Chapter 600: A Shocking Event
“Coming? What is it?”
Before Roland could follow the question with anything else, the ground answered it.
The soil heaved and cracked with a sound like something fundamental giving way. The black stone tower — the reconstructed tower, Summer’s image — jolted into the air. A shape tore up through the split earth, and the shape had a mouth: an enormous crimson cavity that opened around the tower the way a hand might open around a fist. Fluid sprayed from the creature’s skin in sheets as it rose. The tower hung above the abyss for a moment.
No sound. Summer’s retrospection was silent, which made it something like watching a film — the violence present in every frame, the absence of noise giving the whole event the quality of a fever. The witches who had no experience of theatres reacted as the source material intended: several cried out, several stepped back, and Ashes moved in front of Tilly with her hand already on her sword, instinct arriving well ahead of rational assessment.
Then the second creature became visible, and the scene became stranger.
The base of the tower had not been a base at all. The Tentacle Monster had fused itself to the structure’s exterior so completely that from above or below, it was indistinguishable from stone — black body against black rock, only the small stars of red-glowing scale indicating something alive. Now, lifted, it deployed its limbs against the Megamouth Beast’s palate and upper jaw, bracing the creature’s mouth open with a sustained pressure that was clearly costing it. From the scales a dark mist discharged — almost black, corrosive — rolling against the Megamouth Beast’s wet skin wherever contact was made.
The erosion was real. It was not sufficient.
The Megamouth Beast was too large. The Tentacle Monster was bracing a jaw roughly the size of a city gate, with tentacles, against a body that could have swallowed Agatha’s laboratory in one motion. The tower lifted by centimeters. The Tentacle Monster was compressed between the closing jaw and the rising structure, crushed in stages, and when the tower finally slid into the Megamouth Beast’s throat, the Tentacle Monster followed it.
The Eye Demon never moved.
It had sat at the top of the tower from the moment the ground first cracked. Through the Megamouth Beast’s emergence, through the Tentacle Monster’s death, through the swallowing of the tower — motionless, apparently unperturbed, making no attempt at self-preservation. And then the tower was gone and the Eye Demon was gone with it, still in the same posture.
The reconstruction ended. Red Mist and giants dissolved. The empty hole in the ground was the only evidence that any of it had occurred.
Roland realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out slowly. His heart was making itself felt in an unprofessional way, and the scene had been silent.
A long quiet passed through the group.
“That wriggling monster,” Tilly said, finding her voice first. “The one that came through the Misty Forest — that’s what we just saw?”
“The Megamouth Beast, yes.” Roland looked at Agatha. “But not something controlled by the demons.”
“That’s my conclusion as well.” Agatha had clearly rehearsed this. “There’s no record of anything like it from either Battle of Divine Will. If demons could command Megamouth Beasts, they would have done so against Taquila — underground approach, senior demons riding through the rock, past the city walls entirely. Taquila would not have survived.” She paused. “These are not tools. They act for their own reasons.”
Tilly’s brows pulled together. “Then whose reasons? Something coordinated the mantis attack Nightingale found. These things have plans.”
“Or they don’t.” Nightingale spread her hands. “Hybrids aren’t ordinary beasts — the Months of Demons proved they can think. Maybe they just want something, and what they want brought them here, and nobody gave the order.” She considered this. “Given enough time, they might be smarter than us.”
The group laughed. The tension cracked open and drained away. The image of creatures that existed primarily to wrestle through underground mud developing geopolitical objectives was too absurd for sustained fear.
Roland did not laugh.
He was looking at the hole, and he was thinking about the question of what constituted intelligence. His own world’s assumption — that human cognition was the apex, the standard against which everything else was measured — had always been contingent on the fact that human beings were the ones doing the measuring. In a world where the relevant environment was dark, wet, pressurized, and lightless, what would evolution have selected for? Not language. Not fire. Not the kind of pattern-recognition built for open grasslands and social hierarchies. Something else. Something that might look, from the outside, entirely like instinct, and might be anything but.
He kept this thought to himself.
“Why didn’t the Eye Demon try to escape?” Andrea said. “You said the whole camp wakes the moment it sees something.”
“Because the Megamouth Beast didn’t see it.” Agatha’s tone was the patient one she reserved for explanations she had already worked through completely. “Eye Demons respond to being observed — they enter reactive state when a perceiving entity looks at them. The Megamouth Beast has no eyes. No light-sensitive organs of any kind.”
“It doesn’t need them,” Roland said. “It lives underground permanently. Eyes are expensive to develop and maintain — metabolically costly, structurally complex. An organism that never encounters light has no use for light-sensitive organs. Natural selection eliminates the expense.” He crouched at the edge of the cavern and looked down. The torchlight reached perhaps two meters. Below that, absolute dark. “Lightning.”
She materialized next to him with the speed of someone who had been waiting for permission.
“You want me to go down.”
“I want you to fly through the tunnel and report what direction it runs. Then come back.” He looked at her. “He ate demons after all. Not Agatha. You are not catching him.”
Lightning’s expression contained everything she was choosing not to say about this restriction. She had her portable torch out before she finished the expression. She lit it, sat down at the edge of the hole, and dropped.
The group waited.
A few minutes passed. Then: “The exit’s over here! Can you see the torch?”
Nightingale turned in a slow circle. She stopped facing southeast.
Roland stood and looked at what was behind her.
The snowcapped mountains rose above the treeline, filling the eastern and southern sky. Their peaks disappeared into cloud. The glaciers on their upper slopes caught the afternoon light and held it, a white so bright it was almost colorless. He had looked at those peaks from the demon camp on his first survey and thought of them as backdrop.
He was not thinking of them as backdrop now.
Tilly had come to stand beside him. “We were wrong,” she said quietly. “The demonic beast in the Misty Forest wasn’t traveling to Devil’s Town. Or not only to Devil’s Town.” She looked at the same peaks he was looking at. “It was heading for the snowcap.”
“It appears so.” Roland did not look away from the summit. Whatever was up there — whatever the Megamouth Beast was moving toward, whatever the tunnel led to, whatever had drawn it through kilometers of solid rock — was in that mountain. In his mountain. In the highest point of the Western Region, a place he had looked at for years and never thought to investigate.
“Which means,” he said, “we need to know what’s inside that mountain.”