Though the black creatures bursting up through the mat all around them were technically leaches, they were so much larger than normal leeches up to the point of absurdity, and this lake alone claimed home to this gigantic strain of the species. As soon as they were on top of the mat, however, the second terrifying difference between them and normal leeches became obvious. They could move above ground. Their inky black bodies began to change the moment they were on top of the mat, taking on a longer and thinner form better suited for movement out of water. Once they finished their metamorphosis into a much more eel, or snake-like state, they immediately began slithering towards the Ooura standing closest to them.
Only one crisp moment later, Poh used the upswing of his most recent bounce to make a great leap away from his starting point at the center of the waves, sending himself flying dozens of feet away, and it was not more than three breaths until they all learned why. A purple tentacle the size of a tree burst through the mat in the precise location Poh had just been, and it immediately started flailing desperately for the source of such a significant disturbance as Poh had caused.
“Mother of all mud pillow,” Lonka muttered, watching as the bright yellow glowing lures dangling from all over the kraken tentacle's flesh left afterimages in his darkness-adjusted eyes.
Brahman caught two leeches just before they managed to attach onto his legs in one swipe with his free hand, then cleaved off both of their spiny, sucker-mouthed heads in one clean cut, tossing them to the side by a tree he was probably planning on using as a marker for where he would retrieve his prizes later. Besides Poh, the elder was the only one who spared no pause for the sight of the obscenely massive tentacle. Though, to his three brothers' credit, they quickly broke through their collective shock in order to focus on the more immediate threats posed by the leeches all around them.
Lonka sighed, looking around, trying to figure out some way to get out of this without being branded entirely a coward. The leeches were things of nightmare. He honestly liked his chances better with the kraken’s tentacle than them. So, while the others tangled with the eels, Lonka instead found himself climbing up into the low-lying and, unfortunately, sparse tree canopy.
“He runs again!” Poh called. “The greatest fisherman among us and you would think he would be attracted to the greatest lake in the known world like a bee to a flower!”
Lonka made a farting noise with his lips while he clambered above them all, making his way closer to where the single colossal tentacle sticking up through the mat was still desperately trying to catch hold of the threat to its domain. It had already caught some of the leeches by random happenstance, which were now stuck to its barbed sucker cups, and beginning to weigh it down, noticeably dimming the ferocity with which it moved.
Eventually, by the time Lonka was standing on the branch of a tree positioned right over top of it, the tentacle had caught enough things, both living and not, that it was too weighed down to move much at all. Less conveniently, it only took a moment for the tentacle to slither back beneath the surface and even less time for the next fresh tentacle to appear, again thrashing with all the ferocity the first one had, searching for the cause of the disturbance. In fact, if Lonka wasn’t mistaken, its reach was wider now. No doubt… he thought with dread, The Orux Eater is coming closer to the surface.
Thankfully for most of the others, they had already been chased out of the tentacle's attack radius by the pursuing eels. Poh, on the other hand, was tempting fate like he always did. He stood only barely far enough away that the tentacle hadn’t managed to snag him… yet. And it was only a matter of time before he would be in danger since the tentacle was gradually lengthening. Poh tossed three dead eels aside, grinning at the thrashing tentacle like a giddy child. Lonka just sulked above, watching his father's antics with a dissatisfied look on his face.
How Poh had managed to live this long, Lonka honestly had no idea.
Then again, his many scars told a different story. He had already lived a dozen lives, one for each of his sons. It was a known thing. The more sons you had, the stronger your own life force became, and so the more unlikely death was to find its mark falling on you. Lonka wasn’t overly superstitious, but it was hard to deny the proof standing within a lick of death below him, completely unphased.
Untill, all at once, he was very much phased.
Poh, stupidly, so, so stupidly, had tried to make a swipe at the tentacle during one of its flails in his direction, and though his knife had hit home, so too had one of the barbed suckers managed to pierce and latch onto his arm. For the first time in his life, Lonka saw fear on the man's face, though it was quite short-lived before his face was out of view as he was sent stumbling, taken along by the momentum of the huge fleshy arm. The moment the tentacle felt the heavy resistance against it, it must have known it had hit something worth prioritizing because it ceased trying to flail about randomly and instead started to focus on pulling Poh. Lonka could only watch as his father was pulled skidding across the mat towards the hole it had sprung out of.
Shit! Shit. Shit. Lonka bounded from branch to branch, following above Poh. A brief glance told him none of the others had noticed yet, all too preoccupied with their own battles. Poh had already drawn another knife with the hand he still had control over and was doing everything he could to cut himself free, but the tentacle was too thick, and he was being taken towards the water too quickly. He wouldn’t free himself in time. Lonka pulled out his largest knife, the one he hardly ever used but for cleaving fish heads off. Shitshitshitshit.
Lonka bit down on his fears and leaped from the safety of his branch.
He landed in a scramble, tangled up with his father and the tentacle awkwardly, not at all how he had hoped for–he wasn’t half as dextrous as the average Kothai, after all. Fancy maneuvers and heroic acts like this were more Banon’s speed. At the very least, he didn’t feel any barbs in him, but he certainly wasn’t ideally positioned to make use of his knife just yet. He flailed around uselessly until, by pure chance, their path took them dragged over a small hole in the mat one of the eels had used to burst through. Lonka reacted as soon as he felt his elbow catch in it, stabbing his fist straight down through it and hooking his knife sideways for a more substantial anchor point. In his other hand, he held onto his father by the ankle.
