Mr. Williams seemed to chew on Serenity’s statements. As Serenity was about to return to the problem at hand, he asked one more question. “If you’re not worried about mammals or insects or any sort of monster, what are you worried about? Birds? They don’t burrow.”

Serenity grinned for a moment. The frustration in the liaison’s voice was obvious. “Some do, but this would be more than I’d expect. No, what I’m worried about is reptiles. There are all sorts of reptiles, and many of them burrow. They lay eggs in quantity and many don’t care for their young. They can also be quite dangerous even without the help of magic, and some of the creatures that are could certainly have made a burrow like this if there are enough of them. Even if they only came over as adults, we could be looking at a bad situation fairly quickly.”

Serenity shook his head. “While that’s possible, I think that’s unlikely. This looks like there’s one coordinating intelligence, and unless there’s a rather odd beastmaster, that doesn’t make sense for reptiles. They’d simply be too hard to dominate. Sapient reptiles are more possible, but still fairly unlikely; there are far fewer cooperative sapient reptile species than mammals. They have a different niche. No, most likely we’re looking at a colony species of some sort.”

Speculation wasn’t going to get them any farther. All he could really say from what he’d seen was that there were probably a lot of whatever was here. He turned to the rest of his group. “Slow or fast? I mean, should we investigate the burrows or just charge for the center and try to get the portal?”

Serenity was leaning towards slow. It was safer. While he didn’t think whatever this was would be nearly as dangerous as the Sterath, there was always the chance he was wrong. It was certainly prepared.

The advantage of fast, other than getting it over with, was surprise. That was essentially the only advantage, but it wasn’t a small one.

“Slow.”

“Slow.”

“Fast.”

“Investigate.”

Rissa’s “Investigate” was clearly the same intent as Katya and Raz’s “Slow”. Serenity turned to Ita. “I can guess why most of you want to go slow and investigate. Why do you want to go fast, Ita?”

Ita waved her hands in the air. It wasn’t standard body language. Serenity guessed that it was her gathering her thoughts, but it could just as easily have been an expression of how obvious it was. “You’re on a time limit, in a competition. The prize is important.”

Serenity glanced over at Rissa, who wore heavy clothing with a hood shading her face just like she had whenever they were outside since the incident with the vase, then looked back at Ita. “You have a point. So, not slow but also not just charging in blind. Mr. Williams, did I hear you correctly earlier? Is there a bulldozer somewhere nearby?”

It turned out that there was quite a bit of different construction equipment nearby, including a small horizontal drilling machine with an integral camera. It was even remotely operated, and the soldier running the machine mentioned that it was actually developed for civilian use. It was something to do with sewers, but that was all he’d say.

He ran it below-ground and Serenity watched the screen as it moved forward. There was a small window inset on the side of the screen with a map displaying the position of the camera; nothing interesting happened until the drill-head passed the front edge of the berm.

Moments after that, it punched into a small open tunnel. It was a little surprising, since it was below the original ground level, but the dirt did have to come from somewhere.

The tunnel ran along the length of the berm. They waited a few minutes, but nothing moved in the tunnel. “Should we follow the tunnel, move up, or head forward?”

Serenity turned towards the soldier in surprise. “We can change directions?”

It was a dumb question. Serenity realized that as soon as it came out of his mouth. The soldier didn’t seem to take it that way. “Yes, up to a point. If we get too far from the turn, I’ll need to back out and come at it differently.”

Serenity nodded. “Can you back out and avoid the tunnel, but go forward? I’d rather not have the drill blocking their tunnel, just in case.”

As the camera backed out, Serenity thought he saw movement at the side of the view area right. “Wait, stop.”

A moment later, it was obvious that there was movement. Specifically, there was a giant centipede hurrying down the tunnel, carrying a clod of dirt in front of its mouth. Its body filled most of the tunnel, which meant that it was probably a foot in diameter. They simply watched as it hurried past; it didn’t seem to pay any attention to the camera, even though it shone light that the centipede should have been able to see.

It seemed to take forever to pass, showing just how long a foot-wide centipede could be.

Serenity broke the shocked silence. “Looks like it’s bugs. There must be something else; monsters usually imitate their natural relatives and I don’t think most centipedes usually live in large groups and work on common tasks. Much less carry dirt around like an ant?”

He wasn’t sure. Bugs weren’t his field of study. He was simply grateful that killing them should be relatively easy. “So, Mr Williams. About that possibility of insecticide I mentioned?”

“I’ll have to ask. It’s not something we have on hand as far as I know.” The liaison was still staring at the screen even though the centipede was gone.

It was apparently not something anyone had on hand in the kind of quantity they’d need. On top of that, there seemed to be a problem with either the rules against chemical warfare or environmental impacts; Serenity overheard both mentioned as Mr. Williams tried to figure out how to take care of the problem the easy way.

After about three hours, it was fairly obvious that even if “the easy way” was possible, it wouldn’t be fast.

