Chapter 695: Annihilation and Division of Forces

Tentacle Tree Civilization, Supreme High Command.

The conference hall of the High Command was a completely sealed spherical chamber.

Countless projection screens were embedded across every surface, each one frantically scrolling with real-time data streams from different war zones. Red alert lights flickered incessantly, like countless wounds tearing through the darkness.

In the center of the hall, a three-dimensional star map dozens of meters in diameter floated silently.

It was a holographic projection of the entire outer defense perimeter of their home star system.

At this moment, more than a third of the defense nodes had gone completely dark.

The dark gray representing lost connections was spreading steadily along the edges of the star map.

A deathly oppressive atmosphere continued to thicken.

Members of the highest leadership entered the meeting one after another via the virtual network. On the circular conference seats, holographic projections lit up one by one. Every time a tree-like being appeared, the tentacles on their crowns trembled slightly, signaling the anger they displayed.

The one presiding over the meeting was the current Supreme Executive.

He had lived for far too long. His deep brown bark was covered in cracks, and the tips of his tentacles gleamed with an iron-gray metallic luster. As his eight crystal eyes slowly swept across the assembly, the air itself seemed to freeze.

“Report the current situation.”

A low vibrating frequency spread outward, causing even the edges of the conference seats to hum.

The Chief of Intelligence stepped forward. One of his tentacles tapped the star map, and a combat recording extracted from a surviving warship’s black box suddenly unfolded. In the dark cosmos, a pitch-black tide was surging.

It did not look like a living organism at all, but rather a disaster engulfing the sea of stars.

The fleet’s cannon fire poured down madly. Hundreds of millions of energy beams tore through the vacuum, yet when they struck the black tide, they failed to raise even a single ripple. Immediately after, a pitch-black giant stepped out from the void in the footage.

It grabbed the flagship’s bridge with its bare hands and tore it open as easily as ripping a sheet of paper.

The recording ended abruptly at this moment.

The final frozen frame showed the operator’s face with all eight crystal eyes widened in terror.

As the footage concluded, the conference hall fell into dead silence.

“This is data from one of the few warships that successfully withdrew after that battle,” the Chief of Intelligence said, his voice noticeably lower than usual.

“After docking, the crew member suffered a complete mental breakdown. He kept slamming his tentacles against his own trunk until his bark split open, at which point the medical team forcibly restrained him.” “From the intermittent tapping records he left before collapsing, we reconstructed partial information.”

“The invaders possess individual combat power far exceeding conventional standards. Their attack method is pure physical strikes, but the energy level of each individual…” He paused, and for the first time, uncontrollable shock appeared in his crystal eyes, as if he could scarcely believe the intelligence in his possession.

“At least Level Five! And the number of high-grade individuals… unknown!”

“Fourteen minutes after contact with the border fleet, the entire force was annihilated!”

For a moment, the conference hall sank into silence.

Until a device suddenly emitted a beep, breaking the frozen atmosphere.

Bang! Bang! Bang!!!

All tentacles slammed onto the table at once.

Low-frequency vibrations swept through the hall like a tide of fury, causing the surrounding screens to flicker wildly.

“Summon the army.”

Finally, the Supreme Executive interrupted everyone and delivered the final decision.

Thus, the entire civilization’s war machine began operating instantly.

The Tentacle Tree Civilization ruled a super-large universe-like plane.

Due to highly active wind elements, the space within the plane was extremely vast.

According to the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s statistics, the entire plane contained roughly five hundred billion stars.

With so many stars, even after excluding unsuitable star systems, the Tentacle Tree Civilization possessed countless colonial planets.

Even on barren celestial bodies unsuitable for habitation, permanent military outposts and recruitment bases had been constructed.

Now, all war systems were activated simultaneously. Conscription orders were synchronously transmitted through the quantum communication network to every star system, every colonial planet, and every city.

Recruitment stations were crowded with summoned citizens. In the orbital shipyards, warships reignited their engines one after another.

The mechanical arms in the shipyards operated twenty-four hours without rest. The firelight spewing from the furnaces even illuminated entire industrial continents.

The response from the various governors was astonishingly fast.

Of course, no one would truly hand over all their elite forces.

Each tacitly retained a private army within their own territory to maintain control.

Even so, the final number of warships converging in orbit around the home planet was still staggeringly vast.

It was a steel torrent calculated in the trillions.

The tail flames of countless warships connected into a river of light spanning the orbit, turning the dark night of that region of space into daylight.

“The enemy has not moved,” the Chief of Intelligence quickly reported on the encrypted channel.

“After the invasion force breached the plane barrier, they have remained near the breach point without advancing further. Their deployment coordinates show no changes.”

The Supreme Executive was silent for a moment.