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The tension of all that weight snapping tight on him felt like it was going to rip his shoulders from their sockets, and he knew the knife was being pulled out of its wedged spot. Until it slowed, and to his surprise, it seemed he had halted things, at least for a moment. Lonka seized that moment to do the only thing he could think of.
“Help!” he screamed.
Tyube started sprinting for them without even taking the time to dispatch the eel that was still clinging onto his thigh. Tamil’s war cry could be heard but Lonka couldn’t see where he was, and Dartome? Dartome was already upon them, hacking at the base of the tentacle where it went into the mat.
“Not there, you half mind!” Brahman growled as he came to a sliding stop beside them. “Here!” he bellowed, and began hacking at the much thinner section of tentacle just below where Poh’s wrist was bound.
Lonka felt his anchor point in the mat beginning to tear out. “It’s pulling!” he yelled unnecessarily.
“It’s pulling,” Dartome mocked, acting with not half the urgency the situation called for as he strode over to help cut at the spot Brahman was directing them.
All three of his brothers and elder Brahman worked at once, slicing and cutting. Lonka gritted his teeth, vowing to never leave his fishing shack again. In fact, he would build a bed inside it, just so he never had to look Poh or anyone present here in the eyes after today.
And then his anchor gave way, and he was being pulled along with Poh again.
“Father!” Tamil shouted. It was not for the reasons Lonka had first thought, though. Tamil himself had been caught by one of the barbs now too.
Tyube tried to pursue but slipped. Dartome had been knocked on his back at some point, and Brahman was trying to pull back against the entire weight of the kraken with on his own, having not much of any effect without any point of purchase to anchor himself.
SHIT.
Lonka abruptly let go of his father, but he had not given up yet. Now freed from his useless pursuit as a dead weight working against a monster as big as a village, he lept forward and came to a hault on the edge of the hole Poh was mere feet away from being pulled into. From there, he waited until he saw the section they had been attempting to hack through together. The wound was far from clean, due to how frantic they had been, but he could see there was only perhaps three arm’s thickness of flesh remaining connected in the deepest recesses of it.
Just as the wounded section was about to slide over the mat’s edge and into the hole, Lonka raised his knife over his head, held in both hands, and swung down with all of the might of fisherman who wanted nothing more than to be anywhere besides in a situation like this one. The last vestiges of flesh severed and Poh came to a stop, still connected to the now lifeless tip of the tentacle–which was still no less than several feet in length.
After that, an underwater scream erupted that literally sent ripples through the mat on its own.
Poh blinked up at Lonka.
“We need to go!” He held out a hand to his father.
Poh took it, and with the help of the others who had just arrived, they collectively helped Poh, still attached to hundreds of pounds of tentacle, away from the hole. It wasn’t long before Poh got his legs under him and was ready to run, the tentacle chunk slung over his shoulders like it was nothing, and a grin on his face that was far too relaxed given the circumstances.
Behind them, Lonka was pretty sure he was hearing the sounds of something truly massive sliding up onto the surface, but he didn’t dare look back.
The rest of them barely had the time to retrieve the corpses of the leeches they had left while Lonka just kept his focus on dissuading Poh from turning to face the massive creature, because it was certainly something he wouldn't put past his father. To his surprise, though, Poh went along happily with the retreat. Too happily… in fact.
Lonka was beginning to suspect something was up with him, something even more than simply being content with taking home a single tentacle of The Orux Eater as his prize.
Poh made an obnoxiously satisfied noise as the troupe caught up with them again, and they were now all fleeing the scene together at a mild sprint, which was thankfully more than enough to outpace the leeches and the gaudy creature that had no business being out of water at its size.
“Goddess of the trees,” Poh said.
“Don’t say it,” Lonka warned. “I hate that the two of you think it's funny. The Dryad certainly wouldn't.”
Poh smiled widely at his son and delivered the second line of their dumb inside joke anyways. ”I shit myself.” Then he made a contemplative gesture with the hand that wasn’t still attached to a suction cup. “Somebody pick through it and see if you find a green gemstone. I still haven’t passed the one embedded in Dorse’s forehead, even after all these years.”
Tamil shook his head, Dartome grunted as if he was serious, and Tyube stared straight forward as they ran, a petrified expression on his face, and only a single leach slung over his shoulder.
Lonka closed his eyes and massaged either side of the bridge of his nose, unable to fathom how such an idiot had become their emperor. He froze in place, but it was already too late when he realized what he was doing. Fingers still pressed to his nose, he opened his eyes and glanced between everyone there, who had all stopped just ahead of him to stare back at Lonka. Poh started laughing first, and eventually, they all were, and then they were all howling except Brahman, all while Poh held his own nose bridge, mocking Lonka. The finger-to-nose bridge was the tic every man in their bloodline seemed to have without fail, the stress impulse that united all of them, even the most outlying personalities like Dartome, who Lonka was pretty sure shared more lineage with slow-moving slimy creatures than Poh. The night was looking to be a long one indeed.
Actually, it appeared the first colors of sunrise had already begun to fill the sky while they were all preoccupied with the chaos.
The day of rites had begun in earnest, then, though the ceremony itself would take place at the apex of tonight, so they still had much time to return–days were the longest when the summer festival took place.
Funny. As the sunrise broke above them, it was three notes more beautiful than it had ever been. Lonka supposed it would be when one knew just how close they were to missing it, and missing everything else for that matter. Lonka abruptly found his mind wandering to what else he might have missed if their tangle with the kraken had ended for the worse.
“Hmm,” Lonka mused out loud. “I wonder what Banon is doing right now.”
“Killing things,” Dartome guessed.