The Mech Touch

The battle did not last much longer after the giant king fish made an appearance.

The supremely powerful king fish did not attack as exaggerated as before, but its next moves confirmed to Tusa that the powerful creature possessed enough firepower to match that of a warship or an ace mech!

The only reassurance to Tusa was that the king fish did not possess any extraordinary traits as far as he could tell. The monstrous and utterly unique monarch creature relied on its extraordinary biological properties to fight back against the Swarmers. The Dark Zephyr detected no signs of true resonance or other extraordinary manifestations, which meant that the creature was probably not as difficult to deal with as an actual ace mech.

"It's still a darn powerful fish, though!"

The king fish completely dominated the battlefield as soon as it emerged. It did not appear to be in a hurry to close in on the enemies. Instead, it maintained its distance and utilized various ranged attacks to completely unsettle and disrupt the Swarmers.

In one moment, the king fish launched a strange flesh ball that landed in the midst of the surviving enemy formation like a bomb.

Once the flesh ball fell into place, it exploded and sprayed hundreds of Swarmer fish with poisonous liquid that caused the victims to lose focus and behave more erratically!

In another moment, the king fish exerted its phasewater reserves to tear a space crack in the center of the enemy horde, causing the attackers to get split up from each other!

While all of this went on, the other individualistic fish-whales quickly regained their momentum and beat back the enemies that had gotten close before bombarding the remainder!

"It's over. The Swarmers have lost their only advantage."

When the group of weak Swarmer fish dropped below a certain quantity, they no longer possessed the numbers to overwhelm the defenders.

Nonetheless, none of the grunt fishes or elite fishes showed any hint of retreating! They continued to go forward in order to take down as many individualistic fish-whales as possible. Blood continued to be shed as the two groups of fish did not show any mercy towards each other!

By the time the battle had come to an end, the Swarmer horde ceased to exist. All of their bodies ended up in the bellies of their fellow comrades or fell down onto the surface of the asteroid that they sought to conquer.

The defenders didn't look so good, though. Though they only lost up to fifty or so unique fish-whales, each of them were strong and expensive to nurture. The losses also amounted to a significant proportion of the defenders on this landmass!

In addition to that, the price the king fish had paid to wipe out so many Swarmer fish probably wasn't light. The creature already began to droop as it had just exerted a handful of highly impactful attack abilities.

The survivors soon began to enjoy their spoils. They approached the places where piles and piles of Swarmer fish bodies had fallen and stoically partook in their meals.

Unlike the cannibal fish that Tusa had encountered before, these new ones did not look as if they were letting their baser instincts control their behavior. They looked fully aware as they replenished the energy and body mass that they had lost during the battle!

The king fish ate the most bodies by far. Its huge body and its powerful energy emissions made it clear that it probably needed a lot of resources to sustain its massive body. This might also explain why the rest of the fish-whales did not grow to such an exaggerated size. The resources available on this asteroid might not be enough to sustain another super-sized monster!

"This… is a contest of attrition."

Though Venerable Tusa was not as well-versed in war and strategy as Commander Casella, he still knew a thing or two about warfare.

With everything he had seen so far, he understood that the Swarm Kingdom probably had the initiative in this intraspecies war.

"I have personally seen how the Swarm Kingdom controls at least 9 asteroids. If each of them produces resources, then that means the Swarmers have a massive quantity advantage. They can easily launch attacks on a frequent basis without getting distressed because they can quickly replenish their ranks on account of their abundant territories and huge population base."

The defenders of this asteroid appeared to be following the opposite route. Each of their fish-whales were unique and much more powerful than their Swarmer counterparts.

Given how diverse they looked and how they all grew in unique directions, Tusa dubbed them the Evolvers.

"If there is one benefit to this battle, it is that the weak fishes get eliminated by the Swarmers while the strong fishes survive by virtue of their superior evolutionary direction."

The meat-grinding bladed fish, the wizard-like silver fish, the area-denying fire-breather fish and above all else the king fish that was basically the fish-whale equivalent of a juggernaut each showed that the Evolvers had become highly proficient at slaying their opposition.

Still, Tusa didn't think the defenders of the ruined labs could hold onto their territory forever.

He didn't know how quickly the Evolution Kingdom could replenish its losses from this invasion, but he was pretty sure that the loss of over a hundred-thousand fishes was completely negligible to the much more massive Swarm Kingdom!

Just as Tusa wondered how long it would take for the Swarmers to take over this asteroid, the king fish that had just eaten hundreds of fallen bodies abruptly turned and directed its bright eyes straight in the direction where the Dark Zephyr was hovering in the distance!

Although the Dark Zephyr wasn't under stealth, Tusa had made sure to maintain a healthy distance and minimize the emissions of his expert mech.

The perceptive abilities of the fish-whales that he encountered so far weren't impressive. Though the Evolvers looked more developed than the uniform fish subspecies of their enemies, Tusa saw little reason why they would enhance their observation capabilities considering that the Swarmers were too numerous to hide their movements.

Yet despite all of these considerations, the king fish was much sharper than it looked and stared straight at the distant metal speck!

If this wasn't enough to alarm Venerable Tusa, then what happened next completely changed his attitude towards the powerful king fish.

