Ripper Swarms

Rippers are the swarm at its most elemental, small and maggot-like organisms bred in numbers beyond counting for a single purpose: to consume. They are the fleet's harvesters, the teeming multitude that renders a conquered world down into raw biomass, and it is their ceaseless labour that gives the Tyranids their terrible reputation for stripping planets to bare rock in a matter of weeks.

Individually a Ripper is a negligible thing, but that is never how they are encountered. In a heaving carpet they can pull down and devour creatures many times their size, smothering and dismembering anything too slow to flee. They are utterly mindless, however, little more than appetite given shape, and a Ripper brood severed from the guiding pulse of the Hive Mind will swiftly perish, its purpose lost.

Once gorged, the swarms crawl to the base of the towering capillary structures that grow across an invaded world and tip themselves into the reclamation pools there. In that churning digestive soup, both the Rippers and everything they have eaten are broken down into their component matter and drawn up into the fleet, to be reforged into fresh organisms and monstrous new bio-constructs.