Golden Wheat Province, Eupatorium Plain.
This had once been the promised land flowing with milk and honey in poets' verses. Now it had become an enormous open-air mill. Only it was not grain being ground down, but the Empire's lifeblood.
"Hold the line! Swordsmen, form ranks! Don't let them through!"
Governor Moulton stood on the battlefield in his elaborate robes, shouting himself hoarse. He did not even dare wipe away the sweat running into his eyes. He merely clutched his staff as though it were his only lifeline.
Before him stood a black wall.
It was a living tide formed from tens of millions of beetles piled atop one another. Their scalp-prickling crunches merged into a roar like a tsunami-the sound of mandibles severing wheat stalks and chewing grain.
"Kill them! For His Majesty! For the Empire!"
Moulton raised his gem-encrusted short staff. A searing arcane ray shot from its tip and swept viciously across the swarm before him. As the beam passed, a dozen or so beetles burst in the intense heat, their dark green fluids evaporating into foul-smelling wisps of smoke before they could even splatter.
But it meant nothing.
Against the boundless sea of insects, killing a dozen was like scooping a spoonful of water from the ocean. The insects behind them clambered over their fellows' corpses and continued their tireless advance. Their target was clear-the untouched golden wheat fields behind him.
That was the largest estate under Moulton's name, and his last hope.
"My lord! The infantry can't hold them!" A centurion covered in insect corpses stumbled over, his face scored with bloody gashes from their mandibles. "Conventional weapons aren't killing them fast enough!"
Moulton looked toward the front. The soldiers were indeed fighting for their lives, swords like a forest and shields like a wall.