Only one Eater horde bothered us as we headed for the pass, and that after we made it back to the first hardpoint I’d put up the day before. We left scores of yellow and black striped posts hammered into the ground behind us as the two-legged bulb-jaws ate their way through multiple Summons, converged on us living things, and we proceeded to hack them down.

  I did pay more attention to the wake of the Eater hordes, which explained some of the resilience of the hordes.

  Naturally Eaters died as they swarmed on the Summons, even if it was anywhere from one to six Eaters per target, all the time. They still accrued injuries, and they still died if the enemy got lucky.

  However, other Eaters immediately devoured them hungrily, the corpses of their fellow dead the only ‘real’ meals they got. Eaters who got to eat their fellows were actually obvious, because they waddled more than their starving, ectoplasmic-fed fellows.

  Little Eaters were being popped out almost constantly by the Summons Eaters, as they couldn’t all swell to the largest of sizes quickly, and so their reproductive systems were basically on overdrive. The baby Eaters also mobbed any of their parents who fell, and they grew with almost explosive speed, especially if they managed to get in on some of the Summons, the ectoplasm causing spurts of growth visible to the eye. Corpses, armor, weapons, everything made of ectoplasm went down their gullets and was somehow digested with fantastic speed.

  The Eaters cleaned up after themselves savagely, and there was obviously a net positive of Eaters dying and then recycled vs Summons eaten, extra mass being created and more Eaters building up over time as they ate more and more Summons faster and faster.

  At some point a break would happen, the horde getting too large and catching up to another, or respawns happening before the whole horde left an area and the horde split forward and back.

  Our slaughtering of multiple hordes just basically cleared the field of competitors, which allowed the remaining hordes to spread out a bit more, devour things more constantly and faster, and thus reproduce even more quickly. It had been a fairly static process, with the excess Eaters vented off into the ocean on a regular basis when their numbers became too high and a horde could find nothing to eat.

  We wouldn’t be able to stop the process without stopping the land Spawns entirely, and then the only things for the Eaters to eat would be one another… or go hunting for the few real things that were left to bug.

  We were assuming the Ruschk still existed in at least their main encampment on the easternmost island, dug into the ice and simply waiting the Eaters out patiently. It was something we’d find out eventually.

  Day Two ended, and we hadn’t even made it out of the pass yet.

  ------

  Days Three and Four were about making our way west.

  We had five miles to go to reach the saddleback up to the ridgeline that would take us back up and over the mountains to the top of the tallest peak, where Sir Bellas’ prison was located. There were literal armies of Summons we had to carve through to get there, nonsensical numbers of creatures that should have been at each other’s throats instead just sitting around and forcing us to kill them to get past them.

  There were also the Eater hordes which slaughtered them, and which in turn were slaughtered by them continually and relentlessly in an ongoing cycle which had likely been going on for years.

  The area cleared by an Eater wave was about a quarter-mile wide, with about a mile of Summons between waves. We could see the respawns popping up behind them as the hordes came out of the west at us. It was kind of surreal watching them approach, like a living tide of bouncing balls with jaws.

  Knots of conflicts bled Eaters that drove over and past them into the next set of spawns, which didn’t react to the Eaters until the first of their numbers were attacked. Then the entire squad of Summons would turn and race into the fight, and the first overeager couple of Eaters would die as they faced multiple attacks and spells.

  But the other Eaters were coming behind in greater and greater numbers, driving one another towards the fighting, rapidly surrounding the Summons and even bouncing up over one another and into the middle of the Summons in their hunger. The balls of jaws would spread out and around, and then one would catch sight of the neighboring Summons, raging over that way to get a meal, and lead a string of later Eaters after it seeing the same thing and expanding the wave.

  Behind them baby Eaters devoured fallen Eaters and helped gnaw at Summons and rip them apart before they could dissipate, months of growth happening in minutes, and no doubt contributing to their massive hunger as it did so.

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  Viamontians, Ruschk, fellow Eaters, Uber Penguins; it didn’t matter, they were all Summons, all designated prey, and the Eaters devoured them all.

  I noted that the Fiun and Viamontian mages who got spells off tended to take the best toll on the Eaters, as the uncoordinated melee combatants got themselves surrounded and chewed down from all sides, minimizing the harm they did. Casters who happened to chain-Cast from a distance instead of charging up to fight could actually kill quite a few of the Eaters if the melee line was fortunate to stand long enough.

  But in the end, the melee line of fighters would fall, the Eaters would charge the mages and tear them apart quickly, and the process would keep rolling and repeating.

