The swarm didn’t advance with the chaotic scattering of mindless beasts. It flowed like liquid black glass, a seething, multi-legged sea of black armor and twitching antennae that poured over the rubble ramp of the collapsed wall.
Through the broken lens of his Zeiss magnifying glass, Arthur counted the vanguard signed names: over twelve thousand living entities advancing in tight, rhythmic waves. There were Acid-Spitters with pulsating, semi-clear yellow throats that hissed as they built chemical pressure. Razor-Scorpions the size of war-horses, their triple-segmented tails dripping with neurotoxic venom. And millions of Bladed Millipedes that scurried across the fallen concrete slabs with a dry, rustling hiss that sounded like a forest of dry leaves burning in a gale. Behind them crawled Underground Blood-Leeches, bloated annelids three meters long, their circular lamprey-mouths ringed with nested rows of three-sided hard shell teeth.
Behind the breach, deep within the heavy-duty avenues of Sector 7, panic had transformed into total madness.
Factory bells were tolling wildly, their iron chimes clashing with the relentless air-powered drone of Klaxon Zero. Ten thousand commoner laborers, women clutching infants wrapped in coarse wool, and elderly shopkeepers were fleeing northward toward the Upper Tier Citadel, the fortified safe hall district where the noble houses and academy directors kept their private estates. The smoke from abandoned foundries hung low over the rooftops. It mixed with the screams of families whose wooden shacks bordered the outer drainage canals.
