Her Majesty's Swarm

Vol. 1. Confirming the Situation

I took a quick look around and found a small piece of paper. I scrawled upon it all I could remember just before the Swarm's collective consciousness completely washed my memories away.
I was an eighteen-year-old college student, born and raised in Japan. I didn't have a lot of friends in real life, but I had plenty of them online. I knew most of them from gaming. When it came to video games, I was a chatterbox.
I led quite the sad life, if I do say so myself. What I lacked in reality, I sought after on the internet. Still, I had no regrets, and I couldn't claim zero attachments to the somewhat empty life I led in Japan.
I will definitely make it out of this world. I promised the Swarm victory,
but at the end of the day, I had my own selfish motives. Rather than focus on the goal of achieving some as yet unknown and unknowable victory, I chose to hone in on my desire to find my way back to Japan.
I made no effort to hide it either. The Swarm likely knew this from the collective consciousness that connected us, but they remained silent on the matter. They seemed to tacitly approve of my wish to go back. Or maybe they intended to leave with me and sweep my world with the black currents of the Swarm.
Whichever it was, the Swarm didn't reject my intent to go back to my own world. I vowed to find a way to leave this world and return home...
except I had no idea where to start. But someday, I will surely find it.
Thus, my first order of business was to confirm the situation. Scouting was the first order of business in this kind of game, after all. I needed to get a grasp on the terrain, our enemies' positions, and the resources I needed to produce more units-that is, more Swarms. I needed to confirm the logistic path to those resources as well as all other pertinent information about this region in order to emerge victorious.
Those were the Four Xs: eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation, and eXtermination.
I needed resources. I needed a stronghold. And I needed an enemy. But truthfully, I was still hesitant to fight this so-called enemy. Where was I to begin with? The map was too large. I'd never seen these tunnels, and I didn't recall ever playing a map with tunnels of this size.
I could clearly remember all the maps I'd ever played. In fact, that was an island of perfect clarity in my otherwise hazy sea of memories. There wasn't a single map I didn't know, from the single-player maps, to online ones, to unique, user-made maps. On one hand, this could have been some really niche, unknown player-made map, but there was no chance a map this large wouldn't be highly-rated by other players, so even that seemed unlikely.
To that end, I divided my Ripper Swarms into pairs and sent them out to scout. Their information came directly to me via the hivemind, and I used it to draw a map of the area. If we're going to win, we'll have to secure this area, I thought.
A gold mine. Hunting grounds. A densely packed military installation of unknown affiliation. I was fixated on gathering information in the name of the victory I had promised the Swarm and for the sake of going back to my own world.
But honestly, as far as starting positions went, this one was golden. No matter how much you tweaked the difficulty settings, you'd only start with two to three Worker Swarms and a Ripper Swarm if you were lucky. The Arachnea was a faction that overwhelmed the enemy with sheer numbers, so having this many Swarm units so early in the game was usually forbidden to keep things balanced. It was no simple feat to get these numbers right away.
The Marianne's main resource was faith, which increased with the number of citizens it had and allowed the faction to increase the limit on their number of troops. The Gregoria mined gold, the favorite food of their dragons, to mobilize their forces. The Flame, a fellow evil faction, increased its number of units according to how many sacrifices it made. There was a loophole, though, where the Flame could sacrifice worker units-who didn't subsist on meat-to increase the sum of its sacrifices.
Usually it was hard to build up a number of units in the early game, but the Flame could do it relatively easily. Its worker units subsided on the most basic foods-fruits and agricultural crops-and could be sacrificed to unlock higher-level units, such as attacker units that were the Flame's counterpart to the Ripper Swarms. That said, for how easy it was for this faction to produce units, the units themselves were unsurprisingly lacking in strength.