the emergence of this organic monstrosity looked like a ghost had appeared. Those who had learned about the formation of this anomalous organic construct or seen recordings at an early date all looked grim. No matter what, the Goliath Hive's latest move had completely smashed apart their projections and their battle plans. The meticulously planned tiered defensive layout that they had been working on during the past week only accounted for the presence of massed voribug swarms and dozens of Goliaths up to Level 7. It did not account for the formation of an organic moon that was steadily growing larger than all of the other moons in orbit! The atmosphere in the command center grew gloomier by the second. "There has been a new development since we last observed the formation of this... organic moon." The grandson of the Brownstone Prince announced. The recording continued to show the growth of the organic moon. The swarms of voribugs had petered out at this point. Many of them had already crashed into the colossal flesh construct and melted into its enormous embrace. Its growth rate had slowed down. It had absorbed so many bugs that much of the available cannon fodder in this part of the outer system no longer existed anymore. The Philaster Crestia System had become a lot less populated all of a sudden! Had the massive organic alien construct reached its zenith? No. The moon had yet to sate its appetite. Since its food no longer came to it on their own accord, the biomoon decided to satisfy its hunger on its own initiative! "What is it doing?" "The organic construct is... spawning millions of mutated voribugs of an unknown subspecies! No matches have been found in our database!" Small bugs emerged from holes spread across the surface of the entire globe. The freshly spawned voribugs did not appear to be strong. They did not linger at the orbiting biomoon, but immediately departed for the nearby planet. Soon enough, the lifeless world became infected by a growing number of voribugs. The creatures landed on the surface and began to burrow through the surface! The bugs disappeared from sight and eventually emerged aboveground with fatter and heavier bodies. These bugs had clearly devoured the planet's resources. They flew back to the orbiting biomoon with a full haul in their large stomachs! The amount of voribugs that engaged in this activity was difficult to count. However it was undeniable that all of this activity promoted the growth of the biomoon. While its volume did not appear to grow any further, it was most definitely becoming denser and more difficult to damage than before. The recording eventually came to a halt. "This is what has happened in the past few days. As of this moment, the organic moon is still siphoning tough and heavy materials from the terrestrial planet. It has apparently become a pickier eater as it is no longer absorbing low-quality materials. Our analysis tells us that there are multiple reasons behind this. If the biomoon's mass is too high, it becomes too slow and unwieldy to traverse across space." That news only provided a small amount of consolation. The fact of the matter was that the defenders of Philaster Crestia III still had to contend against an alien monstrosity that could rival the size of most moons and small planets! Sure, there were greater phase whales and ancient phase whales whose true bodies could also grow to this extent, but every red human was already accustomed to this reality. They did not expect for the mutated voribugs to be able to field units of this scale, especially so early in their racial development! Everyone had long formed the impression that he mutated voribugs almost entirely consisted of relatively small and weak ordnance fodder units. Even if the Goliath Hive turned out to be an outlier and liked to develop Goliath strains, their sizes remained reasonable. Pretty much every human had dismissed the possibility that the Devourer Queen or the Goliath Princess would choose to allocate so much biomass to a single organism that the appearance of the biomoon completely broke their expectations! Lord Richard Brownstone studied everyone's expression. He took in their confidence and their willingness to confront this new alien horror. What he saw disappointed him. The Rubarthans had tempered themselves in the war against the native aliens, but that did not necessarily mean that their tolerance for new and unusual surprises had reached a satisfactory standard. This was one of the shortcomings of Rubarthans and other citizens of powerful first-rate states. For a long time, first-raters had lived comfortable lives. Almost everything fell into their control, and it was difficult for them to suffer life-threatening setbacks on the battlefield. Due to the peace enforced by the Big Two, many conflicts between major powers ultimately devolved into rule- bound competitions. It had been centuries since the human race truly waged unrestricted warfare against unambiguously hostile foes. Though the Red War allowed the Rubarthans to shake off their rust and rouse their violent hearts, their mentalities had yet to reach their height. The humans who lived during the peak of the Age of Conquest would definitely feel ashamed if they