Horns blared. Not the long, ominous note we had heard from the beach. These were shorter blasts, repeated in a pattern that even I, with no military training, understood meant bad things were happening very fast.

  Horace’s chair scraped back as he moved. “Positions!” he yelled, and everyone moved.

  Halric was already halfway across the field to where the horses were picketed. Captain Derral was barking orders before he was even out from under the canopy. Someone crashed into something just beyond the canvas, cursing. The whole camp erupted into a rhythm of frantic motion: boots pounding, weapons clattering, men yelling, horses whinnying.

  “Stay with me,” I told Dekka. She gave me a dirty look, and I could feel her ‘where else would I go?’

  We stormed out into harsh sunlight and chaos.

  The encampment that had looked tired and worn a short time ago now snapped into a kind of frantic, desperate life. Soldiers sprinted. Archers scrambled. I spun around trying to make sense of the chaos. Find the pattern and the order, because despite what it looked like at first glance, there was an overall pattern to it.

  The officers were mounting horses, and men were forming into squads. Mages ran to preassigned points, staves already glowing. Healers hustled the walking wounded back toward the rear, cursing them when they tried to join the fight.

  I followed the direction everyone was moving, drawn to the point where fear seemed thickest.

  The earth beyond the last line of stakes was moving.

  At first, my brain insisted it was wind dancing through the grass. I had been to the prairies once. The grain rippled like water. This wasn’t that. These ripples did not move with the breeze, for the wind was at our backs and the ripples were headed towards us.

  The ground screamed.

  That was the only word for it. It screamed, a high tearing sound like the earth itself was being rended asunder.

  “I guess there are rocks down there.” Mage said to my left.

  I gave him a WTF look.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again as the high-pitched scream reverberated against the sky. “That noise couldn’t be made by soil again.” He said when it stopped.

  The tents lurched as the earth buckled beneath on the eastern side of the camp. A crack formed in the earth, and tents and a few men just slipped in. Their screams cut off shortly after they were out of sight. The hair on the back of my neck rose. A chair tipped over beside me, and I jumped. Prince Horace swore, sharp and ugly, as the ground heaved again, hard enough to throw all of us off balance.

  Then the packed dirt and trampled dried grass before me split, and the smell of damp earth and something else, notes of something musty and bitter, filled the air.

  A shower of loose dirt and broken rock shards burst upward as something enormous punched through from below. Dirt and roots sprayed the tent. A weta erupted into the space, its carapace scraping canvas, mandibles clacking as it thrashed.

  Captain Derral didn’t even have time to draw his sword. The weta slammed into him, drove him backward into a support pole, and crushed him against it with a wet, cracking sound. He screamed once. Then the mandibles closed around his chest, and the scream ended in a choking gurgle.

  “I thought they couldn’t get under the camp.” I yelled at the Prince.

  Horace shouted something I didn’t hear as the tent behind us collapsed inward, canvas tearing, poles snapping. I grabbed Dekka by instinct and rolled as another section of ground gave way where I had been standing a heartbeat before.

  Weta poured up through the rupture like a geyser of chitin and nightmares.

  They were everywhere. Their long, powerful back legs allowed them to cover easily twenty metres in a single leap. This allowed them to escape and attack with frightening ease and with an unpredictability that was hard to counter.

  Soldiers screamed as the ground beneath them erupted in a chain reaction of holes. Men fell mid-run, swallowed waist-deep before they could even understand what was happening. Spears clattered uselessly across collapsing soil. Archers stumbled as their platforms tilted and fell. Horses panicked and threw their riders, their panic adding to this macabre spectacle. Their legs snapped as they galloped and then hit a hole.

  The only merciful thing was the moment they were down a weta would leap upon it and kill them.

  “Shouldn’t these things be herbivores?” Rose asked, standing very close to me.

  “The rabbits, beavers, and goats of this world aren’t. Why would you expect these monsters to eat leaves?”

  “I dunno it just seems unfair for them to be this scary and want to eat me.”

  That did seem fair. “Will your necromancy work on insects? They don’t have bones, right?”

  “Their whole outside is like their bones. Exoskeleton. But I don’t know if it works the same way. I need to find a dead one.”

  I scanned the field. There were no dead weta that I could see. Only dead humans and horses.

  “I can make you a dead one if you want to try.” I swung my war hammer loose.

  “It would be good to know.” She said as we tried to keep our feet.

  Mage and Barry were talking to the Prince. Mage was gesturing at the ocean. I don’t know where soup and Ayerelia got off too. I hoped there were ok. Copperbeard had grabbed his lute.

