Dedahvrov's Diary - Entry III

He was now staring at the bottom, with its nearly hypnotic patterns made up by broken hedrons, gigantic coral formations and brightly colored algae and sponges. There was surely some venomous thing every other two square feet, or so he thought. All of this was invisible to even most of the sea creatures that lived there, because the night hosted only a very thin crescent and many voluminous clouds, with the stars coming out at intervals. The warrior could see this well only because he was not human, not anymore at least. His shadow-infused eyes were perhaps even more at ease in the darkness than in the light.

He was estimating that some three-to-four dozens strokes ahead, the reef would have been at his feet's reach. He also spotted some movement ahead, a reddish mass encircling a hedron, recognizable by the glowing light coming from the engraved part. It could have been anything from this distance. And so could have been the bright things that were bouncing on the bottom. First one, than two, then other two more quickly. They advanced at a certain speed and then stopped, as if their propulsion had been sucked up by the water. And that was the case. They were small pebbles being thrown by someone trying to catch his attention. But he didn't take the hint.

He saw the eyes only after feeling the suctions on his armor. Two big eyes, distanced by many feet, they were either incredibly reflective or outright luminous. A head hosting those two eyes should have been enormous. But luckily or not, it turned out to not be a head, not a single one anyway. The eyes diverged, and after the initial split-second of shock, Vurokk could recognize the shapes of two incredibly large cuttlefishes, evidently one-eyed, 10 or more feet below. Even from there, they managed to attach their longest tentacles to his armor. A pair managed only to cause him some pain, pulling his leg while lashing back to the cephalopod, the other pair did the same, but the pain Vurokk felt was way more serious: something was seemingly burrowing inside a junction of his chitin plates. Just when he extracted his large doubly-curved blade, the two cuttlefish rotated in some way, hiding their eye and they disappeared from his view. Not a second later, he disappeared from everything and everyone's view too.

My god, a parasite-barb attached... It will continue to burrow in his flesh if it stays close enough to the parent. He must kill the parent, but how can he spot them? I can see them but... If I go out and signal their position, they will spot me too, and I'll be dead meat before he can protect me. I left my harpooner-crossbow on the ship! Oh my... Maybe if I could attract his attention better than before...

Vurokslaw was not going to last much longer invisible, and his attempts at extracting the strange barb failed, so he could just hold tight and prepare for the worst. Then suddenly a luminous animal of the likes of a slug popped out from nowhere, bouncing about on the cluttered seabed in a curled-up fleshy wheel. The bottom reflected only its light a bit. Until it bounced over a patch devoid of algae. Which reflected the animal as a mirror. The shape was there, it was the cuttlefish in an incredible camouflage. Vurokk held his breath and bited on his branch-tube to bring it along while he dived still invisible. He planted a pointed extreme of his broad blade right in the middle of the thing, which emitted a pitched sound and let out a viscous cloud of blood from the throbbing wound. The eyes of Vurokk glowed green and a flare of blue-green energy resembling flames enshrouded the strange animal, which hit back with the smaller but more densely barbed tentacles, causing many small cuts on Vurokk's armored arms. Murenae sinuously popped out from their hideouts in the crevices to participate in the feast, most of them aiming for the smaller prey, 6 feet 2 inches Vurokk. When some of the bites connected with his flesh, Vurokk channelled the essence of Fury in a blow so mighty that all the murenae seemed to vanish in that very instant, so fast was their retreat. The strength was coming directly from them and their predatory instinct, from the cuttlefish's blood, from his pain. The slicing blow was devastating, leaving the big cuttlefish's head split open. Still alive, it swam erratically away, finally stopping and starting to float upwards when the eerie flames coming from Vurokk's channeling erupted again from the gushing wound. The monster was dead. But its hunt-mate wasn't.

