"Arguing with you about this is completely pointless."
Looking at the brain-bug speaking on behalf of the mother-hive, Datch felt like he might be losing his mind.
He had actually tried to debate the meaning of gene preservation with a collective consciousness that saw devouring other races as a gift of immortality!
"Tell me where the Great Devourer's true body is, or I'll destroy it."
"The Great Devourer has no physical body." The brain-bug repeated the same words, its psychic pulses calm and slow.
"We are a gestalt consciousness. All mother-hives and swarms fuse together to form the Great Devourer."
"You cannot find a single Great Devourer, because it is the sum of every swarm. This is neither a secret nor a deception. It is simply the nature of the Tyranids."
"If you won't tell me, I'll find out the truth myself."
Datch stopped talking, raised the hand wearing the Infinity Gauntlet, and snapped his fingers.
The C'tan pals waiting behind him were already itching to move.
The snap released all the energy they had been holding back at once.
A terrible surge of energy exploded inside the mother-hive's central chamber.
Living-metal bodies wreathed in green energy carved straight paths through the countless swarms.
The C'tan unleashed destruction with every gesture, tearing apart the bugs in their way.
The endlessly writhing fleshy tubes and carapace barriers were ripped open, leaving gaping holes.
In a short time, they wiped out the swarm gathered around the brain-bug.
Countless structures of flesh, blood and biomass burned fiercely in a sea of fire.
The gene-culture pools once used to grow new warrior forms boiled dry in the heat.
The living nerve fibres clinging to the pool walls curled and scorched in the flames, giving off a pungent stench.
The brain-bug let out an ear-splitting psychic scream, and the dense web of nerve fibres covering its gigantic head blazed with dazzling light.
It gathered an unimaginable amount of psychic energy, enough to reduce a whole planet to ash in an instant.
But that energy never got the chance to be released.
A beam of destruction from the Void Dragon pierced it precisely from the top of its head to the depths of its core.
Its body shattered, scattering in scorched fragments across the ground.
With all resistance inside the hive eliminated, Datch passed through the slimy, slowly writhing organic tunnels into the heart of the hive.
There, a brain the size of a mountain was thrashing in agony.
It rose from a deep sea of protoplasm at the centre, its surface covered in a dense web of neural synapses.
This was the core memory store of the mother-hive.
Every race it had ever devoured, and all their memories, were permanently encoded in biomass on this brain's synaptic network.
Using the Mind Stone on the Infinity Gauntlet, Datch connected to the mountain-sized brain.
His consciousness was temporarily cut off from the material world and drawn into a mental realm filled with endless memories.
This realm was built from the leftover fragments of consciousness of the countless races the swarm had devoured.
With the timeline woven by the hive will as its framework, it formed a vast, intricate holographic space.
"I already told you. We are a gestalt swarm consciousness, and there is no such thing as a physical body. Why won't you believe it?"
A figure wrapped in light, its true form hidden, appeared before Datch.
It was the mother-hive's core brain manifesting in the mental realm.
Datch ignored it and used the Mind Stone to search the mother-hive's memories.
Strangely, it didn't stop him. It let Datch search, and now and then even filled in a missing detail or two.
It turned out the Great Devourer really had no physical form. Countless swarm organisms fused with the hives to form the so-called Great Devourer.
Its structure was somewhat like the Orks' gestalt.
The more of its scattered individuals gathered together, the more complete its consciousness became.
But unlike the Orks, the Great Devourer didn't need a WAAAGH! field to condense its consciousness.
Its gestalt hive structure was a far more advanced distributed computing network than anything the Orks had.
In this network, every mother-hive, every hive fleet and every swarm warrior was an independent computing node.
When enough nodes gathered, they formed the colossal predator.
"This is a problem."
After confirming the Great Devourer truly had no body, Datch frowned.
No centre meant tactics like decapitating the leadership were useless.
He could easily wipe out the Tyranid fleets on the front lines and lead the C'tan to burn every Tyranid hive scattered across space.
He could sweep away huge swarms as easily as stepping on ants.
But none of those victories would destroy the Great Devourer completely.
As long as a single hive fleet survived, or a single hive remained undiscovered, the Great Devourer wasn't gone.
"You see? I wasn't lying, was I?" The figure's tone was still calm.
"Destroying the mother-hive is meaningless. It only erases forever the precious legacy those races left behind."
"Their gene codes, their evolutionary histories, and every scrap of biological wisdom built up over countless generations were wiped from the swarm's memory nodes by your attack just now."
"They could have gone on living inside the swarm, immortal."
Datch said nothing, lost in thought.
He quickly went back over every memory of the mother-hive he had accessed.
Eventually he found what he was looking for: the planet where the Tyranids first arose.
"What exactly do you want?" The figure still sounded confused, unable to understand why the creature before it wouldn't give up.
"The Great Devourer has no physical body. Destroying our home world will change nothing. You'll find nothing there."
Datch stayed silent, withdrew from its mental realm, and returned his consciousness to his body in the material world.
Ignoring the mountainous brain, he used the Space Stone to open a deep-blue portal.
After recalling all his C'tan pals, Datch stepped through and arrived on a planet much like Earth.
Its star was a yellow dwarf, and the planet had a moon.
The distances between the planet and moon and between planet and sun created ideal conditions for life to arise and flourish.
It was practically a perfect copy of Earth.
Using the Time Stone to look into the past, he saw that this planet had once been covered in azure seas and lush forests too.
By now, however, the Tyranids had completely transformed it.
The surface was buried under a thick green fungal carpet several metres deep, the seas had dried up, and the air was filled with countless clouds of spores.
Primitive Tyranid organisms roamed the surface. Most of them lacked symbiotic weapons or plasma-spitting organs.
