Once out of the Stillflight Field, our Avians and other fliers took the sky, while I stood on my Disk next to the Mick and Hopper, gliding along with Briggs near the front of the force.

Sama was already gone. I could hear her chatting with Reynard, who seemed to have discovered some interesting targets for her and Tremble, and a bloody disruption of communication among enemy lines was now in operation. Krakenoids and Squidmen were a LOT easier to kill than Finmen. Rubbery hides and slender necks were much less impediment to Tremble than steel-hard scales and inches of supernaturally absorbent blubber and muscles... not that she couldn’t take out Finmen, too, it was just the arrogant, elitist Psychics were so much simpler to take down for a Human who came out of nowhere, harvested them, and then went back to nowhere, somehow.

Still, didn’t stop what was coming for us next.

“That,” the Mick murmured to me in a voice that was almost drooling with urgings for hot butter, “is a LOT of Crab, Lady Fae.”

It was a couple square miles of ground, and it was currently covered by Crabs averaging ten feet in diameter, all the way up to Commanders a good fifty feet across. It should have looked dreadful.

Instead, it looked bloody delicious!

“We’ve got attacking Bugs coming in. They’re sea-adapted, they are not used to hauling the full weight of their shells. Guess what happens when you double and triple gravity on them, Big Guys?” I noted for everyone.

The biggest of the Contracted Beasts, most of whom had an Earth basis, rumbled softly in response, seeing the living carpet of Crabs coming their way with scuttling speed. The things didn’t look like they were having trouble, which probably meant they were benefiting from Sky to the Sea too.

“Fae, gonna need you to shut down the heavy air in the area. Earth mages forwards. Now’s the time to try your flowering spikes!” Briggs called out.

The combination of heavy gravity and no Water let-off would instantly have the Crabs nearly unable to move, their own exoskeletons not giving the support for their own weight without Water Magic around to draw on.

“Everyone else... don’t even try getting through their armor from above, it’s not worth your time or hassle. Flip them over, and let those behind trample them or spells come down and fry them. If they are spiked, let them hang and die!”

There were wuffs and quiet calls of confirmation up and down the line. Neither the Beasts nor their Contractors were dumb, they’d all worked together before, and seeing square miles of Crabs was not something particularly new after other littoral raids, or fighting armies of bone-armored Undead in the Death Zones.

I was just going to be flensing a lot of them, so I stood there and watched for the Commanders trying anything silly with jets of Water or something.

The Crabs seemed rather foolishly eager for a meal, but that’s what we looked like to them, and they couldn’t be said to be too bright. Still...

“There should be a Ruler for a Horde this size, Briggs,” I spoke up, looking around for some signs of a concealed super-Crab, and seeing nothing.

Briggs just pointed Endure towards the middle of the Crabs. “It’s sliding along in the middle of the Horde, keeping a low profile. Look at Sunny’s feed.”

I glanced at the visual feed from the Sunbreasted Robin a couple thousand feet up, and yeah, a hundred-plus-foot diameter scarlet-and-purple Reaver Coral Crab Duke was pretty goddamn hard to miss from above.

“Watch for Water Lasers from the Crabs,” Briggs intoned, and a number of Barriers in various colors popped up in front of us. “Earth Mages, at your discretion.”

Fists punched up, and the Earth responded with fingers of its own.

Flowering Spikes required some exquisite Earth Mana Control and practice. Instead of making just a hard and sharp Stone Spike and trying to impale something with it, it was designed for stuff with hard shells that couldn’t be penetrated normally from above, and thus couldn’t be impaled from below, either.

Sticking a Beast all the way through was almost never going to stop it. You really had to hit the vital spots for that to happen. Impaling was about immobilizing it, however, not necessarily instant kills.

Flowering Spikes came up normally, but when they encountered a hard obstruction, they folded outwards, flowering out as the Spike continued to rise, scraping along the inside of a shell or scales or whatever. They ripped the shit out of the innards of the target as they did so, and not incidentally did the whole impale thing in a circular fashion.

It was a specialized technique that was extremely useful against the likes of Lobsters, Crabs, Scorpions, Spiders, Beetles, and a large number of other creatures with extremely tough top/backsides, and considerably weaker undersides.

We just hadn’t had much need to use it against Pangolins, Armordillos, Dinosaurs, and the like as yet.

The simplest form of it was a Novice-level spell, too. Mages with Tiered-Stars could use it hundreds of times very easily, and if they scaled up the Mana, cover multiple targets and much larger areas, with more armor penetration for the tougher targets.

A couple square miles of big, circular targets? It was literally a gigantic shooting range!

The Archmages began raising some powerful spreads of Spikes, thrusting attacks that drove Crabs right up off their feet... and then the Crabs jerked and fell, but didn’t quite reach the ground as they quivered and hung there, twitching a bit and getting absolutely nowhere.

Those around and behind them basically ignored them as long as they could get past them... or simply crawled right up on the hapless Crabs hanging there and used their packed shells for convenient footing.

The closer the horde came to us, the more Spikes began to snap up, although the areas of them were smaller. That didn’t matter so much, since the Crabs were converging on us and almost piling up on top of one another as they scuttled to get at us, even as walls of Spikes and impaled Crabs rose up in front of them. They were snipped down or crawled over, only for the new Crabs to share the same fate.

I saw one of the Commanders get bounced off the ground by four Spikes at once punching through the crevices in his armor, armored legs still cycling as it tried to move and could not, internal fluids gushing down the Spikes that had shredded its insides but not killed it yet.

