Chapter 17-444: The Deepsea, Part II (1/2)

There were massive sea serpents in the waters here, and at least some kind of intelligent, psychic, acid-spitting worm just as big. Great whales with pale flesh and echolocation picked up Legion’s location in the air at one point, and a hundred-ton brute surfaced and tried to use a sonic wave to smash them out of the air.

Legion grabbed the silly thing and tossed it for a quarter mile through the air, letting it learn not to do that again. They could hear a lot of whale calls going out thereafter, and for the rest of their trip, not a single pod of whales they saw anywhere disturbed them.

There were monstrous sharks, and humongous eels, kraken-sized squid, and octopi (but no kraken), turtles and crabs the size of small islands, lizards that could munch on crocodiles for snacks, and of course fish of unnatural size and strength, somehow vital enough to support all the supersized things around.

There was a lot of fungi, lichen, molds, and algae around, and the creatures fed on a lot of it. Legion could only assume that it was the cause for the inordinate size of things.

There were a couple airborne attacks aimed at them, but only when they were moving very slowly. The first was a colony of giant bats whose group sonar saw them coming from some distance, and got into the air to make a mess in time to intercept them.

They were not very happy when Legion simply sped up and blew right through them behind a shaped Ward Wall, sending broken bats flying in every direction as they kept right on going, and the sea boiled with fish having fresh lunch behind them.

The second time was a spider web that covered nearly half a kilometer, strung between two pillars. The spiders that wove it were definitely the biggest Legion had ever seen, legs like pillars somehow still managing to anchor themselves against stalactites... and the size of the web meant it was meant to be released and fall upon big creatures in the water below, not just nab fliers.

They Rode the Shadows past the things, little more than a breeze as they flitted between dozens of the monstrous webs covering many miles of area. If the spiders could see them as they avoided the great webs, their dark eyes just gleamed and they made no efforts to respond.

At the very least it confirmed that the Felldeep had managed to keep a level of magic active that completely exceeded that in the outer world, supporting so many monstrous creatures that should have died under their own weight.

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Cerebrovores. The brains on chicken legs didn’t actually show themselves, but the port full of various species of creatures, from muuk to simians, all interacting in silence and interfacing with some horrid insect-reptile things that were born from implanting in other creatures called xenosyms, basically gave them away.

Just to be on the safe side, they swooped down, picked off a straggler, cracked open the skull of the thing giving off the subtle scent of death delayed, and when the cerebrovore expanded out of the empty braincase, they crushed the stone-hard body of the thing in their hand, much to its disbelief that anything of flesh could be so strong. They tossed the mangled alien fungi-brain into the waters after setting it on vivic fire, not about to spread its genes any more than they already were.

They wondered what down here was keeping the numbers of these creatures in check, and then calculated that all the other forces down here might be doing that. In particular, the cephalids and cerebrovores did not have a friendly relationship, and the former were the more powerful mentalists. They probably considered the cerebrovores the equivalent of a mouth-wateringly ripe melons prancing around in front of them.

There were trillotsur here, a race of Axiomatic-leaning crystalline humanoids of inscrutable aims and purposes, motives unknown and alien, making a town of polished crystals in strange geometries and layout that had a greater purpose related to the laws of reality in the area... and likely resonated extremely well with the strata, amplifying the psi-deadening effect into their territory and likely warding off a lot of mutant creatures and Aberrant things about who didn’t want to go into a psi-dead area.

What purpose they had down here wasn’t likely to be friendly to organic life, either. The Hedrons were the most reactionary of the Axiomatics to mess around in the mortal world, being drawn energetically to Chaos incursions, but they were also known to come to the call of the trillotsur...

The discovery of the ghostly bone city of the krovboynyar brought Legion up short.

The Strata was diffusing the effects of the Shroud...

Depth of the mantle must have had something to do with it. It made sense, of course. The Aberrants down here, with the uncounted numbers of slaves they had slain over the eons, should have ignited Shroudzones everywhere in this realm.

There was nothing.

The krovboynyar were a mutant race of native outsiders, descended from daemonic influences, like a more intensely deathly version of the Tomb Clans. They were a Tomb-Tainted species, with transparent flesh and phosphorescent glowing bones, looking very undead, and could basically be treated like such for most effects, for all that they had children of their own.

They could only get older and stronger by feasting on the energy of positive energy life forms, too, so as a species they were driven to war all the time.

The cerebrovores had the closest port to them, so the inland caverns were probably bordering one another, too... so the brains were likely on someone else’s menu, too.

If the Shroud claimed the surface, the undead would naturally pour into all other places there was life as well, including the Felldeep and the oceans. When it got to the krovboynyar, it would instantly ensnare them as it’s kind of tools, not even needing to make them undead.

They were probably terrified of leaving the Utterdeeps and being taken by the Shroud. Legion could appreciate that fear, but they were a negative energy species, literally vampiric walking death, and the only thing the Land wanted out of them was vivic munchies.

They would have to die regardless.

Legion winged their way onwards, painting miles and miles of the Deepsea into The Map, and thinking about how huge it all was... and yet, in Demonium, there were entire worlds that were made up of nothing but endless caverns like this...