The warrior headed back for the surface just in time before starting to suffocate. He noticed the burrowing barb detach from his leg and quickly start to fall down in the depth. He didn't even think anything, relief was all he got in his mind.
He located his breathing branch-tube and submerged a bit to look for other threats. And he only managed to see a mass colored of a crimson red, advance at blazing speed towards him, rightly from where the branch was nearly floating. It rammed his torso with its mantled-head. It was the other cuttlefish, colored to match its rage at the loss of its partner, as Nahdu knew and witnessed in fearful astonishment from below.

What can I do now, What can I do now to help him? Nothing. Nothing would distract the vampire-cuttlefish now that it's frenzied.

Vurokk was sure about this even without having any knowledge of these vampire-cuttlefishes: his killer instinct was very able to recognize itself when looking into a mirror. He was starting to loose blood from the now open wound were the barb was, and the ramming of the 20 feet monster left him breathless for too many seconds to be counted. He had to reach the branch-tube, but the huge predator wasn't passable terrain. He quickly glanced around while keeping his falchion in a defensive position towards the invertebrate. The reef was near now, but so was the hedron and the strange colored mass that encircled it. Which revealed itself to be a really enormous and extremely heavy-looking crab. Its claws were latched on the hedron, so maybe it couldn't attack fast enough to represent a threat. Anyway, he had to reach the high reef, and the nearest spot was there, few feet from that new monstrosity.
Vurokk waited for the scavenger fishes to approach the fighting, and then channelled again the collective fury in a mighty strike that severed one of the big tentacles and one of the smaller ones of the blood-red and swollen cuttlefish. He focused for some reason on its skin, which looked corrugated, forming little spines that weren't there before. It was as if it had undergone a metamorphoses. Then he swam top-speed on the surface towards the reef and the gigantic crab, which didn't look startled by the movement, although strange appendages where its mouth or head should have been started moving rhythmically. The cuttlefish was in the middle of a contortion, partly from the pain, and partly for aligning its only eye again towards the prey.

Vurokk could not see what the cuttlefish was doing while he was finally standing up on something solid and emerging out of the water with his torso. But he could manage to see what the crab was doing. And he didn't understand what it was: he just noticed the hedron rotate in the crab's pincers, flash, and then he felt like falling, but up in the air. Suddenly, he drunk the extremely salty water of the low lagoon: a sphere of water the size of the crab itself had come up from below and was now engulfing him, some 30 feet up in mid-air. A pair of man-sized Stone-crescent fishes and an entire portion of the reef were swimming in the reversed bubble too. He grabbed the coral and started to push with his legs with the frog-stroke he knew how to put to good use. He felt the coral get very heavy once one extremity of it went out of the bubble, and then suddenly the bubble burst, so to speak, and he felt gravity again. He managed to get on top of the falling reef in those crucial seconds, so that when the thing hit the water, the lower potion of it crashed into the still-standing reef while the rest inclined itself towards the crab. He had just successfully climbed the crab as an invader coming out of a siege engine. He allowed himself to breath frantically laying face and palms up on the big and rather flat carapace of the crustacean. He thought it was trying slowly to reach for him with a claw...

"Stupid beast, I noticed that your junctions don't allow this movement, do you think I'm that crazy to stay on top of you like if I wanted to copulate with your ass, without fearing retaliation? I had all calculated, I won! I SURVIVE! You can't eat me, and sadly you can't even kiss my ASS. Sadly, 'cause that's what you should do."

But hearing in response a very strange hissing sound coming from what should have been the big pincer wasn't something he had calculated, so he focused his eyes better, raising his head from the resting position he had so gladly reached. It wasn't a pincer, it was the cuttlefish! Even more swollen, inflated actually, it was actually flying towards him, tentacles twitching in a maddened murderous attempt. Vurokk could swim quite well, but with the thing now airborne... It was a lost battle. He seemed to blur for a moment, and he rolled down from the crab, hiding as only a shade could. When the cuttlefish slowly flew, now vertical on top of him, he jumped from the crab leg junction he was using as a perch and ended up landing an uppercut with his blade, severing another pair of small tentacles. The hiss of the creature became so highly pitched and resounded so much in that gas-chamber that it now was in its entirety, that Vurokk's very brains hurt. And the crab started moving backwards.

