The hydra took one look around the forest and then located one of the dark holes in the ground. In the in-between, it had spoken extensively with its fellow wakeful souls, and while their body had grown tremendously during this iteration, what they really needed was to find easy prey or a place to hide and regroup in relative safety. And there was still one avenue that they hadn't explored.
The [[Darkness Below]].
The dark hole yawned large before them, but a quick application of Max's power granted the hydra a form of infrared sight. Heat became visible, and the dark surroundings quickly acquired pale blue and white tones with only a slight red glow from the hydra itself. Meanwhile, Aevum worked to muffle the sound of their travel into the tunnel by judiciously applying his slow field to the ground beneath their feet.
The darkness wound further and the earth never really hardened into prop stone. There was a large amount of water in the walls, turning the material into a thick semi-solid mud rather than proper bedrock.
With nothing warm to guide their vision, Max switched the Brand to grant them a weak tremor sense. This deep in the earth, it was superior to infrared sight, and they made swift progress after that.
Despite the initial tunnels looking as if they had been formed by roots, the path they trod never dead-ended. Instead, it eventually flattened out into horizontal tunnels that only occasionally descended deeper.
Rounding a final corner, the hydra came across their first living creature. It was warm, but only slightly more than the surrounding earth. A complete status was also impossible to examine as that would remove their ability to sense the earth around them. All the hydra could tell was that it was vaguely rounded, slightly smaller than it, and possessed 8 narrow legs.
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It appeared distracted by something on the muddy wall, and after ensuring it was alone, the hydra lunged.
Three separate sets of teeth slammed into the strange creature's body in unison. They were briefly stemmed by a hard carapace-like armor before some quick thinking flipped the creature and attacked its more exposed underside.
The creature struggled, scratching at the hydra, but that only slathered wriggling vampiric blood onto it. In seconds, its wounds were infected, and the inevitable degeneration began.
Whatever it was died moments after, and Google took a victorious bite out of the creature's underbelly. It tasted like salty fish. Satisfying, though, they did wonder if they even needed food to sustain themselves, considering they had yet to feel hunger. On the other hand, they hadn't ever survived long enough for that to matter.
What followed was relatively restful. To every head's surprise, the deep dark seemed almost peaceful compared to the overworld. The beetle-like carapace-covered creatures were semi-ubiquitous, solitary, and almost trivial to deal with. Especially since, with the combination of Max's and Aevum's Brands, they could almost always ambush the small-minded creatures.
The hydra kept sneaking through the tunnels, thinking and dealing with the nameless creatures as it descended deeper. Only after nearly two hours of constant travel did the hydra find a change in the tunnel system.
The winding paths opened up into a large chamber for the first time in forever. Dozens of tunnel entrances dotted the sides of the cavern, with no regard for up or down. In the center of the chamber, the hydra sensed a large creature nursing a brood of smaller creatures.
These were distinct from the beetle creatures from before. The creature almost reminded the hydra of itself in a way. It was snakelike, with a long neck and tail and a larger body, though it only had two arms optimized for digging instead of four legs used for walking.
Infrared sight was useless against it, as the creature and its brood were as cold as their environment. Though the mother—presumably—was feeding the young a corpse of something that used to have been warm, the young were chirping loudly as they tore into the food patiently provided by that large monster.
Luckily, none of the creatures had noticed the hydra looking down on it from above.
What do you do?
[[A Subterranean Meeting]]