Then, he slowly unfurled all his tentacles, revealing the crystal eyes hidden at their roots.

This was their race’s gesture representing a “grim smile.”

“Arrogance!”

He rapped out the vibration coldly.

“Assemble all elite forces and press forward directly! I want to see exactly what scheme they are hiding!”

The departure of the main fleet was a spectacular sight.

Trillions of warships activated their spatial jump engines in batches. On the orbits of various logistical planets, clusters of jump radiance lit up one after another before quickly extinguishing. Each flash meant an entire fleet batch had vanished from its original location.

The logistical fleet was even larger than the combat fleet. Supply ships loaded with ammunition, energy cores, and cryopreservation pods formed tens of thousands of long dragons, advancing slowly through the starscape. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

At the same time.

The atmosphere within the Supreme High Command gradually relaxed.

In their view, given the enemy’s level and numbers, they had mobilized such a massive war machine. Their combat power held an absolute advantage. Defeat was impossible!

In the virtual conference room, senior generals had already begun discussing the distribution of postwar benefits.

Several military district governors argued fiercely over priority research rights for “Level Six biological samples,” their tentacles even becoming entangled. In a corner.

Two old trees quietly opened an encrypted channel and whispered about transforming those black giants into weapons of war.

“If we can analyze their energy absorption mechanism…”

The Technology Executive waved his tentacles, sketching a grand blueprint in the air.

“Our civilization’s development will no longer stagnate. The entire civilization may even attempt to breach the Level Seven barrier.”

A large rustling sound filled the conference room—the laughter of their race.

But suddenly, all sound ceased.

The Chief of Intelligence’s holographic projection shot upright from his seat. His tentacles frantically hammered the controls.

The data streams reflected in his crystal eyes were collapsing at a terrifying speed.

All frontline communications were rapidly cut off at an alarming rate. The fleet’s responses fell completely silent.

On the star map, large swathes of fleet icons were graying out simultaneously.

The Chief of Intelligence’s tentacles froze in mid-air. His body could not help but tremble.

“The army… has been completely annihilated.”

“All formations, all jump batches. All of them…”

He could no longer tap out the following words. His tentacles, due to excessive panic, could only produce noise.

But every tree present understood what he meant.

For a moment, the entire venue was deathly silent.

The old tree who had just been planning biological weapon blueprints still had his tentacles suspended in the air.

His wrist detector suddenly emitted a piercing alarm, warning of excessive emotional fluctuation and nutrient circulation overload.

Two other governors seemed drained of strength. Their tentacles drooped limply, and the color of their crowns rapidly faded from deep brown to gray-green.

One tree directly curled all its tentacles inward, wrapping itself into a sealed sphere.

An emotion that had not appeared among this civilization’s upper echelons for centuries was spreading: fear!

The iron-gray tips of the Supreme Executive’s tentacles even began to turn slightly pale—a physiological reaction that only appeared in extreme terror. Yet he was ultimately the first to regain his senses.

Bang!

His tentacles slammed heavily onto the conference table, instantly cracking the entire surface.

“Summon all armies!!!”

His vibration frequency had completely lost control. Amid the high-frequency oscillations, there was even a low-frequency infrasound resembling a wail.

“Recall all colonial garrisons! Open all strategic-grade weapon stockpiles!”

“Fire salvo!”

“Erase it along with that entire star region from the void!!”

In the corner, a young executive responded with difficulty.

“Your Excellency… activating strategic weapons requires a two-thirds vote from the Supreme Council.”

“Moreover…”

“If we pull back all colonial garrisons, control over the affiliated star systems will collapse directly.”

“Those conquered races have not been fully assimilated. Once the garrisons are withdrawn…”

“Then let them rebel!!!”

The Supreme Executive whirled around. All eight crystal eyes blazed with piercing golden light.

“Do you think…”

“The enemy that has come this time is merely here to conquer a few planets?”

The young executive froze instantly.

The conference hall fell silent once more.

After a long time, another old executive spoke slowly.

“I agree to activating strategic weapons. But deployment will take time.”

“Unsealing, orbital adjustment, recalibration of parameters… at least two days.”

The Supreme Executive closed his crystal eyes.

In that instant, he seemed to age greatly.

“Two days…”

“Then two days it is!”

Elsewhere.

Jie Ming remained seated cross-legged in the cosmic vacuum just as he had from the beginning.

The excessively massive nest obscured most of the cosmic background radiation.

The distant star revealed only a small portion of its outline. Orange-yellow stellar light passed through the translucent azure gelatin, casting flowing ripples across his robe. Around him stretched an endless ocean of wreckage.

Warship fragments, broken cannons, torn engine compartments, floating armor plates…

Countless metallic ruins floated silently in the vacuum, stretching beyond sight.