A strange mental intrusion began to intrude upon his mind. Though it wasn't particularly strong and focused, it reminded Tusa a lot of the glow of a design spirit!

The foreign mental pressure only pressured him for a brief amount of time before it began to communicate a strange word.

WUGEENAE.

Tusa almost jumped out of his piloting seat as the king fish spoke to him from a distance!

The capacity to speak a coherent word was not only a clear sign of intelligence and sentience, but also indicated that the Evolvers probably established at least a rudimentary form of civilization!

If the scariest part about the Swarm Kingdom was its huge population of disposable cannon fodder, then the trait that stood out most from the Evolution Kingdom was how clever they became!

Though Tusa could have decided to stay and make first contact with the king fish, that was definitely not a part of his objectives.

He resolutely turned his Dark Zephyr around and drove it away from the lab landmass as fast as possible!

Tusa quickly felt the alien creature's mental presence fade away. He relaxed but still maintained a bit of vigilance as the asteroid behind his expert mech grew smaller.

It wasn't until he confirmed that the king fish hadn't followed him that he slowed down his expert mech and took stock of the situation.

"There are still more asteroids to explore. How many different fish societies will I find?"

The existence of two distinct societies of fish-whales implied that more groups existed as well.

Although Tusa did not know whether the remaining ones were easy to deal with, he still felt obliged to uncover all of them before he returned to Fort Fishblood. The expeditionary forces urgently needed to gain awareness of all of the different fish-whale 'kingdoms' that populated this isolated pocket space.

"Let's go, then!"

The remaining asteroids did not disappoint his expectations.

While the one he visited next was occupied with clever-looking individualistic fish-whales that probably hailed from the Evolvers, he encountered a completely different group of fish-whales on the subsequent asteroid.

The new group did not display the numbers of the Swarmers nor exhibited the sheer diversity of the Evolvers.

Instead, the fish-whales that occupied the asteroid were relatively few in numbers while looking like different-sized clones from each other.

The third group of fish-whales possessed oval bodies and featured a single uniform light blue coloration. The only way for Tusa to tell them apart from each other was by looking at their battle scars and their sizes.

Although these fish-whales didn't look strong at first glance, the Dark Zephyr's sensors informed Tusa that both the light blue fishes and the asteroid they treated as their territory possessed one extremely important trait.

Both of them contained an abundant amount of phasewater!

The Dark Zephyr spotted visible lakes and pools of water. Small but noticeable quantities of phasewater were deposited underneath. Even now, several light blue fish-whales were peacefully diving underwater so that they could harvest the phasewater generated through unknown means!

"This place is a treasure trove of phasewater!"

With such an abundant supply of phasewater, it shouldn't be a surprise to see that many of the fish-whales in this place accumulated a lot of this precious substance. Each of them looked like mobile phasewater deposits in his eyes!

However, Tusa quickly restrained his urge to dive in and cut them all to pieces. He had already seen how the handful of phasewater fishes among the Swarmers and Evolvers were able to debilitate and destroy enemies by generating artificial spatial anomalies.

Though the blue fish-whales did not accumulate as much phasewater as the king fish of the Evolution Kingdom, there were many among them that possessed similar amounts of phasewater as the silver fish!

With so many powerful 'phasewater wizards' among this group, Tusa had no doubt that the inhabitants of this phasewater-rich asteroid could easily tear entire hordes of Swarmers into pieces!

"This place should not be easy to invade at all." Tusa guessed. "The Swarmers and the Evolvers should both be eying this phasewater asteroid, but the fact that they failed to hold it means that the current occupants shouldn't be weak!"

Having learned his lesson, Venerable Tusa did not dare to look down on these docile-looking fishes and moved on to continue his scouting run.

It soon turned out that the Phase Kingdom as he called it only ruled a single asteroid. The next ones were relatively barren and only contained small and loose groups of Swarmers and Evolvers.

Tusa grew a little bolder and flew his Dark Zephyr closer in order to gather more detailed data on the barren landmasses.

According to the initial results, they contained few resources, few energy sources and no phasewater. None of the fish kingdoms took them seriously.

After exploring a couple more barren asteroids, Tusa neared the end of his scouting run. It wasn't until he visited one of the final ones that he encountered a new group of organized fish-whales.

These ones resembled the Phaser fish as Tusa called the ones occupying the phasewater-rich asteroid.

The biggest difference was that the fourth group of fish-whales were all black.

The Dark Zephyr also did not detect any phasewater in their bodies. The asteroid they were in did not show any signs of being rich in phasewater.

What stood out from the black fish-whales was that they were each brimming with heat emissions. The entire asteroid they were on was a lot warmer than normal as well. There were even specific sites where the sensors detected a lot of energy spikes!

As the Dark Zephyr captured the rich energy signals from the asteroid, the nearest group of fish-whales abruptly moved into action.

They turned their backs towards the distant expert mech and extended organic pipes from their bodies.

Worrisome concentrations of energy welled up beneath these pipes.

"Oh hell."

The Dark Zephyr dodged aside as over sixty laser beams raked its previous position!

It appeared the fourth group of fish-whales were all capable of bombarding their enemies at range!