I Only Wanted A Class In The Apocalypse-Chapter 1925: The Hive Mind!

"How can a world like this exist so close to a star and not burn to a cinder?" he murmured. He began to scroll through the external parameters of his ship’s sensors, and his blood ran cold.

"The external temperature is off the charts, and the atmospheric pressure is crushing my shields ..." He began to grasp the terrifying truth of the Hescos.

"Don’t tell me the suits they wore were designed to protect them from exploding in the weak atmosphere of the rest of the universe... But it still doesn’t make any sense. If this is their home, how does anyone even stand on the ground? How can they survive all this in the first place?!!"

The pressure was so terrifying that his ship’s hull was groaning—a sound he had never heard in deep space.

He couldn’t fathom what the early days of the Hescos must have been like. For a race to not only survive but thrive in an environment this hostile required more than mere luck; it required a structural evolution of the body, mind, and soul.

He understood it now—if a race faced such crushing atmospheric pressure, searing radiation, and toxic chemistry and managed to conquer it, it explained why they stood as the undisputed first race of the universe. Nothing could break a will forged in such a furnace.

"Let’s see what the world truly looks like," he murmured, his hands steady on the controls. He realized his ship was still skimming the upper thermosphere, the actual crust of the world a staggering distance below. He adjusted the inertial dampeners, feeling the hull groan under the increasing pressure, and began a slow, cautious descent toward the surface.

His scout ship was built for speed and stealth, but those advantages came with glaring trade-offs. The scanner arrays were tuned for short distance, deep-space reconnaissance, not wide scale planetary penetration. From his current altitude, the ship’s data was frustratingly vague.

All he could tell was that the landmass stretched toward infinity in every direction, a solar system-sized plate that defied the curvature of a traditional planet, while the blazing star hung perpetually above, appearing dangerously close, as if it were a low-hanging fruit of fire.

"What is that?!"

Before he had even crossed half the distance to the ground, a localized anomaly caught his eye. A dense, swirling cluster of purple clouds had gathered to his side. What stood out wasn’t just the color, but the data flooding his sensors: this cloud was moving against the wind direction, accelerating toward him with a vague intent.

"It’s not a normal cloud," he observed, his eyes narrowing. "It might not even be a cloud at all. Let’s see how it handles a greeting."

He didn’t hesitate. The moment his suspicion spiked, he squeezed the trigger. His ship’s small cannons hummed, sending streaks of missiles into the heart of the purple mass.

As he expected, the impact didn’t pass through. The cloud buckled, breaking apart with deafening roars of fierce explosions. Thousands of smaller, distinct masses broke free from the formation, scattering in a chaotic but controlled dispersion.

They didn’t dissipate like smoke. They hovered, regrouping, before drifting back toward one another like a magnet.

"These are... Insects!"

The realization hit him the moment the holographic scanners resolved the blurry shapes. Each speck was the size of a big monster, armored in chitin that shimmered with a metallic, purple luster. Seeing such a colossal number of insects moving in such a synchronized manner meant only one thing: a hive mind.

He searched his memory for any clue from Earth or the system’s early trials about how to kill a hive mind of such scale. If there was a queen or a king controlling them, killing it was the only way to break the swarm before they reached his hull.

"Where are you hiding?" He diverted his gaze from the front line of the swarm, searching for something that didn’t match the rest. Nothing stood out at first glance, so he fired again—random, wide-pattern shots, aiming to provoke a defensive reaction. He watched the swarm’s response with the intensity of a hawk.

"There!"

After a third volley, he caught the tell-tale sign. When his shots approached a specific spot in the lower-quadrant of the swarm, the insects didn’t scatter; they surged inward, forming a dense, cocoon-shaped structure to shield a certain spot from any possible damage.

"Heat and fire won’t do enough," he realized, glancing at the external temperature gauge. This was a world where a thousand degrees was room temperature.

His small ship weaponry was being mitigated by the insects’ natural resistance to their own environment. And those insects wouldn’t give him the time to switch gears and take out his grander ships.

"Using my Soulers and Reapers is too risky. I don’t know if their spiritual forms can maintain integrity in the toxic pressure outside. So..."

His eyes flashed with a cold light. There was only one choice left. He used his cultivation technique. Outside the ship, a grand, swirling black sphere of energy manifested, hovering defiantly against the crushing pressure. Thousands of thin, shadowy arms stretched out from the sphere, aiming like lances at the insect cocoon he had identified.

To be cautious, he withdrew several high-grade bones from his inventory, keeping them ready to replenish his energy. His technique was a product of cultivation from the other universe—it wasn’t a physical object subject to the laws of this universe’s physics. It was a foreign force, and he was confident that the planetary environment couldn’t touch it.

Yet he soon realized how dangerously he had underestimated this special world.

"What is that?!"

For the first time since the apocalypse ended, Hye felt his technique fail to reach its target. The arms had extended with their usual lethal velocity, but as they crossed the distance into the area around the swarm, they began, weirdly, to slow down.

They stretched for a great distance, but they still fell short, shimmering and vibrating as if they were trying to push through a wall of solid lead.