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Zerg Rush / Fan Works
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Examples

  • Abyssal Plain: After the Undersiders and Breakthrough accidentally take over a farm ran by a Farmer boogeyman, said Farmer returns with hundreds of Others to retake it. While the Undersiders and Breakthrough hold their own despite the number advantage, they still end up fleeing the farm as a result.
  • Being Dead Ain't Easy: When in the Soul Room, hundreds to millions of Funny Bunnies swarm Joey and Kaiba.
  • Better Angels starts up with the Walker invasion that took place during Season 2 of The Walking Dead. The tactics of Rick and Shane are notably similar when defending Carl from the Walkers.
  • In The Broken Day, this is noted to be one of Hydra's favoured strategies when fighting wizards; as Neville reflects in a flashback, they can afford to basically strap bombs and weapons on to muggles and send them out to fight until the target is dead.
  • Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: The "Last Resort Robo-Launcher" is a swarm of hundreds of locust-like robots that do this to the heroes.
  • Death in Scampia: An Agency team find themselves surrounded by gang soldiers of the Camorra, backed up a hostile crowd of locals hurling rocks and abuse.
    Here were the gunslingers of the Camorra clans, cheap and expendable and inexhaustible in supply. Any other time they would have been an object of derision to the cutting-edge killers of the Agency. Now the girls could sense their handlers' fear and the knowledge made them taut like a mainspring, ready to erupt into a murderous frenzy that would not stop until everyone was brought down in a hail of bullets.
  • Dekiru: The Fusion Hero!: During the USJ incident, Class 1-A, even separated, is doing fine against the League of Villains as most of them are two-bit thugs that even they can handle. However, there's so many of said thugs that it's actively preventing them from reuniting at the entrance. Those at the entrance can't leave to help either, as they're being besieged by villains as well on top of having to protect their two severely injured teachers.
  • Downfall (Bleach) has this tactic both played straight and inverted. The Exequia Troops of Unohana's army are mindless drones that employ this tactic occasionally as skirmishers. They are repeatedly shown to pose occasional difficulty to even Lieutenant-strength opponents due to their sheer tenacity. They make no sound—not even when they're hurt or killed—and will keep coming until they're dealt a fatal injury.
  • Enemy of My Enemy: The Brutes try a version of this, charging in a solid wave of fur and fury against a wall of Jackal-shield-wielding Elites, in a scene reminiscent of soccer hooligans rushing a fence. In this case, the fence pushes back and holds firm, while the Elites' human allies fire down on the Brutes. It's stated that the Brutes were so tightly packed, dozens were dead on their feet because there was no room to fall to the ground once they were killed. This is, unfortunately, truth in writing, as many examples of people dying in tightly packed areas do feature corpses that are only revealed to be such when the place starts thinning out, causing them to fall down due to no longer being supported by the people around them.
  • Fractured (SovereignGFC): The Reapers are the weak faction against the Trans-Galactic Republic's much sterner starships after the Citadel races would have been the "Zerg" against the Reapers had the TGR not pulled a Big Damn Heroes/The Cavalry. In the sequel, the Flood engage in this tactic with a twist—endless weaker soldiers...that also endlessly revive... Cue the heroes emulating their enemy.
  • The Long Walk: This dry exchange happens between an OC and Mikey:
    Mikey: "The Shredder thinks if he throws enough Foot ninja at a problem, it'll go away."
    Breech: "That's right. There'll be less Foot ninja for a start."
  • Mega Man Reawakened, Cudabots try this on Megaman, and bee robots do this to Roll.
  • Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!: Izuku, All Might, and Firestorm are swarmed by hundreds of robots inside Mt. Fuji. Firestorm manages to take out the majority of them while Izuku runs to find his spaceship, but they're besieged by even more robots when they confront the Villain responsible.
  • Percy Jackson: Spirits: The default attack strategy of the dark spirit hordes is basically just to cause as much chaos and destruction in a short a timespan as possible. Because they don't work together in groups very well, this works against them.