Some wreckage still retained high temperatures, emitting a dim red afterglow in the infrared spectrum.

More had become utterly cold cosmic debris.

The nest was devouring them.

The nest’s total mass and volume had now expanded far beyond that of Jupiter.

Its enormous azure gelatinous body slowly spread outward in all directions like a giant net covering the sea of stars, enveloping swathes of wreckage.

Once inside its body, the wreckage was instantly decomposed into information state and then rewoven into the nest’s structure.

With every region of wreckage it swallowed, its size continued to expand.

Behind it, even more warship wreckage was slowly drawn in by its own gravitational field.

Occasionally encountering particularly massive hull fragments, the nest would extend a single tentacle to gently wrap around it and slowly drag it back, as if casually plucking a ripe fruit.

Beside Jie Ming, the Black Giant Legion had reformed its ranks. A hundred billion black giants formed neat phalanxes in the void.

The vertical slits on their chests opened and closed slightly, their low collective resonance forming a single continuous sound.

Apart from a handful of unlucky individuals who had perished in battle, the Black Giant Legion had suffered almost no losses.

The Level Seven large-scale elemental pool in the Infernal Sulfur Plane provided them with near-infinite energy supply.

From death to repair and back to the battlefield, many black giants required less than the time it took to drink a cup of tea.

The gains from this war were equally astonishing.

Vast amounts of energy attacks and countless warship materials had been devoured and absorbed by the black giants.

Relying on the black giants’ innate talents, the number of Level Six black giants had skyrocketed tenfold from before the war, surging from a million directly to over ten million! As for Level Seven black giants, there was no longer only Molten Mountain.

Behind Jie Ming, four ten-thousand-meter-tall figures stood silently like a black wall spanning the cosmos.

Molten Mountain stood at the center. His physique was noticeably larger than the other three. His liquid-metal-like body even emitted a dark red luster—the result of having devoured excessive superweapon energy that had yet to be fully digested.

Though the other three newly advanced Level Sevens were slightly shorter, when all four giants stood together they still completely obscured the starfield behind them.

Jie Ming slowly opened his eyes. Massive memory fragments were continuously merging within his spiritual sea.

Having captured large numbers of prisoners and information banks, increasingly complete data gradually constructed a full picture of the entire Tentacle Tree Civilization.

It was a super-large plane with an internal structure similar to a universe.

A scale of five hundred billion stars would qualify as a galaxy even in Jie Ming’s previous life.

The countless colonial planets made the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s industrial scale shockingly vast.

It was precisely because of this that the other side could pull together a trillion-scale fleet in such a short time.

Moreover, even the forces lost now were far from crippling to the entire civilization.

As long as the industrial system and population remained, they could quickly produce even more fleets.

The only issue was… they were simply too weak!!

So weak that Jie Ming even felt somewhat disappointed.

So-called Level Six warships theoretically matched Level Six in energy level, yet their actual combat performance… was simply appalling.

A single ship’s firepower could not even compare to the frontal eruption of a Level Five black giant. Their shields were as thin as paper.

That so-called “ultimate weapon salvo” could not even inflict serious injury on a Level Six black giant.

He had originally suspected whether the other side was hiding some true trump cards.

But after reading the memories of numerous high-level figures, Jie Ming confirmed it.

There were none.

That had been their strongest conventional firepower.

Moreover, according to these beings’ memories, aside from a few core planets, any single Level Five black giant was sufficient to single-handedly crush an ordinary colonial planet!

Thinking of this, Jie Ming slowly stood up.

His gaze swept across the distant sea of stars as a new strategic plan fully took shape in his mind.

Since every black giant possessed the ability to independently crush a colonial planet, why keep the legion concentrated into a single fist?

The efficiency was too low.

Furthermore, although this plane’s space was vast, its actual matter and energy were not particularly abundant.

To conquer this plane more efficiently, the truly correct approach was to disperse the entire legion!

Jie Ming turned around.

“Molten Mountain.”

His calm voice transmitted directly into the spiritual sea.

“Pass down the order.”

“All black giants, in groups of five, disperse and operate independently. Simultaneously attack all non-core planets.”

“Level Six individuals are to be prioritized for deployment in high-density, highly developed star sectors. Level Seven individuals will provide regional mobile support. The list of planets to be conquered and their coordinates will be issued separately by the Incense Fire Divine Dao system.”

“As for the core planets… do not attack for now.”

Molten Mountain’s chest cavity opened and closed violently. A deep rumble spread outward: “Yes! We obey your command!”

Thus, the massive phalanx of a hundred billion black giants began to slowly fracture apart.

Groups of five transformed into countless small black teams, activating teleportation toward the directions of the stars in the universe!