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.

---

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.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

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 its 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...

Their thoughts considered something as they swept past yet another of the covered galleys of Leng.

The weekend romps in Antarctica had been taken over by the other teams now, starting to specialize in the task, while the ‘seniors’ who’d been having fun were being redirected to more active fun roles away from the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Banes-hunting to break through to Eleven, mostly.

They still hadn’t gone anywhere near deep enough to see if there was actually a darksea under the center of Hyperborea anywhere. The odds that there wasn’t were... small.

Did that mean there was another way on or off Hyperborea, if you dared to ride on the edge of the waters of Dream with the Merchants of Leng? Leave it to Old Gods to put in a back door to their own hidey-hole for their own purposes...

------

Rkullu, the coral parasites, infecting other beings as building material for their own bodies.

Wermii, the worm parasites, infiltrating and taking over their hosts from inside, even passing bits and pieces of themselves back and forth sexually.

The Venerates in Flesh, possibly the ultimate evolved form of doppelgangers, a whole race of shapechangers and flesh warpers who were, to put it mildly, completely unhinged from normal standards of sanity... and the massive mounds of meat they eventually turned into didn’t help matters.

Combine them with the cerebrovores, and that meant the neh-thalggu, the brain collectors, were involved somewhere, as the two species basically represented the types of things the Compact of the Black was best at.

If the morkoth and the ixzichi manta-folk were down in the waters somewhere (unlikely, given the lethality of the place, but who knew?), that would just be the gross icing on this very unwelcome shitstorm of a cake.

I shook my head to myself as I went over Legion’s download into The Map. They had covered over twenty thousand miles over several days, following the Deepsea into Asia and even underneath parts of the Russian Shroud... and the Ghoul-City there, too. Even then, the Shroud didn’t reach past the Strata, held at bay by the slumbering weight of the planet and some very powerful magic from who knew when made by nobody anybody knew of, given the scale it was constructed at.

Finding out more shit to do as the world was getting slammed with disasters from the corrupt in their own ranks wasn’t doing anyone any favors.

The Churches of Harse, Valus, Aethra, Mithar, and Tiirith were on the job up above, however, and the Faiths of Amana, Flora, Aru, and Nuava were tireless bastions against the diseases and misery being spread by the uncaring, the mad, and the fanatical, as well as the opportunistic, criminal, and vengeful.

It was a rule among the Forsaken that the first Weapon Bane they took for Slaughter was always their own race. Now they were finding out why, as hunting traitors to the mortal races was starting to be quite the thing for fighters coming off the front line against Cultivators and undead, while finding themselves having to succor friends and family who as often as not were being particularly targeted for ‘special care’.

Special care was coming, right enough.

Inquisitorial teams were everywhere, and far, far more dangerous than the sots doing all this shit had any idea, since they too had been Leveling to beat the band in Asia, and were now putting their Double Helices to work.

It was pretty much a given that those pulling all this shit off hadn’t had the Leveling opportunities, as Aural scans were pretty much a requirement for joining any of the various teams, Allegiances, and other groups out there... and Allegiances who took people like that had been quietly marked for attention a long time ago, as well as all their members.

It had been to nobody’s surprise when suspiciously large numbers of those people had been involved in some deadly shenanigans, and so the tracking had continued... and with murderous violence, more discoveries of the unclean sort were made.

It was a crystallizing moment, as Powered fought Powered, crossing the lines of states and governments wildly in flight and pursuit, and native law enforcement simply couldn’t keep up with the demands of the chase.

The Candidates for Kings were naturally players in all this, extending out control and coordination in tandem, coolly organizing things and going around the bureaucracies that were far too slow to prevent things or catch those that had done it all.

They were also watching very closely those that were acting to slow down or stop this kind of pursuit of Evil-doers, and seeing who those people had ties to. There were sections of my Markchat just stacked up with spreadsheets of who was connected to who and how, and especially tracking the money, because even fanatics needed money to burn through, and where the money came and went solved a lot of tracking problems.

The world financial system probably would not have been happy to find out just how badly their ‘secure’ money transfer systems had been infiltrated by both law enforcement and vigilante teams, and how such agents got together to drink, shared rather too much private stuff with one another than most people would like to think about, and then went back to their jobs of killing the problem at both ends.

Kings got things done. I sat back and watched, healed plague victims, dispensed tens of thousands of Resist Diseases a day, and rode across the Indian Ocean, plotting the demise of krakens, eel-men, and wild sahaug tribes down in the deep.

Atomic weapons were moving out. The target date was to have everything in position on Halloween, and that was truly going to be a night and day of the dead.

September 23rd, the Autumn Equinox, came and nobody really noticed with the shithouse the world was in.