Serenity pulled his team together. He started by repeating what they knew. “So we know we’ll be facing insects. Nothing other than centipedes has been seen with the camera watching the tunnel. Does anyone have any ideas on a good approach other than charging up the middle? I’d really rather not fight all of the insects we’ve seen, especially not all at the same time.”

“I do.” Rissa’s immediate words were a bit of a surprise; she usually stepped back when it came time for planning, since she recognized that most of the others were more experienced than she was, even Raz. “First, we need to check on exactly what equipment is available…”

Rissa detailed her plan before they started. “The plan has a lot of moving parts, but each step is simple and there are a lot of places where we can fix things. First, we’ll have two of the remote-controlled front loaders start digging up the berm, about thirty feet apart. If all goes well…”

The first step went off with no problems at all. One of the front loaders was able to simply dig up the soil making up the berm, moving it about ten feet away into a new pile. It made its way halfway through the piled-up dirt, cutting a path wide enough for itself to turn around, before the second front loader started.

The second front loader almost immediately ran into what Rissa was hoping for: it dug up a centipede. Surprisingly, the loader actually lifted up the centipede along with the dirt; they’d planned for several possibilities, but this one was the absolute perfect first test.

As the centipede righted itself and started trying to escape from the earthmoving equipment, a shot rang out and a large hole appeared in the centipede’s head. It continued to move, but now seemed to be attacking the bucket instead of trying to escape it.

The arthropod was far too similar to its non-monstrous relatives to stop that easily; it was dying, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t try to take its killer with it.

It couldn’t do much after the front loader dumped its body away from the working area.

The two front loaders kept working for another twenty minutes with only occasional interruptions from centipede appearances (and deaths) before anything changed.

“Once we kill enough centipedes, we’ll get the attention of whatever’s behind this. It’s possible we’ll see a wave of centipedes, in which case the defenses behind the front loaders should be able to take them, but I’m expecting we’ll be attacked by something else. Even though centipedes are venomous hunters, they aren’t going to be the shock troops.”

Katya couldn’t leave the line alone. “What are you expecting, then?”

Rissa grinned. “If it stays with arthropods, either scorpions or crabs. Lobsters are also possible. I suspect scorpions will be for defense, so more likely crabs or lobsters; they’ll be hoping that the crustaceans’ thick armor will deflect bullets enough.”

Serenity wasn’t certain if bullet-resistant insects would be possible or not; the Voice definitely would allow Tier Five creatures through, which could be close to bulletproof, but it was highly unlikely that there would be more than one or two; they simply used up so much of the invasion portal’s budget that it seemed unlikely. Two or three would probably be the actual limit, this early in the invasion, and Serenity doubted there would be even as many centipedes as they’d seen if there were two Tier Fives from the same invasion portal.

“So what’s your solution?” Rissa wouldn’t be presenting the plan if she didn’t have an idea.

She shrugged. “Armor-piercing bullets and some crustacean anatomy lessons. You can actually kill crabs fairly quickly if you hit the right spots, but they’re not that big and there are two of them. Lobsters will probably be more annoying.”

The first sign that they’d moved to the second stage was a ten-foot-wide crab emerging from a hole in the ground about fifteen feet from the inside of the berm as one of the loaders turned to carry dirt back to the pile it was making.

Serenity’s first thought when he saw it on the screen in his head was that it didn’t look like what he’d expected. The image he’d had in his mind of a crab was a king crab, but the first crab was different. It had a markedly flatter top shell, almost more like a coin than what Serenity thought of as a shell; it also was a purplish-black in color instead of red or green, though the legs were still red. The claws were relatively smaller and straighter, as well.

The second crab was light green, had a more spherical body, and seemed to be mostly leg. It reminded Serenity more of a spider than a crab. Were they all different?

Now that he thought about it, the centipedes were different colors. That meant different species in centipedes, didn’t it?

The first crab didn’t make it to the machinery. The one that followed right behind it did. It grabbed onto the tread of one of the wheels with its left claw, trying to destroy the machine’s mobility. It died before it succeeded, but the wheels were only so sturdy; one hit in the right place or two or three hits close enough to each other almost anywhere would flatten a wheel.

It wasn’t designed for use in combat with monsters, but it was a perfect decoy. The crabs didn’t seem to realize that the loaders were just remote-operated machines.

The crabs led, but behind them came lobsters. They were less armored, but would simply keep moving through more damage. The hail of bullets from the hastily-established machine gun emplacements was the solution for the lobsters; it took a lot of bullets, but it didn’t take much time per lobster. Once they had the right weapon aimed at the crustaceans, lobsters turned out to be faster to kill than crabs.

After a half-hour of fighting crabs and lobsters, both loaders were completely disabled, but the crustaceans didn’t retreat. Instead, they headed forward, towards the source of the gunfire that had killed so many of them.

Far fewer went forward than the waves that originally attacked, now left in piles near the bullet-riddled construction equipment.

They weren’t prepared at all for what they ran into behind the newly-created dirt piles.