Vurokslaw had used his last shadow trick to become invisible in the moment he hit, but staying on top of the crab now was impossible, so he had to dive, inevitably splashing. The flying red devil dived too immediately after hearing the splash, but was seemingly still half-full of gas, able to submerge only tentacles and eye, the mantle still aloft. While the crab was still walking the reef, Vurokk had to use his lasts seconds of invisibility to get near it again, while the tentacles were nearly caressing his armor. He had moved away from their reach when suddenly, with a mighty and unexplainable feat of movement the cuttlefish went up again and then dived with such a speed that it caused big waves in all directions, sending the warrior crashing dangerously towards the reef. The beast found itself at the bottom in a split-second, raising a big cloud of dirt and algae. Now both the warriors were again unaware of each other's position.

Vurokk's invisibility had ended, but he managed to cleverly hide in a crevice of the reef, able to breath when he needed to without loosing cover or field of vision. But it was a stall until he located the devil fish. He could not abandon that tight position.
He started concentrating on the many luminescent animals around, hoping that one could mess up with the creature's camouflage by mirroring unnaturally on its skin like before. What he spotted was different but not less useful: a school of those sunset shrimps moving erratically, always in patterns reflecting the hedrons below even here where they were broken. They seemed to be chased by something, so much that he thought the cuttlefish was behind. He managed to see a fast and sleek silhouette but it was small, no cuttlefish. Until the dancing orange crustaceans formed a very curiously-shaped pattern at one point. Roughly the silhouette of a 6 meters-long cuttlefish. It was just a moment, but it marked the position well enough.

With a very slow approach, maintaining cover as well as he could, the warrior approached the point of reef nearest to the beast and then dived enshrouded in his last conjured shadows, using as a diversion the moment in which one of the crab's "steps" from behind made all the reef tremble. He was nearly ready to strike when the cuttlefish sensed him despite the shrouding magic. A tentacled wrestle ensued, and the air in his chest started to be all too precious. All he could do was puncture the fleshy thing with his arm-blades, and hope that it would go up instead of down. The beast became of a dark sick green. It then started to jet-propel itself in random directions, even jumping again over the surface, with Vurokk's blade latched to it and Vurokk himself in tow. The smaller tentacles had reached his neck though.

He was starting to see black and loose the sense of direction completely when he heard a loud snap and a splash. Three feet from him, nearly half of the cuttlefish's body was floating, now of a pale white, spilling guts and undigested bits in the dark waters. He was lying painfully on the partially emerged reef, and big spiky hairs as long as his arms were inches from perforating his eyes. They were attached to big and red chitinous legs. A hedron lied on a side a few more precious inches from his head, and crunching and rubbery sounds came from above while the biggest and strongest was now eating the ex-predator. He could just silently begin to move on all fours trying not to get ripped by the coral or the crab spiky carapace, and reach the shore. It was maybe 50 steps from him all this time.

Without a single thought in his mind, he crawled towards the first karst-crevice he could find, remembering the similar formations in the Pelakka Karst in Guul Draaz, a place he knew as if it was his home. He got himself in one of those tight but seemingly comfortable cavities and closed his eyes.

Yes, I never felt so good as today, I can affirm it.

Meanwhile, a very hard-to-spot merfolk was lying face-down on a big overarching branch sprouting outwards from the calcite framework intertwined with the mangrove, now a true portion of the famous Oran Rief of Tazeem.

He did it... He's an incredible warrior. He managed to channel the cold fire again while in the air before a 55 fins-long dive which probably drove him unconscious. The cuttlefish was already long-dead when the crab returned there and started eating it. I'm happy to have been able to help a bit. Who knows what could have happened if I didn't follow him. Did I save his life? He will never know anyway...