“Big Guys, advance at will.”

My cue. I swirled through the Argent Magic, Driver Sam standing nearby and hooking in with his own Archmagic to expand the effect further to the flank.

The Dispels went out, targeted against the mass of the huge Emperor spell that was keeping the Water and Air Mana so mixed. They detonated in midair in silver whorls that spread out and chased the heavy presence of Turn the Sky into the Sea from the area, reducing things to normalcy.

Among other things, that also made it a lot harder for the Aquatics to breathe easily.

The difference in the speed the Crabs were moving was instantaneous, as suddenly they were effectively two or three times the weight they had been, and all that exoskeletal armor was HEAVY. No internal skeleton to brace yourself? Sucks to be you!

Seeing that, the Great Beasts moved out.

The massive herbivores led the charge, although I noticed quite a few Plants were tunneling through the ground, too, ready to contribute. The Beasts behind were to be finishers and flank guards as the Big Guys rampaged.

The armored Crabs literally went flying at the impacts, trying to move against the Heavy Gravity effect that was hammering down on them, and were instead smashed off their feet by the Earth-using behemoths who were only picking up speed.

Behind them, a couple Summoners opened Beast Tide Gates, and two whole herds of Rhinos and Elephants of different species trumpeted and went smashing into the oncoming Crabs, throwing them around and trampling them after they did so, powering forward as the Crabs could barely even raise their massive pincers to try and snip at them... and that usually ended with their pincers getting torn off as the big Beasts just kept moving.

I watched Lord Quake plummet from the sky with great speed right into the middle of the Crabs, noting through Sunny’s aerial view that he had just slammed down on the back of the Crab Duke there...

Three massive Spikes smashed into it from below, each the size of small towers, but they failed to penetrate. That was okay, as what they did was drive its front high into the air as it scrabbled at the stone, abruptly making itself a massive target out there.

The Mick punched out with Driver Sam and Big John at the same time, and their Void Magic combined to smash that Duke Crab right over onto its bright red and purple armored backside, Lord Quake providing a very convenient fulcrum for that purpose.

That wouldn’t have been totally bad, as it could certainly use Water Magic to flip itself back over, right?

Swampy made very sure that didn’t happen, Countering the gouts of Water meant to flip it back to its feet, while Lord Quake simply raced up onto its underside, ignored the log-sized legs scrabbling at him, and proceeded to rip and tear with wild abandon, ripping off foot-thick carapace armor on its bottom with cracks I could hear all the way over here... and then exhaling some nasty dragonfire down into its insides at point-blank range.

Dragonfire was not at all respectful of Aquatic resistances, especially once it was inside the big Crab’s carapace. The Duke Crab could only convulse as the insides of its shell became a blast furnace, and it cooked in place.

Lord Quake jumped away and up from multiple Commanders converging on him, wings beating with massive strength and Buffs to help him jump further away in the Stillflight Field, while a dozen steely Vines from a Heartstopping Raspberry Bush slid up over the Crab’s shell, extended into that opening, and made sure to continue the process of ripping apart the Duke’s insides, ensuring it didn’t return to the fight.

The death of the Duke didn’t help the command structure of the Crabs, who suddenly had to work out which Commander was in charge while trying to deal with Rhinos, Elephants, Hippos, Bulls, and the like rampaging through the mass while irate Plants drove wooden root-spears harder than steel up into multitudes of them.

Up above, Sunny and the other flying Avians and their Riders were letting loose falling blasts of Flame with precise aim onto the upended Crabs, making sure that they wouldn’t live to get tipped back over deliberately or accidentally. They’d all learned the benefits of Mana conservation and precise targeting in protracted fights by now, learning what fights of endurance and persistence were all about.

Here and there some of the Big Guys had to be pulled out of the fight, hamstrung or crippled by grasping claws. The SAR Teams were on them, obliterating the Crabs trying to swarm them, Healing magic coming down to get them on their feet and allow them to hold out until the main force could reach them, or a Plant could pull in around them and help with its defense.

The Beast Tides of the Summoned herds exited through silvery Gates back to the Beast Realm, having plowed a path hundreds of yards wide and over a mile long, dotted now with vivisizing Crabs bombarded by the Avians following up on their rampage. Rolling walls of Spikes and thrusting Plants from below were advancing on the horde, instead of forming walls against it.

Flense and Butcher spells were starting to grind out against masses of Crabs, accessing my Sanctum’s storage area with my permission to dump a lot of Crab meat into storage there. I saw Big John pull a big cauldron out of his Pocket, heat it up, and then start grabbing pincer and leg meat out of the Flensing he had going, dipping it and then tossing it around for everyone to enjoy.

Multi-pound Crab meat dripping with butter was almost heavenly good, and even the Beasts enjoyed the combined taste. As there was more than enough meat for everyone, he soon had a constant line of Beasts flying past, striding past, snatching Crab out of the air, while the Casters grabbed their own handfuls and chowed down, even if they didn’t need to eat.

Yeah, it was good stuff.

Thousands of tons of Crab meat was stacking up in the Sanctum for use, while massive carapaces and claws, both suitable for alchemical treatment and Armor or Weapon use, were piled up outside after being stripped of flesh and organs as the rest of the Crabs burned and Fed the Land. Nothing was left around to break them down, so they’d last for years if we couldn’t get the salvagers here to make use of them... and we definitely could.