The wasteland of Tark-III no longer existed. In its place lay an endless, writhing, seething carpet of purple-black life.
The swarm's main force had finished assembling. Its attacks had shifted from frenzied charges into a cold, efficient, lethal tide of coordinated organisms.
The fortress city's walls became the only steel reef in the storm, enduring savage assaults from every direction, above and below.
No further rallying was needed.
The soldiers of the Tallarn 113th Regiment silently held their firing positions, weapon status, ammunition reserves, and tactical information streaming across their retinas. Once desert assault troops, they were now nodes of death atop these hundred-metre walls.
Countless Rippers formed a writhing "carpet," trying to drown everything beneath their numbers and sharp teeth.
Large numbers of Graviton Gun turrets loaded with solid ammunition lay concealed in the outer wasteland. These Autocannon Turrets had already been destroyed once during the swarm's earlier rush, but they were soon silently repaired and rose again from a battlefield strewn with fragments of Tyranid corpses.
The gravitational ripples generated by rapid fire erupted in dull thumps, like bowstrings being released.
Highly penetrating Metal Jets raised countless waves of blood in the sea of Hormagaunts and Termagants.
The tiny Rippers swarmed these newly repaired turrets, then tore them apart once more through sheer numbers.
The Tyranid Swarm clearly could not understand why these destroyed installations could recover, but that did not stop them from adapting.
The pits housing the concealed turrets were brutally ripped open. Groups of slightly larger Termagants carrying Acid Sprays soon turned these dangerous holes into tiny pools of acid.
The Nanomachines inside were completely destroyed as a result.
After the outer defences were destroyed, the tiny Tyranid Harvesters began gnawing on their companions' corpses.
They began reclaiming biomass to replenish the losses sustained in