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Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? (Worm/MGLN) (Complete)

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Aineko said:
Yes, I know what strategic means, and the point is that they were consistently unfit for purpose. Bombing of cities was largely unsuccessful in destroying either morale (the most honest claimed purpose) or industry (also claimed).
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That's because in those days, the bombs available were sufficiently inaccurate that you could only rely on hitting somewhere within a fairly large area.

Which meant that they frequently missed the industrial targets they were often theoretically intended to destroy.
 
sstabeler said:
That's because in those days, the bombs available were sufficiently inaccurate that you could only rely on hitting somewhere within a fairly large area.

Which meant that they frequently missed the industrial targets they were often theoretically intended to destroy.
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Maybe! It is true that nobody's run a similar campaign with more modern bombing accuracy, at least, so one could imagine anti-industrial bombing working better.
 
Aineko said:
Maybe! It is true that nobody's run a similar campaign with more modern bombing accuracy, at least, so one could imagine anti-industrial bombing working better.
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Actually they have, it just wasn't bombing. Specifically, that's what Ukraine are doing when they keep blowing up Russian arms depots. Same basic idea, greater accuracy so you can minimise the collateral damage.
 
sstabeler said:
Actually they have, it just wasn't bombing. Specifically, that's what Ukraine are doing when they keep blowing up Russian arms depots. Same basic idea, greater accuracy so you can minimise the collateral damage.
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Striking arms depots and striking industry are not the same category.

Using air power against operational logistics, AIUI, has been effective at least back to WWII.
 
Tygerion said:
Curiously, Worm is 1.68 million words long (~26 normal novels), so part of why it wound up being so long may just be that web serials just... tend to be long, likely due to a lack of the pressures of making a physical book; no need to limit
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Tygerion said:
Something of interest:
Adult fiction novels typically range between 70k-120k words.
Hybrid Hive Eat Shard is 1.4 million words. So this isn't just a book; it's length is around that of 11.66-20 books.
This one story has more words than the entire Harry Potter series (1,084,170), and is just shy of thrice as many words as the LOTR trilogy (481,703... Though that goes up to 576,459 if you add in The Hobbit).

Curiously, Worm is 1.68 million words long (~26 normal novels), so part of why it wound up being so long may just be that web serials just... tend to be long, likely due to a lack of the pressures of making a physical book; no need to limit page number to keep the books a reasonable size, or pay money to the publisher based on the number of pages for example.

Maths aside, congrats CmptrWz, for completing your ~15 novels-long story.
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Another reason web novels get so big is that ending a book risks losing audience and the reputation of a good webnovel will grow over time so a longer one will build up an audience as it is written. Then ending it risks losing a chunk of that audience and they need to repair damage to their audience in the new one.

Look at Wildbow himself. Pact never build up a fraction of Worms reception and the damage Pact probably harmed Twig which a barely heard of existing until Ward Started. I'm not certain how well the Pale audience is compared to prior ones but its quality is great although not as good for fanfiction fodder.

The author of A Practical Guide to Evil lost me after ending aPGtE.
 
Thank you for your enjoyable story.

I think it would be funny if some time later, the Secret Kingdom are wondering why they haven't received any communication from P.I.t.S.K. and then slowly it dawns on them that it's in the name and they are ignoring them deliberately.
 
Windborne said:
Well shit I wasn't expecting to see "Epilogue" in the next post's heading after finishing the chapter. I guess this is really over. Congratulations @CmptrWz. That was one heck of an ending. Even if it wasn't very dramatic for the last few chapters, it does feel like a solid ending and that final reveal was very appropriate and on point. It's going to be really weird not having something guaranteed to read every Wednesday afternoon though.
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Cmptrwz doesn't post a story until he has a backlog of at least 10 chapters
 
This has been an absolutely incredible, wild ride! Thank you so much for writing this and sharing it with us!
 
Please Ignore the Secretly Completed Worm Fanfic

Dave, recursively recursive? why sir whatever could you mean by that?
 
woodzrox said:
He's at one of the amusement parks as a live fire gun range target.
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I think he was wondering what happened to Behemoth after the shards were cleaned up. Sure, Behemoth worked on the firing range after the other Endbringers were slain, but this more recent action is quite a bit broader than that. Since the Endbringers were connected to the network in some fashion, the dismantling of it seems like it would do something to the last 'living' Endbringer.
 
