Carrying the city's purest genome (he was at the barycenter of a cluster carefully engineered around the poor and otherwise unprofitable) and wielding its most powerful weapon (no human mind could wield the Swarm but to fulfill old laws somebody had to be in the nominal control exerted on the rack by the body pulled apart in a hundred thousand vectors of agony) the Swarm Master fell to the biological hacking of its enemies (many of the Swarm had or were chemical sensors; when his bunker-sealed body was woken up to observe the ritual requirements of legal humanity he recalled the complex flavors of dying flesh until his horror blossomed Swarm-ridden) and turned its polymorphic lethality upon the city itself in a surprising betrayal (they had known he would within a month's precision before the first interface plate had replaced the first segment of his long-disassembled skull) his own weapon rebelled against (he died with the taste of a child's blood on his tongue).
The city wept and waited uneasy for its next champion (many of the Swarm had or were identity recognition systems and it knew every child's genome and neural scans).