This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Storms_Wrath on 2025-06-30 02:32:35+00:00.
Waves of millions of aliens surged around Skira from multiple fronts. Armored hivemind avatars continually rained blows down on any Sprilnav that got close, allowing him to rip and tear into his foes with reckless abandon. Tanya's training was progressing quickly, and without her by his side, the Quadrants had taken the initiative to be bolder with their plans. Several counteroffensives had been planned, and this was only the second phase of the larger plan.
Since the hivemind itself was overwhelmed, and not even Phoebe's resources could bring its psychic energy to a high enough level to counter the number of threats, it had been decided that attacks were more suited for elite units. In some capacity, every super soldier was deployed, including various mental warfare specialists from the non-human species. The powerful champions were running forth, hivemind avatars by their side, carving dense furrows of broken limbs and clogging blood.
A battlefield of this scale, where untold millions fought at once, should have progressed in certain fashions. Oceans of blood, stone pulverized into sand, and rampant diseases. But in the sterility of the mindscape, there was little besides the raw violence. The only records of the carnage were the holes left by the fading bodies of the slain.
It wasn't easy. The hivemind and Brey had to help with evacuation efforts on several planets, where the mindscape battle had turned sour. Even with the increasing streams of ships arriving at the battlefront from Phoebe, there wasn't much she could do.
Skira was carving his way through many armies at a time. His drones fought as one, using any and all tactics to bring down the enemy as much as possible. The billions of deaths that stacked up every day were a rounding error, especially in real space.
There was quite a bit of political wrangling going on, as well. Skira had already been in meetings with various national leaders, and even those such as Izkrala, to plan potential defenses on-planet in case landings occurred. The Acuarfar Empires were uniquely weak to invasion due to their large spread compared to the single system species such as Humanity or the Knowers.
Skira felt a nuclear bomb erase a squad of elite drones, their personal shields overwhelmed instantly. Another possible base of the Initiative had gone up in smoke. He wanted to gnash his countless teeth, but he just forged on, keeping the other missions from faltering. With his focus so divided, he didn't notice the Elder at first.
But after the stealthy Sprilnav began digging into an inflated portion of his connective neural tissues, the Quadrants engaged. The Elder backed away, and Skira tried to crush her underneath his weight. Unfortunately, the Elder was too quick and vanished before the hivemind's avatars could reach her.
But the drones weren't his biggest concern. The Alliance had many populated worlds. The colonies were relatively small, but they often still had hundreds of thousands of people on them. Most had been evacuated before the Sprilnav invasion, but not all of them.
There were those who were out in the fields, those who were already in the influence zone of psychic suppressors. Brey couldn't handle all of it. Skira had already begun to find bodies. There were hundreds, probably thousands, who would just disappear. His drones ran as fast as they could, as far as they could. To him, it wasn't hard to imagine Tanya out there in one of those alien landscapes, stranded amidst rising swarms of enemies. The terror of the Sprilnav wasn't just that they would bomb a planet. No, they invaded as well, doing their very best to make the invasion personal.
He didn't understand it. He didn't know why the other Sprilnav didn't care, didn't put a stop to it. He knew there were at least a few good ones, those who had never carried the prejudice and xenophobia common among their peers. Skira had seen Nilnacrawla talking with people outside Penny's body, and he wondered if any other Elders still were willing to do the same.
Even now, Sprilnav hid on his planet. Those who were friendly to the Alliance but at risk due to the circumstances, compared to those who even lived under Kashaunta's dominion, were a tiny population. Why was there always so much death and conflict? Why did people always have to attack the Alliance and put its people at risk? Why, in a universe full of sentient concepts and beings that were essentially gods, was everything so terrible and evil?
His drones tore apart another group of soldiers. Many of them were obviously afraid. They screamed in alien languages, bleating and crying fearfully, carrying their rifles, straddling their tanks, and marching into cities that they had no claim to. He even spotted a few cloned species from the Alliance involved, some even speaking languages he understood. They cursed at him and shouted with rage, trying to drive their voices into his mind. The chorus that would have once terrified him, tormented him endlessly, tearing its way into his brain and memories forever, barely even caught his attention.
Their voices were the only things that could impact him. Their claws might destroy the drones, but there were always more. In a defensive war on the Alliance's own soil, he held no sympathies for the invaders. Well, he did his best not to. Behind him, behind the soldiers of the Alliance bravely stepping up to defend their homelands, even after the evacuation orders went out, was a home. Maybe not his home, not yet. He wasn't sure if the Alliance truly welcomed him as more than a tool for them. But they didn't send him forth to conquer alien peoples or try to enslave him, as many he had met and outlasted in the past did.
His teeming masses, which would normally bring fear to any with a military mind, instead inspired awe in them. He'd befriended many humans who'd taken his drones as pets, taking them to parks and feeding them with all kinds of meals. Skira had enjoyed quite a bit of human cuisine and culture from two different worlds, and he was given a warm welcome. They didn't expect anything from them. They got nothing from being nice to him, but they did it anyway.
And Tanya was even more lovely than all the rest. Skira knew that she cared and could feel it in her mind and her deepest thoughts when they communed. Maybe at first, it had been closer to a fascination, a thrill at the taboo of a romance with such an alien being.
He had thought she was just another face among the rest and been proven wrong. He had so many mouths and paws, so many eyes to watch the world. Skira remembered their first kiss and the 265 next ones. And the way she looked at him, her face framed by her scars, gleaming prosthetics that always caught the light, all of it was perfect.
It wasn't as simple to say that he was fighting against his enemies. He liked to think more that he was fighting for his allies. Tanya loved him the most, but there were many other humans that still did. And there were Acuarfar, Breyyanik, and Knowers, too. The coalition of different species, united only by common agreement, all were willing to take him in. His appreciation for their acceptance was a grand thing.
Now that he had a chance to protect them, to fight for something true and righteous, he would never give up. He'd built more breeding chambers, doing his best to offset the massive losses incurred by the fighting. When Elders or beings of their caliber appeared, Phoebe and the hivemind were there to battle them.
And when they could not be there, and mental attacks threatened Skira's outer neural networks, the Alliance was there to help. Even if no soldier was dumb enough to land on Venus without shields, he knew that if the invaders broke through the Alliance Defense Fleet guarding the entire system, they would come for him after killing everyone he knew and loved.
Skira's drones waded through the pulped corpses of their predecessors, interspersed with their foes. They shot shield-piercing bullets at the carriers dropping off bases outside the city shields, which were weakest at the base. He roared from trillions of throats, the noise enough to become a physical vibration that rattled the blood-soaked dirt of a thousand worlds.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Penny had nearly completed her investigation, with the scraps of information she could access, and now it was time for her to act. The Final Initiative might have some conceptual protections around it, but she was confident she could succeed in cracking them. She just needed more time and some help.
Attacking the concept of the Initiative wouldn't be possible until she could pin it down. Even saying the words only led her to thin snippets, which always burned up when she tried to push Cardinality through it to select the entirety, or even a small section, of the larger concept. Liberation and Revolution held no answers, and neither did Kashaunta or Exile.
But she suspected Kashaunta had already poured thousands of years of research into the problem, given the 'mysterious' report that ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1lnwf53/the_human_artificial_hivemind_part_607_old_wounds/