DarKenJoiz said:
I think he was wondering what happened to Behemoth after the shards were cleaned up. Sure, Behemoth worked on the firing range after the other Endbringers were slain, but this more recent action is quite a bit broader than that. Since the Endbringers were connected to the network in some fashion, the dismantling of it seems like it would do something to the last 'living' Endbringer.
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Frankly with the tech level of PITSK it shouldn't be difficult for them to keep Behemoth intact and still working at the firing range.
 
Given the Endbringers were expected to collectively run out of energy after about 300 years in canon, the final epilogue time skip likely had Behemoth's energy deplete and cease functioning even with the extra energy from not breaking cities every few months.
 
There were others but this...
Brainstorm813 said:
So, all the shards were cleaned up, right? Say, whatever happened to Behemoth?
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and this
Trufla said:
Behemoth is pretty much in the same condition as if a programmer lifted a section of code for a boss monster out of a game and sandboxed it.
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Coupled with this
Isiri Pudireach said:
Assuming it isn't given more energy, or just properly joins the Kingdom.
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Gave me this.

The Endbringer known as Behemoth suddenly snapped its head around, focusing it's single baleful eye to the sky behind it. Automated and formerly automated systems responded to the detected increase in energy consumption by removing the safeties of the various methods set in place to destroy the beast if necessary. They held their fire though as the detected energy pattern didn't match a weapons profile. With Queen Minerva having all available resources engaged with her own fight the systems had only isolated the increased activity as most likely a thinker power, possibly a precognitive one. During the three point seven seconds those determinations were made they did note that the direction Behemoth was looking was a direct line to her current fight with Zion. A tense few seconds more passed before the process that monitored the Endbringers connection to the chat window at the firing range lit up with a message.
|ALARM!!!|
|ASYLUM?|
 
Aineko said:
This. Baiting the defenders into throwing resources that they might not be well able to afford at trying to stop it.
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Arguably it was more than just baiting. By publicly announcing their targets, the Germans/Japanese had to at least try to stop the attacks or damage public morale even further (it's one thing to fail to stop an unexpected attack, but knowing an attack is coming and not even trying to stop it makes for very different optics).

Not even attempting to stop the announced attacks would make the civilians think the government either didn't care about them at all, or that they were too weak to face the American forces. It really did put the defenders into a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Byzantine said:
Guys this is so far off topic I can't even see it from here.
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err, good point, :oops:
 
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Awesome story. Thanks a bunch for sharing this wonderful tale with us.

I do have one question though. How many thousands of years did it take before they renamed themselves the Culture? ;) Post scarcity societies are fun.
 
All I want to say is: thank you. Epilogue was as good as I expected it to be, even though it is kinda sad that this story is done. I had so much fun reading this story, probably almost as much as when I read 'Mauling Snarks'. Honestly I loved that one and this one is pretty close.
 
This was a very entertaining read CmptrWz. I had laughs, I had moments of hell yes, and I was legitimately intimidated by Tay at some points. I did wonder what happened to Lisa and the Undersiders... but hey, they got their happy ends as many others did.
 
Euden said:
This was a very entertaining read CmptrWz. I had laughs, I had moments of hell yes, and I was legitimately intimidated by Tay at some points. I did wonder what happened to Lisa and the Undersiders... but hey, they got their happy ends as many others did.
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I believe Lisa got recruited by a TLA(Three Letter Acronym), probably the FBI, was eventually depowered with a goal of being a wizard, just a bit before the organization was dissolved due to Annexation Day. There's a reasonable chance that Negotiator was one of the shards capable of being converted into a useful Device, and that they'd still work together, but it's not stated, this is mostly my theory.

Grue and Imp got a sizable payout from the PRT for testing power removal on Imp. Grue might have ended up with a TLA, but they probably just coasted until Annexation Day.*

Regent vanished into the nether when their team broke up, going south to avoid Daddy Dearest. There's an equal chance that he was fine on Annexation Day as that he was long dead in a ditch.

Bitch... I don't actually remember, I think a TLA was wanting to recruit her, well trained dogs are very valuable to law enforcement or military, but she most likely just vanished into wherever, and most likely was fine up to Annexation Day.

*Edit
Technically the money was all Aisha's, but I think their family issues were dealt with around then as well.
 
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