could meet their bedraggled descendents of the current age! The Seven Apex Races had been anything but easy to defeat at the time. Humanity constantly walked across a tightrope as it had to balance between unrelenting aggression and strategic withdrawal. The human race learned many bloody lessons during its ascension in the old galaxy. As a scion of the Rubarthan Imperial Household, Lord Richard had grown up hearing stories about the legendary figures that boldly confronted the seemingly unbeatable alien empires that held a solid grip on the Milky Way for eons. He not only learned about the most glorious feats, but also the abject failures that took place during all of those exciting times. This knowledge gave him a higher perspective of the Rubarthan Pact's precarious state in the current day and age. While the newly reformed colonial star empire was definitely in dire straits, Lord Richard still believed in the strength of the human spirit. His distant ancestors had confronted many bizarre and powerful alien obstacles during the Age of Conquest, but they always managed to overcome them one way or another. The Rubarthans must not falter in front of this latest variable. Doing so would only feed the confidence of the mutated voribugs and encourage them to flood the frontlines with many more of their super bioconstructs! "Soldiers." Lord Richard spoke in a firm tone. "We, the defenders of the Philaster Crestia System, are privileged to become the first ones to encounter the latest 'superweapon' deployed by the mutated voribugs. On the surface, it appears our latest enemies intend to deploy their version of a battle moon in the next decisive battle. The Voribug Organic Battle Moon or VOBM in short will require the use of much more destructive weapons than we currently possess. We need to discuss the threat posed by this new alien bulwark and devise potential countermeasures that we can employ in a short amount of time." There was very little information that people could glean from this 'battle moon'. It was a completely new thing that did not possess any direct relation to the enemies they fought in the past. Perhaps if they dug far enough into humanity's history, they may be able to find a number of adversary races that used to employ similar extravagant bioconstructs. However, humanity during the Age of Conquest fought with considerably less restrictions than in the present. While the Rubarthan Pact technically no longer had to abide by the prohibition against the use of weapons of mass destruction, in practice the Rubarthans were still reluctant to deploy them right away. Even as the Red War continued to grow bloodier by the day, neither side had truly committed to resorting to nuclear weapons, antimatter weapons and other massively destructive attack methods. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢 Both sides still demonstrated a remarkable amount of restraint despite all of the growing animosity and resentment. No matter how much they hated each other, the humans and aliens did not want to devastate the entire Red Ocean. So long as they could afford it, the combatants preferred to keep their planets and territories as intact as possible. The same could not be said with the mutated voribugs. They engaged in much more egregious actions and did not hesitate to strip entire planets of their valuable resources. Yet despite the unscrupulous nature of the insect foes, many red humans still hoped that their new enemies would figure out the universal conventions of warfare and agree to the unspoken rules. The Rubarthans were actually split on the matter. There was one side that insisted that the voribugs were not civilized enough to engage in any meaningful diplomacy. It was best to eradicate them without reserve. The greatest and most horrible weapons must be used to rid the stars of this voracious race! There was another side that expressed more optimism towards the new race. The mutated voribugs had grown rapidly, so it was not far-fetched for them to gradually grow smarter and more intelligent. Even if true patience was reserved for the bugs at the top, they should at least be able to agree to a handful of common principles. However, the latter opinion never gained much traction in society. The mutated voribugs were simply too inhuman for people to believe that they engaged in any form of reasoning. Most people considered the mutated voribugs to be bioweapons that had long gone out of control. The appearance of the Voribug Organic Battle Moon was not a coincidence. Did the insects possess the 'design' of the VOBM from the start, or did the Goliath Princess personally invent it after learning about the Cybernetic Empire's war planets? Whatever the case, the Voribug Organic Battle Moon was bound to cause a lot of headaches among the Rubarthans, especially if these kinds of constructs started to show up elsewhere! "Yes." The Rubarthan mech designer abruptly turned towards the Larkinson. "Yes, Richard?" "We may need your strength and the strength of your Ascended Giants." A pause. "Uh... I am afraid you are overestimating their capabilities. Their capacity for mass destruction is not as great as that of a decent-sized warship." (More chapters in Buyers club for TMT)