  • Point Me at the Skyrim: Frost Bite spiders go for this maneuver once Antares hits them with her fear aura. She didn't know how bugs would normally interpret her fear inducing powers, but the entire swarms turns on her in a second.
  • Pokémon Reset Bloodlines and its sidestories feature several examples, to varying degrees of success:
    • During Chapter 23, Belladonna and her group take over the Gringy City power plant by overwhelming the defenses with a horde of mind-controlled Poison-types, most of them relatively weak. It works, but then problems come during the occupation. Since they no longer have the element of surprise or an enormous numerical advantage] (due to having to spread themselves out more thinly to hold the plant as opposed to being able to concentrate their attacks on the personnel), competent attackers like Ash and company are able to defeat huge numbers of the hypnotized Pokémon.
    • In the Lorelei Interlude, a group of Rocket grunts attacking the Mandarin Island Stadium try this on Lorelei and Frey, but despite the sheer numbers, the couple manages to take them all down using only three Pokémon each.
    • In Chapter 34/35, most of the latter part of Ash's battle in the Saffron Gym amounts to this. While Ash and his Pokémon manage to hold their own for a while against the hordes of Sabrina's Psychic-types, eventually they start to wear out. Fortunately, Dexter manages to bring every Pokémon Ash has caught with the help of his Exeggutor herd (who can use Teleport) to level the playing field.
    • Red in his Five Island Interlude is forced to deal with this with the Rocket Grunts in the warehouse, though it's a more gradual example, as the plan is to lure him deep into the hideout to take all of his Pokémon. He's saved by a combination of managing to improvise on the fly, and the timely arrival of Yellow who broke out of captivity with Ratty's help.
  • Queen of the Swarm: Taylor has the potential to do this but hasn't due to lack of Zerg. Though she is looking to fix this for when Leviathan attacks.
  • Rise of the Minisukas: The titular Minisukas are eight-inch tall Asuka's alternate selves bearing tiny replicas of the Lance of Longinus. Obviously, one of them is no threat to an Angel. Good thing there are billions of them, and even though their spears are not as powerful as the real article, they can still pierce through an Angel's core. Their tactic against Sachiel consisted on swarming around the giant Eldritch Abomination, covering its body completely and stabbing it to death.
  • The Rush shows what happens when the titular, dreaded event happens on a small, simple farmstead. Needless to say... it's painfully obvious that it doesn't end well for the two... at all.
  • The Swarm of War: Volran actually has it as a tactic — a psionically reinforced stampede of a million Zerg isn’t easy to stop.
  • Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K:
    • Standard doctrine for the Separatists is to flood the battlefield with Mecha-Mooks and rely on their easily replaceable nature and sheer numbers to make up for their subpar individual combat abilities.
    • Standard Imperial doctrine generally boils down to "flood the battlefield with Imperial Guardsmen, then deliver knockout blows with the important troops and units". No longer having the vast reserves of their own galaxy to draw from means this mentality is a problem that they have to wean themselves away from, but change comes slowly to Imperials if at all.
    • The Republic Navy is outclassed by the Imperial Navy in almost every way except when it comes to FTL travel. So far, the only way that the Republic Navy has effectively held their own against the Imperial Navy in a Space Battle is to outnumber them by so much that any losses the Imperials manage to inflict on the Republic fleet is like Shooting the Swarm.
  • Tarkin's Fist: The PLA resorts to human wave attacks as a means of pushing back the Imperial invaders.
  • Worldwar: War of Equals: Discussed between Atvar and and Kirel before the invasion of Earth. The Conquest Fleet consist of 35,000,000 infantrymales and note that no Human military can match them in those numbers. This tactic actually works in some of the small countries of Earth, helps dominate the skies, and gives superpower nations such as America and China a run for their money.

Alternative Title(s): Fan Fiction

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