Kalli shrugged at the curious students as the skeletons pulled the dead gator monster over to the wall, where Esmeralda had already started a summoning ritual.

The gator slowly rose to its feet, and the hole in its head began to mend, leaving a fleshy wound where the scales were missing. Then, it joined the pig men at the front of the group, and they waited to see what else might be coming their way.

There was a quest to clear the area, so they would have to leave the Academy soon.

But first, everyone wanted to get a better idea of what they were going to find, and how strong it was. Until they knew that, nobody wanted to be away from reinforcements.

"More incoming. I don’t even know what to call these."

"Dinner, that’s what those are," Kalli decided.

They looked like giant coconut crabs, if coconut crabs got to the size of a small car.

And there were dozens of them.

"Skip the shell attacks, aim for the eyes and frontal area between the claws. That’s the only way to seriously injure most crabs." Sanchez warned.

The crabs seemed to know that as well, and the moment that Kalli started to shoot, they began to cover their faces with one massive claw.

"Fine, aim for the leg joints."

The legs were much more fragile than they looked, and the first shot that Kalli put into one caused the limb to completely detach. That was a win, no matter how she looked at it. A hundred kilo crab leg would be a veritable feast, assuming it was edible.

Within seconds, the crab had lost four legs, and the pincer was finally deployed to balance itself, so it didn’t topple over forward before it could even get to the undead.

That was the opening that Sanchez needed, and a single laser beam penetrated the creature between the eye stocks, causing the crab to collapse.

"That’s the method. The Crabs are tough, likely three or four times tougher than the Swineherds or the Rat Demons, but they can be taken down. Ranged fighters to the walls, aim at the legs until they uncover their faces," Kalli shouted.

If the monsters could speak human languages, they were in big trouble, giving away their strategies. But if the creatures had the intelligence to understand human strategies, the Academy might well be doomed anyhow.

Her only real hope was that this event was rated as a Hard Mode mandatory quest by the System, which meant that it should be something that they could do with just a moderate amount of risk.

However, the pure number of crabs suggested that there was a definite line between "Easy" and "Hard" and the line was definitely somewhere past "You can stay on the wall and just shoot them".

"Teams, form up. There is no maximum group size for this quest. We need you outside the walls while the snipers stay here and lighten the load. There are more crabs coming from every direction, and they’re not alone." Kalli shouted, encouraging the others into action.

The students all had teams prepared, but they chose to combine them so that they were in groups of ten instead of their usual five-person groups.

That gave them a bit more flexibility when dealing with the crabs, so they could surround the beast and try to take out the legs, while the warriors harassed the front and kept those nasty looking claws busy.

Kalli changed targets, and popped another leg off a crab, then realized she had a small problem.

"Esmé, Darling..." She began in a fake posh accent that made the Necromancer laugh.

"Yeah, yeah. I will send the skeletons to go collect all the legs that you’re shooting off. I swear, you’re more focused on dinner than survival."

Sanchez and the Ranger on the other side of him both laughed as the little skeletons rushed out and struggled to bring a hundred plus kilogram crab leg back to the gates.

"Someone get Gerry. He can bring this back to the kitchens for testing. If it’s good, we will collect as many as possible. I’ll store them when we get low on space in the Academy fridges."

On Kalli’s left, Hakim cast a [Fireball] at a crab that made a leg joint explode with a sizzling hiss.

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t think that we’re going to run out of crab meat any time soon. Look out to the ocean with your scope."

Kalli turned to look out over the ocean and realized the issue. The whole dock area was covered in crabs moving in and out of the ocean. They weren’t an invading force, or any sort of transient. They were local wildlife, and they were plentiful.

But they were also prey to larger creatures.

"Well, that’s our food supply sorted anyhow. We can clear these out, see what else is in the area, and then secure a few blocks around the Academy.

But you know what I don’t see? I don’t see any signs of battles that aren’t between monsters. There are no new fires, there are no fights next to buildings. There should be some sort of sign that the other survivors are fighting back against the invasion, but I don’t see anything at all.

Surely, they couldn’t have all fled the city?"

The unspoken part of her question lay heavy between them. Surely, the residents of the Academy, and the single building of survivors that they had protected, couldn’t be the only ones left alive in the entire city.

But Kalli’s brain was doing the math anyhow.

The Sergeant and the Commander had both said that the rate of Awakening was roughly one in a thousand among the general population. If the army had rounded up as many of them as possible, the pure number of people to every available awakened resident was so high that there was no way they could hold out.

Plus, they had left with a thousand or more Academy Residents, and likely most of the others who had been recent graduates or employees, once they realized the pattern.

And Kalli had no doubt that they had, in fact, known the pattern from very nearly the start of this incident.