  “Any songs for calming killer grasshoppers?” I asked.

  “I can but try.” He bowed.

  I waited until one was about to leap over us. When it was in the air, it couldn’t dodge. I swung my hammer and used [Targeted Hit] as it was moving fast and overhead. I had little practice swinging over my head. And of course I didn’t want to bash its brains out. Then I would have to find another one.

  I hit it solidly in the side and brought it down with my hammer, crushing it against the ground. I felt its carapace crack, and it made an odd, high-pitched noise, and its back legs scrabbled frantically to find purchase to get it upright and spring away.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Dekka punched in, already in hellhound shape, and grabbed it by a back leg. Even as large as Dekka was now, she was no match for the power of the weta’s saltatorial leg. It was almost comical as she was whipped around, holding on to the powerful limb.

  “Let go Dekka I need to hit it again.” I didn’t want to accidentally hit my dog. I quickly swung around and brought the hammer down just using my own strength and dealt a fatal blow to the chest.

  “Ok your turn.” I called out to Rose.

  I turned my back on the dead insect, keeping an eye to protect this little area while Rose worked.

  I heard someone shouting orders. It might have been Halric. It might have been Horace. It didn’t matter. The noise swallowed everything. Dekka rushed forward and shoulder checked a weta that was about to launch at the Prince he was striding towards the ramparts. The weta, thrown off balance, hit the ground and skidded towards a group of soldiers who promptly skewered it with their swords.

  I looked around. The Prince had been alone. Where were my friends? Hoarse cries came from all directions.

  “Get out of the camp!”

  “No, hold the healers!”

  “They’re inside the perimeter!”

  “Gods, gods—”

  A weta lunged at me from the side, bursting through the ground in a spray of dirt. Dekka went for it instantly, her mouth wide as she sailed through the air and latched onto it mid-air. They hit hard enough to knock me off my feet.

  I rolled, came up on one knee, hammer already swinging.

  The hammer cracked down on chitin. It was like striking rock — the impact jolted my arms to the shoulders. The Weta shrieked and flailed, legs kicking wildly, knocking over a soldier who had been trying to crawl away from another hole opening behind him.

  There were holes everywhere.

  Now the Weta were emerging in waves.

  They were erupting.

  Rose screamed my name. I spun around. While distracted, a weta had pounced and was trying to bite her. Luckily, it was the one with smaller mandibles. The zombie weta was pushing itself between them, but it was uncoordinated even by zombie standards.

  I saw red, and not just the scarlet stain spreading across Rose’s robes.

  “Ayerelia!” I bellowed “Rose needs healing!” And then I let myself be lost to the battle lust.

  Ayerelia was there in an instant and cast [Sanctified Ground] around Rose. Good friends should be safe. Healer was more powerful now. I grabbed the weta that was now biting the zombie by the leg and pulled. Its leg came off. Shoving that leg in the mouth of another that had landed right behind me, I spun and brought my hammer down on the head of the first one.

  The weta spat out the leg and came for me. I frowned at it. Bugs are gross this big. Suddenly I was knocked to the ground. A weta had landed on me, its mandibles around my waist. It squeezed, and I yelled. A corpse came flying past and landed right on the head of the weta in front of me, distracting it. She threw her hands forward, and the corpse of a soldier Ayerelia had been healing jerked violently upright. It flung itself backward into the Weta, knocking it off balance long enough for Rose to scramble out of the way.

  The corpse didn’t last long. The weta tore it apart in seconds.

  “We need to move!” the elf shouted. “We can’t stay here!”

  “I know!” Rose snapped, hauling herself up and dragging a limping man with her. Limping man was friend … Soup.

  Copperbeard’s voice rose somewhere to my right, not singing yet, just shouting, trying to be heard. “Back! Back toward the sand! Anywhere the feckers can’t dig!”

  “Where can’t they dig?” someone screamed back.

  “The beach! Run to the Beach.”

  They couldn’t tunnel in sand. But they didn’t have to tunnel to get us. And that was the problem. No matter what we did short of swimming we were vulnerable.

  The camp had become a field of traps. Every step was a gamble. Soldiers hesitated, froze, ran the wrong way. A man sprinted toward what looked like solid earth and vanished mid-stride as the soil collapsed beneath him.

  Soup appeared beside me out of nowhere, eyes wide, face pale under the grime. “This is not the plan,” he yelled.

  “What plan?” I shouted back, smashing another weta that had crawled too close.

  Soup pointed wildly. “To the beach!”

