Sugar Hermits

Small tentacled scavengers that wear skulls the way a snail wears a shell, feeding on brains and bone and expert at extracting both. The System AI painted their borrowed skulls in Day of the Dead colours for the broadcast and set tens of thousands of females migrating down the Heat Three track toward the giant skull at the finish line. Inside each shell sits a purple, octopus-like body whose dozen barbed tentacles reach out through the eye sockets on a trail of hovering slime. They arrive in four waves: a rolling rush at the start, twin twenty-foot tsunamis from both verges, a surge up through the asphalt, and finally a rain of them fired down out of the sky.

Book 8 appearances

• Chapter 30 — Dr. Metcalf announces the track will be shared with them; thousands roll past the starting line, one tries to tear the head off One Fine Pig's Draconian gunner, and the AI's info box takes credit for the paint job and points out where the migration is headed.
• Chapter 31 — Two twenty-foot waves converge on the road from either side once the invulnerability lapses; the ghouls' Biscuit Packs snag dozens at a time and Donut's Wall of Fire holds the passenger flank.
• Chapter 32 — Waves three and four come up through the asphalt and down from the sky, killing both of Carl's ghoul mercenaries, misting the cabin purple through the shattered windscreen, and swarming Tem's skull like fleas on a dog once they reach it.

Related entries

• Tem (Creature)
• Heat Three (Notification)
• Biscuit Packs (Item)
• The System AI (Character)

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