"What the hell are these bugs made of?!"
The marine-class player squads were screaming over comms as the battlefield descended into chaos.
The creatures kept fighting after losing their heads.
Some had their torsos blown open and organs spilling out, yet still lunged forward hard enough to pin soldiers to the ground and tear into them alive.
And somehow, the players held.
Even after taking catastrophic casualties, the player forces still hadn't collapsed mentally.
The auxiliary alien troops and new immigrant recruits broke first.
Ironically, most of them hadn't even died yet.
The reason was simple.
The players had already learned that Kryptonian Empire Online was absurdly hardcore.
Low-level troops didn't respawn.
Once your subordinates died, you had to recruit replacements manually. And if too many soldiers under your command died, NPC recruits started refusing to join your army altogether because your casualty rate was considered suicidal.
So after days of cursing the developers, players reluctantly started protecting their troops like valuable assets.
Otherwise becoming a planetary overlord later became almost impossible.
But now those same carefully preserved troops were panicking under the Stalkers' relentless assault.
"This game's insane. My soldiers are demanding retreat orders!"
"Mine just deserted after I refused to pull back!"
"I spent all my credits gearing these idiots up and they ran anyway!"
"Bullshit! I charged in first screaming 'follow me' and they still panicked!"
The players cursed nonstop.
But they kept fighting.
And then the swarm swallowed them whole.
The Queen observed the battlefield calmly, visibly satisfied.
"The Stalkers are far more effective than expected."
She had deployed one hundred million of them.
The players simply couldn't handle numbers on that scale. Infinite respawns didn't help when equipment, resources, and currency failed to regenerate alongside them.
"Queen," Drex Valen said thoughtfully, "I have another concept I want you to try developing."
"It would be my pleasure, great Emperor."
The Queen folded her enormous forelimbs respectfully.
Despite the feminine title, the creature itself was a colossal black insect over a hundred meters long, with six pairs of cicada-like wings and an enormous swollen abdomen.
She didn't lay eggs.
She released spores.
Because her "insects" weren't true insects at all.
They were closer to mobile plant-based lifeforms.
The spores themselves were microscopic, allowing the Queen to release hundreds of millions at once. After settling into soil, they spread underground like roots, forming vast biological growth networks beneath the surface.
Under sufficient nutrients and water, the first organisms produced were Vanguard Bugs and Worker Bugs.
The workers cultivated fungal growths and managed ecosystem maintenance.
The vanguards became food for newly born Hunters and Stalkers.
The entire biological system sustained itself independently.
No outside logistics.
No supply chains.
No starvation.
The swarm could march endlessly without losing manpower or food production.
Now, however, after acquiring massive amounts of new genetic material and incorporating Drex's suggestions, the Queen had started recoding future spore strains entirely.
She was fascinated by the concepts Drex introduced.
Zerg.
Proto-swarms.
Tyranids.
The Arachnids from Starship Troopers.
Xenomorphs.
Countless forms of insectoid or pseudo-insectoid organisms from across fiction and imagination.
Among them, the Tyranid concept interested her especially.
They resembled her own swarm structures closely, but with one major difference.
Tyranids didn't rely purely on natural claws and fangs.
Many evolved into upright bioforms capable of wielding living weapons almost like intelligent soldiers.
The Queen found that idea extremely appealing.
Earth.
The moonlit sky suddenly brightened.
A meteor.
It came from beyond the solar system itself, slipping past Jupiter's gravity without capture, evading lunar interception, and plunging directly toward Earth.
The atmosphere became its final obstacle.
Friction burned away layers of its surface as the object blazed across the night sky like a miniature sun.
The meteor streaked across nearly half the planet before finally crashing into a small town in Kansas.
The impact completely obliterated the settlement.
Every year, countless meteors fell toward Earth.
Most burned into dust during atmospheric entry. Others vanished into oceans covering over seventy percent of the planet's surface.
Only a tiny fraction were ever discovered by humanity.
But the meteor that destroyed the Kansas town was extraordinary.
A once-in-a-century event.
Eventually, it became known as the Shibuya Town Meteor.
Recovery teams arrived almost immediately.
Earth's scientific institutions had long understood that many trace materials found on the planet originally arrived through meteor impacts over millions of years.
S.W.O.R.D. ignored the incident entirely.
There were simply too many meteor landings every year for the agency to investigate every single one.
As American aerospace researchers predicted, the object appeared to be an iron meteorite.
But the metal composition shocked everyone.
The alloy displayed properties so refined it almost looked artificially manufactured. Earth's best materials barely surpassed it, including secondary Kryptonian alloy.
Reverse-engineering it could revolutionize multiple technological fields currently limited by material science bottlenecks.
America's technological lead might advance dramatically from this discovery alone.
Unfortunately, the meteor hadn't brought only opportunity.
It brought disaster.
The destruction of the town was merely the beginning.
The real threat came from the extraterrestrial organisms hidden inside the meteor itself.
Alien swarm organisms.
The creatures possessed green flesh covered in wrinkled organic plating. Their bodies resembled malformed insect cocoons fused with distorted humanoid anatomy.
And they could imitate people.
Perfectly.
The alien organisms possessed advanced mimicry capabilities, allowing them to reshape themselves into virtually any human target.
They could even duplicate memories.
Worse, their physical abilities vastly exceeded normal humans. After assuming a victim's identity, they could effortlessly kill the original target and dissolve the corpse using specialized acidic secretions.
Then they vanished into human civilization.
With humanity's global transportation networks, countless infiltrators spread across society in an incredibly short amount of time.
Compared to the future Skrull Secret Invasion incident, this outbreak was arguably even more dangerous.
At least the Skrulls targeted superheroes and key political figures in an attempt to destabilize Earth's defenders through paranoia and internal conflict.
The swarm infiltrators were spreading everywhere.
And unlike the future Skrull crisis, this happened long before the Skrull Empire itself had been pushed to the brink by the Kree.
At the moment, the Skrulls were still cautiously observing Earth rather than desperately trying to seize it outright.
Which was precisely why Nick Fury still trusted several Skrull refugees thanks to Captain Marvel's influence.
One of them had even eventually become Fury's body double.
Ironically, that same relationship later played a major role in enabling the internal conflicts that nearly tore Earth's heroes apart.