  A weta burst up between us. Soup ducked under its snapping mandibles and buried his knife in one of its eyes. It shrieked, reared back—and another Weta slammed into him from behind, knocking him flat.

  “Friend!”

  I charged, hammer raised, but the ground buckled under my foot, and I stumbled. By the time I regained my balance, two Weta were on him, mandibles clamping, legs pinning him down.

  Soup screamed.

  I swung. One Weta’s head burst like a dropped melon. The other reared up, mandibles dripping.

  Soup rolled onto his side, clutching his leg, blood soaking his trousers. “I’m good!” he lied, voice shaking. “I’m—”

  The ground beneath him collapsed.

  It didn’t open like a tunnel. It just … sank away. A sinkhole is forming.

  Soup dropped straight down, screaming, arms flailing as the earth swallowed him to the waist, then the chest. He grabbed at the edge, fingers clawing into loose soil.

  I tried to move closer, but my weight started to make the soil collapse faster. Flinging myself flat on the ground, I reached out to him.

  “Hold!” I yelled.

  His grip was slick. Mud and blood coated his hand. He looked up at me, eyes wild, terrified in a way that cut through the haze.

  “I don’t want—” he started.

  A weta surged up beneath him.

  Its mandibles closed around his torso and yanked.

  Soup’s hand tore free of mine. His scream cut off as he vanished downward, swallowed by bodies and dirt and teeth.

  The hole collapsed in on itself, churning, and then there was nothing there but torn ground and Weta legs scrambling over each other.

  I screamed in incoherent rage until my throat burned.

  Something grabbed my shoulder and yanked me backward. I spun ready to bring my hammer down. But it was friend Barry. His face was streaked with blood and dirt, eyes furious and desperate.

  “Elizabeth, we’re losing the camp!” he shouted. “We have to move!”

  I just looked at him.

  “To the water.” He yelled slowly and pointed to the sea.

  Another tremor hit hard enough to knock us both down. The ground behind us erupted again, and Weta spilled into the space Soup had occupied seconds before.

  I hauled my friend up bodily and dragged him away from the roiling earth.

  Dekka slammed into the swarm behind us, her shadow jaws snapping, buying us seconds.

  Seconds were all we had.

  Everyone still alive was running as best they could to the beach, followed by a torrent of brown chitinous bodies. Dekka loped at my side, throwing worried glances over her shoulder.

  Mage’s voice cut through the chaos like a knife as we reached the edge where tough grass gave way to fine white sand.

  “Clear the center!” he shouted. “Clear it now!”

  He was standing shin deep in the water near the beached ship, hands glowing with deep blue light, water energy crackling around his fingers. The air around him shimmered, and water rose in little whirlpools around him.

  “What is he doing?” I yelled, stumbling to keep my feet as the sand shifted and danced with the rhythm of thousands of insect feet.

  “Something desperate,” Ayerelia said grimly. She had reached the shore before me and was … feeding him her mana? So were some of the army mages? Before I could try to think too hard on that, Mage slammed both palms into the shallows.

  The earth convulsed. The waves in the harbour went choppy, becoming little triangles that went nowhere.

  Water surged up from behind Mage in writhing columns of water. Mage, his face white with concentration, thrust his hands forward at the charging line of weta. The columns of seawater arced through the air like massive angry snakes and landed in the centre of the swarm. Mud geysered into the air. Several Weta were hurled bodily upward, shrieking as they were flung aside.

  For a moment, just a moment, the swarm’s momentum faltered.

  The water ran finding the lowest exit. Holes clogged with sludge. Tunnels collapsed in on themselves. The ground became a choking, sucking mire that trapped Weta legs and slowed their advance.

  Soldiers who had been seconds from death scrambled free, dragging each other out of the mud. Someone else sobbed in relief. Hope flickered.

  “Hold there!” Horace’s voice rang out, raw but commanding. “Hold that ground!” He was mounted on a large white stallion. The horse had blood splattered across its flanks, but it wasn’t the horse’s blood from the way it pranced. The horse’s eyes rolled in fear, and it was blowing hard, but the Prince handled him well.

  The army, what was left of it, surged around Mage’s position, instinctively clustering around the one person who was keeping the hoard of weta at bay. They held the line, preventing the weta from overwhelming Mage as he sent another pair of water columns snaking through the sky to splash down on the insects.

  The insects retreated. Dekka was harrying them like a sheepdog on recalcitrant livestock. A few of the soldiers thrust their spears and skewered a few of the laggers until the commanders ordered them back.

  We just might survive this.