Oct 21, 2026, 6:08 PMLower in the pit, it had several leg-like appendages, all ending in clasping claws like a crustacean's, which made up more of their bulk the closer they were to the front, the largest pair hanging another 10 meters down, with a few more above it at smaller sizes, down to two which hung below that massive circular mouth, made for placing food inside it, one of the few physical tasks an overlord could still do on its own.
All around them, drones and broodlings were split between tasks around the cave and tending to the overlord, some crawling over its surface, gently cleaning and inspecting it. She was one broodling suddenly change direction, skittering to a different spot, gently scratching at it, then returning to its cleaning.
Overlords didn't even scratch their own itches. They had swarms to do that for them.
She'd once been told that a zerg hive cluster should be thought of as its own entity. The combat forms were like immune cells, the drones and broodlinge like blood, the structures like organs, and creep like a connective tissue keeping it all together.
Zilch was the brain.
A single zergling, to the hive, was like a small section of a finger, uncomfortable to lose, but no great tragedy to regrow. When an entire hive was lost however, the zerg lamented, as humans would the loss of a companion. The swarm itself was a much larger entity, made up of hives, and to it, this hive was like a limb. Remembering that put both their views on the wars that they'd been through, and the nature or the zerg themselves, into perspective.
Zilch was literally the brain of this being, with little distinction between itself, the zerg crawling the lair, and the numerous lesser overlords and zerg it had spawned outside of the cave. It had intelligence that in some ways surpassed humans, and was lacking in others, she'd found, though its mind was still incredibly alien, nearly as much as its huge body before her.