"Who's been bullying Brother? Little Bug will go and punch them!" As she spoke, the Hive Princess struck a boxer's pose and threw a mock uppercut.
"The hive-race," Zhao Chen said.
The Hive Princess stopped short and looked at him in some surprise.
"More precisely, a hive-race that Order controls," Zhao Chen explained.
Hearing that it was a hive-race Order controlled, anger showed in the Hive Princess's eyes.
Zhao Chen briefly laid out for her the matter of the two Hive Nests, the present state of the northern hive line, the dangers it faced, and so on.
"A Hive Nest the size of a star system?" The Hive Princess's eyes went wide.
"You have never seen hive-race construction like this?" Zhao Chen asked.
The Hive Princess shook her head. "No, never heard of such a thing. We do build a kind of hive-race causeway between bodies that are close together — like a very, very long elevator — and when it's done it looks a lot like a spider's web. But that's only ever between stars and moons that are close by. It could never come anywhere near covering a whole star system. And the whole idea of us hive-race is to live in harmony with a planet's nature, so we can keep going on and on and live on the planet forever. A Hive Nest the size of a star system breaks that rule, no doubt about it. And… there's no sense in why you'd even do it. It means nothing." At the last, a puzzled look came over her face.
"We have no time now to work out what it truly is. For now, our first problem is still dealing with the trouble on the border. And we must stop Order's designs on meddling in this universe," Zhao Chen said seriously.
The Hive Princess nodded hard. "If it's against Order, Little Bug will give it everything. And I'd love to take those bad buggies Order has bewitched and give them a new life! Brother, Little Bug will help Brother!"
Zhao Chen raised his hand, reaching without thinking to pat her head, then remembered that he was only a holographic projection just now, and drew his hand back.
"Little Bug, if you send your fleets over now, how long will it take?" Zhao Chen asked.
"Gathering the hive fleets, then going through the Star Gate… about a day, more or less. Because there are so many buggies." The Hive Princess counted it off on her fingers.
Come to think of it, he had not yet asked how many hive fleets she had now.
"Three million." The Hive Princess held up three fingers.
"Three million ships?" Zhao Chen's eyes went wide. "When I came before, there were only a million!"
It seemed he had touched on something that excited her.
She said happily, "That's all thanks to what Brother gave Little Bug to drink. That stuff is amazing. After drinking it a few times, Little Bug's power got a lot stronger. And that made the hive mothers under me breed their swarms much faster and much better. In just a short while, there were 3,000,000 ships in the hive fleets. Only it's a shame; I still haven't grown a T6 Hive Mothership."
At the mention of T6 Hive Motherships, the Hive Princess drooped a little.
By now she did have a good many more T5 Hive Motherships under her; they had reached a hundred-odd.
But T6 Hive Motherships, not a single one.
The great bulk of the rest were still T4, T3, and T2 Hive Motherships.
"It does not matter; 3,000,000 hive starships are enough," Zhao Chen said, well satisfied.
For top-tier starships, T6 interstellar warships, there were the Owl Dragon's own.
What Zhao Chen lacked now was, rather, interstellar warships in great numbers.
And for that, the 3,000,000 hive ships the Hive Princess could now provide were beyond doubt the best fit.
"Then get your hive fleets ready to move at once. I will have Lilith's side help you," Zhao Chen instructed at once.
"Yes!" Copying the Owl Dragon officers she had seen before, the Hive Princess gave Zhao Chen a military salute.
Zhao Chen could not help but laugh; then the questions from before came back to him.
Perhaps the Hive Princess could answer them for him.
"Little Bug. Among the Hive Motherships Order controls just now, we have run into some unusual hive-race combat units. Have you ever seen them before?" Zhao Chen went over for her the things that could interfere with communications, interfere with space, and deliver hive fleets over short distances.
The Hive Princess said at once, "The one Brother says interferes with communications should be the T5 Starlight Firefly."
The T5 Starlight Firefly.
Zhao Chen noted the name.
"The T5 Starlight Firefly is a T5-grade hive-race unit, but don't let the T5 fool you. It has no fighting power at all; it's a support type. What it mostly does is interfere with the communication channels in a target area. Before, when enemies invaded our homeland, we used these T5 Starlight Fireflies a lot too. But T5 Starlight Fireflies live very short lives; once they're woken up, they die off on their own after a while. And they're very hard to raise. They can be kept dormant, but they need a special dormancy environment. So even when we were at our strongest, we never kept very many Starlight Fireflies."
Having finished with that one, the Hive Princess went on to the next.
"As for the one that interferes with space, it's a support-type hive-race unit too, even rarer than the Starlight Firefly. We call it the T5 Dimension Ghost-Bug. Just like its name says, it's a thing like a ghost. The way it's born is very special too: it usually needs a place where great numbers of hive-race creatures have died, something like what you'd call a charnel pit. After Dimension Ghost-Bugs are born, they drift back and forth within a stretch of space. They aren't aggressive, but they're very hard to kill. They ignore every kind of physical attack, and if they're hit by energy weapons, they hide straight away in dimensional space, so destroying them is very hard."
At this, the Hive Princess's face began to scrunch up.
"As for the last one Brother mentioned, nothing like it has ever appeared in our hive-race history. But I once heard my mother say that our hive-race's sages had thought about developing a combat unit like that. Because long, long ago, back when we hive-race still lived on planets' surfaces, we had a ground bug called the 'tunnel-bug' that could dig a passage straight into the enemy's insides and launch a surprise attack, and it worked really well. But once it came to the age of interstellar war, those became very rare. Oh! Speaking of that, I went and studied those cosmic bug-nests that turned up in Brother's world. That cosmic bug-nest looks a lot like the kind of thing that theory would make. Only… much bigger, and spanning much further. And the one Brother just told me about, doesn't it sound a lot like a mini cosmic bug-nest?" The Hive Princess blinked at Zhao Chen.
A mini cosmic bug-nest.
For Zhao Chen it was like a sudden enlightenment.
The two were indeed very much alike!
And put that together with what the T5 Leviathan-Shaman-class Hive Mothership could do!
It was just as if they were all creations of a single tech tree, only at different levels of technology.
So… what formidable hive-race technology had these bugs brought out this time?