Chapter 678: The Hive Mind, You

Under the Hive Mind’s control, the invisible Lictor instantly lunged at Fabius Bael, not even stirring a ripple in the air.

The blade sliced through space, the scythe’s edge severing Fabius Bael’s neck.

The head of the Emperor’s Son’s chief alchemist, the creator of the New Humans, flew into the air, slammed against the ceiling, bounced back, and thudded onto the floor.

Fabius’s body seemed slow to react, staggered backward a step, then collapsed, blood gushing from his neck and staining the ground.

It was effortless.

The Lictor’s form materialized in the lab, allowing Fabius’s still-conscious head to see it.

The Tyranid raised its two massive scythe-claws high—an action unmistakably celebratory to any living thing.

Yes, this was certainly worth celebrating.

The blood the Hive Mind had craved.

It had sought one of the twenty gene-sequences within that blood, sacrificing immensely yet failing to obtain it.

Now, with just one Lictor, it had effortlessly acquired twenty equally potent gene-sequences.

How could it not celebrate this victory?

It would reshape and dissolve these twenty powerful gene-sequences to forge a new Node organism, one superior to all Tyranids, capable of housing the Hive Mind’s very essence, radiating and linking to every Tyranid beyond the distant stars, becoming the Node of Nodes, the Lighthouse of the Hive.

Filled with joy, it commanded the Lictor to seize the crimson blood hanging in midair—

CRACK!!

Fabius Bael’s headless corpse suddenly moved.

More precisely, the mechanical surgeon on Fabius Bael’s back moved.

One of the surgeon’s mechanical arms exploded open, a needle thrusting toward the Lictor.

Such an attack, relying on the Lictor’s neural reaction speed, should have been dodged.

But this Lictor had no will of its own—it was controlled by the Hive Mind across the Warp.

That slight delay became a fatal flaw.

The needle pierced the Lictor’s skin; its 3D-networked foamed skin was indeed light, soft, sound-absorbing, and odor-absorbing—but utterly inferior in defense to normal Tyranid skin.

The Nuceria anesthetic flooded its body, spreading rapidly through the 3D-networked foam like a sponge soaking up water, even seeping almost unimpeded into the Lictor’s hollow bone structure; this lightweight design, copied from the Tau gene-sequence, only helped the anesthetic flow into every corner of its body.

Yet the Tyranid’s own powerful immune system still functioned—its glands began secreting various hormones to counteract the anesthetic’s effects.

But this anesthetic’s composition was utterly unknown to the Tyranid Swarm; no record of it existed in the Swarm’s memory bank. For a moment, the Lictor’s glands could not produce any counter-hormones.

In truth, even Fabius Bael himself could not fully decipher the exact composition of the Nuceria anesthetic—he only vaguely sensed it contained some Warp technology, possibly from the Golden Age, designed to capture colossal semi-Warp, semi-reality beings like the Void Whales. Theoretically, this anesthetic was exceptionally effective against Primarchs, perhaps because Primarchs themselves were hybrids of Warp and reality—though most Primarchs possessed innate drug immunity and were not easily sedated.

This Lictor, however, was effectively a hybrid of a Tyranid war-beast body and the Hive Mind’s Warp essence—and the anesthetic triggered a targeted effect, making the Hive Mind feel layers of membrane forming between itself and the Lictor, drastically weakening its control.

The Lictor stumbled backward, then—CRACK—it stiffened and collapsed to the floor.

But the Lictor was not fully incapacitated; its immune system was rapidly breaking down the anesthetic, and the Hive Mind was swiftly reclaiming control of the Tyranid.

It was numb, yes—but only slightly, only for a moment.

Yet a moment was enough. The lab door was torn open by golden claws; Melusine let out a banshee shriek, swirling in silver gauze like a hurricane as she surged toward the Lictor.

Her claws pierced the Lictor’s brain matter, then her fingers clenched violently, crushing its skull into fragments.

The Tyranid war-beast, meticulously engineered by the Hive Mind and the Norn Queen, lay dead on the floor.

“Why so violent?” Fabius Bael stepped out from behind the door, smiling. He glanced at his own corpse on the ground and gestured for his slaves to remove it.

“I’m not really dead,” he said.

Like Belisarius Cawl, Fabius Bael had long abandoned the limitations of a single body, becoming a near-gestalt consciousness.

When one body died, Fabius Bael’s will would project through a bone-prism into another, achieving revival.

The Lictor had killed only one of his many bodies.

In the Warp, Moonwatch Terrace, Gu Chuan residence,

Omnisia Xiao Fu stared blankly at the Lictor’s fallen form.

So close—so close.

Countless hidden calculations, cultivating a civilization across time to preserve a Tyranid tendril, subtly guiding the inspiration of pawns to lead Fabius to the Source Blood Stack, then precisely coinciding with this Tyranid tendril—all to let the Hive Mind acquire the Source Blood Stack without raising suspicion.

Yet all the planning failed at the final moment, simply because—

“What Hive Mind! Are you even playing?! Why the hell are you popping champagne mid-match?!”

“The Source Blood Stack was handed to you on a silver platter!!! And you fucking blew it!!!”

Omnisia Xiao Fu shouted involuntarily, kicking the screen in front of him, his face twisted in fury.

Zhou Yun, sitting nearby, helplessly rubbed his temples.

“You play Tyranids like the Hive Mind,” Zhou Yun said, shaking his head. “Just turn on auto.”

All life within the Tyranid Swarm fundamentally lacks true will—they are more like insectoid AIs: emotionless, utterly rational, immune to sentiment—except the Hive Mind itself.

Even though it is the collective of the entire Tyranid Swarm, perhaps the largest organism in the universe, it remains biological: hungry, elated by feeding, enraged by failure, impulsive, celebratory, swayed by emotion—and as a Warp entity, its feelings are even more extreme and volatile than normal life.

This causes many battles where the Hive Mind personally micro-manages to perform worse than when it lets the Swarm auto-command.

In the original timeline, during the Battle of Baal, the Hive Mind personally controlled the Hive Lords in their duel with Dante, nearly killing him—only to be counter-killed because it popped champagne mid-battle.

In Zhou Yun’s twenty-thousand-plus dreams, the Hive Mind consistently proved wildly uncontrollable.

In these dreams, sometimes the Hive Mind successfully consumed the Source Blood Stack; other times, it failed in the strangest, most absurd ways—truly, it was spectacularly bad.