They were basically the most primitive Tyranid forms, with exoskeletons of pure biomass, simple limbs, and only the most basic instinct to absorb genes.
While exploring, Datch unexpectedly found an alien research facility deep underground.
The laboratory lay beneath the fungal carpet in ancient rock strata, its outer shell cast from a special alloy.
Even after thousands of years, it still gave off a faint silver-white glow.
Using the Time Stone to travel into the past, Datch managed to retrieve information on the origin of the Tyranids from the laboratory.
Modern Tyranids weren't simply the product of natural evolution.
The early Tyranids on their home world had only a loose gestalt-like collective consciousness and were far weaker than they were now.
They could absorb genes from other living things from the start, but their evolution was extremely slow.
Over long ages, they had developed only basic biological forms.
Then they were discovered by a religious civilisation with cutting-edge biotechnology, called the Ahai.
The Ahai built this laboratory deep underground and tried to turn the Tyranids into the perfect biological weapon:
a weapon that continuously absorbed its enemies' genetic advantages, endlessly evolved and replicated itself, and could ultimately overwhelm every known enemy in every battlefield environment.
Over long years of experiments, the Ahai repeatedly broke down and recombined the original Tyranids' gene sequences.
Their reproduction rate was artificially raised far beyond the limit of any natural organism.
Their innate collective consciousness, the gestalt consciousness, was reinforced with Ahai technology.
Under the twin pressures of survival and evolution, the Great Devourer was born.
What followed was exactly what every race that fancied itself a creator had wished for.
The modified Tyranids could rapidly absorb the gene codes and technical knowledge of other living things.
The Ahai also fused ancient relics excavated from the primordial Warp into the modified Tyranids, kept them in a constant state of hunger, and made them wage endless war to fill their bellies.
The Ahai soon used the modified Tyranids as weapons in wars against the surrounding xenos civilisations.
With astonishing evolutionary ability and overwhelming numbers, the Tyranids easily won.
With every victory, the swarm absorbed new gene sequences and technical knowledge.
Its warrior-forms grew ever more powerful, and its living bio-ships grew ever more advanced.
Their overall combat strength took a qualitative leap with every battle.
As their numbers grew, the Devourer's intelligence rose higher and higher.
They began analysing strategic situations on their own, optimising the swarm's gene designs and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their enemies.
In the end, the Great Devourer used its ability to freely recombine the swarm's genes to rewrite its own core gene sequence and break free of the Ahai's control programme.
By the time the Ahai had won every war and tried to destroy the Tyranids, they realised they had lost control.
The Great Devourer was extremely decisive and immediately began a war of extermination against the Ahai.
As expected, the Ahai lost and were devoured.
Driven by their own hunger, the Tyranids kept waging war on the outside world, seeking to devour every living thing in the universe.
"This is really annoying! These bugs are going to be a pain to deal with!"
After reading what the Ahai had left behind, Datch looked dejected, as if he really would have to fight his way through galaxy after galaxy.
"My lord, it may be premature, but I have a proposal."
What proposal?
Datch looked at the Void Dragon, wanting to know what it had in mind.
"When the swarm organisms gather, they become the true Great Devourer. This scattered collective consciousness is immune to decapitation tactics, but by the same token, its own defences are weaker."
"When different consciousnesses come into contact, they fuse. Just as when a Lictor reaches a hive fleet, it is absorbed by the fleet and becomes part of that vast will."
"What if we twist a Lictor's consciousness so that it swears loyalty to the Imperium of Man, and have it seize control of the hive fleet at the moment of fusion?"
The instant he heard this, Datch's eyes lit up.
That sounds interesting!
If the Tyranid swarm consciousness could be twisted to serve the Imperium of Man and then spread that change by fusing with other swarm consciousnesses, the entire Tyranid race could be enslaved.
Are NPCs this smart these days?
As Datch thought that, another thought suddenly drifted into his head.
Really smart. Are they really NPCs?
It all feels incredibly real!
Damn it, have I been time-travelling this whole time?!
Datch frowned and recalled the moment he first entered the game.
He had clearly picked Easy Mode, yet the enemies had been ridiculously strong. In the early game, beating enemies was supposed to be like beating chicks.
The forum had clearly said Easy Mode was for players who wanted to mow down enemies freely.
No special skills or techniques needed. Just go for it!
Once the idea surfaced, it took root firmly in Datch's heart, and he began going back over all kinds of details.
The more he looked back, the more uneasy he grew.
A virtual world that was too realistic, NPC emotions that were too realistic, story developments that were too realistic.
AI technology had advanced a great deal, but even with enough computing power, it was impossible for every single NPC to have human-like emotions.
Yet looking closely, from the lowest hive-dweller to the nobles of Terra, every one of them was as vivid as a real person.
"Damn it, am I actually stuck in the cesspit that is the Warhammer universe?!"
Thinking about it, Datch felt as if the sky had fallen.
But on second thought, things didn't seem so bad.
After all, he had already destroyed all four Chaos Gods.
In the entire universe, there was no one who could match him. He could manipulate timelines at will.
The cesspit's problems were almost solved.
"First I'll deal with the Tyranids, then try turning in the quest again to unlock the ending and see if I can leave the game."
"If that doesn't work, I'll assume I time-travelled and try to escape this universe and find a way back to my own."
I absolutely have to go back.
If this is a game, I definitely need to get back to the real world.
And if he really had crossed over into the Warhammer universe, he wanted to go back even more.
With all the power I've gained, I absolutely have to go back and show off.
Never mind those web-novel "war gods" who could summon a hundred thousand special-forces soldiers with one phone call.
If he went back, he could summon a hundred thousand original Astartes with one phone call, no question.
…