  Then, of course, they would run into us, a coordinated melee/archer line between working fortifications, with magical Healing support, fighting shoulder to shoulder and high up enough that the Eaters couldn’t bounce over one another to get at us, while their carcasses Burned down en vivus and refused to make ramps to get at us for those behind them.

  The Archer Stand Thrust and the spear line of Feats was the first Mastery all the knights learned and used. If the Eaters came charging up, they would impale themselves on the Steadfast Blades in the hands of those waiting for them as they instinctively avoided the spikes on the walls and converged into the attack lanes prepared for them.

  If the Thrust didn’t kill them, the Weapons were withdrawn, great jaws scraping slickly on enchanted worldbone that was not ectoplasm and would not break, and then it was finished with a thrust through the eye or a hacking full stroke down through the sensor stalk atop it that led it to magic and the living into its brain. Slashes to the edges of the jaws would sever the tendons and cause the massive jaw to sag and crash to the ground, where its own frenzied movements would rip it open, sometimes completely off its body, and drop it writhing in a frenzy of gore and thick red blood as squat legs pumped and sent it in impotent circles as it bled out.

  It would promptly be knocked aside or trampled by those behind it, killing it even faster, and then its death would send a signal to the baby Eaters, who would worm between their elders still trying to get at the moving prey and start eating the dead.

  Dead who were Burning en vivus and fell to dust between their jaws, before they could be digested.

  Even if I was in Aurora Stance, I could contribute Darts to the offense, triple Chains leaping among the Eaters and slashing them with Kickers that helped wear them down more quickly, weakened their flesh, disoriented or blinded them, knocked them over, and set them on fire, among other things. The silvery Flames over the Eaters were quick targets for the archers, who let them burn for at least eighteen seconds before sniping them down, letting the burn damage accumulate and bringing them down into One Arrow range for their kills at point-blank range.

  If they didn’t kill them, oh well, the Knights only had to fight half-dead Eaters who reached the walls of our hardpoint.

  The spike-warded walls allowed at least two knights to fight any Eater, and the tactics to impale, chop, thrust, and chop again if needed were almost a dance as the knights swirled through the motions with speed and power. The ectoplasm-fed flesh of the Eaters ignited easily and rapidly on death, and they Burned down nearly as fast as undead did, despite all their bulk.

  Indeed, on death they began to shrivel and shrink with visible speed as vivus Burned on them, desiccating and folding in on themselves, much to the annoyance of the baby Eaters swarming to feed on them.

  No efforts were spent beyond my Darts on the baby Eaters. One set of Chains passing through them was enough to set them on fire, and the Kickers could burn them to death every time, without fail. They were the weakest things in my Detect Aberrations, so I’d Chain between clusters of them and kill a couple dozen at a time, rapidly whittling them down and out of the hordes.

  Through all the gnashing and clashing, Kris Sang as if she didn’t have a care in the world, Quaver rang with notes of coming slaughter, and Endure banged down remorselessly and constantly, splitting skulls and blowing Eaters apart with overpressure from their own brains and blood.

  There were none of the big pale Eaters leading these hordes, probably because the turnover was too high. A baby Eater expelled from its parent might be able to grow to full size in only another quarter-mile of carnage, but the death toll was just as frightening on the side of the Eaters. Given the intensity of the Spawn Points here, no Eater survived to get large enough to do that.

  When the Eater waves were finally finished up, everyone just sat down to rest. We weren’t worried about anything attacking us, as we’d Sealed every Spawn Point in the area, and the Summons behind the Eaters were already respawned, forming another wall of bodies for the next Eater wave to work through… except they had to kill the Summons the whole width of the valley, and we were only clearing out sections of it at a time.

  We had to kill two waves of Eaters each day on Days Three and Four, and then we used the Jumpgates to Linejump out and vacate our hardpoint before the third wave could reach us.

  Those Eaters were going to find a whole lot of cleared ground ahead of them, with nothing to eat for a few miles as they drove themselves forward, doubtless wondering where all their densely-packed prey was. They’d reach the forces to the east of the pass soon enough, since the pass itself was empty and their attention would be drawn to the existing forces scattered ahead of them.

  Our estimations were that each Eater wave was chewing through two miles of the densely-packed Summons a day, with nearly a hundred percent fatality rate within the waves, yet the newborn Eaters matured so fast that they were actually staying ahead of the kill rates.

  It did mean the things were all young and stupid and hadn’t learned anything but incredible blinding hunger for all their lives, but that didn’t garner any sympathy from us. They were Aberrant things, biological accidents made by an obsessed Fiun genius who’d thought himself master of all things, whose idiocy had birthed biovorous eating machines that had doomed a world and its people, and were now here to bedevil the one we were fighting on.

  The Land was feeding on them, and it was Good.

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