FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Leviathan Chapter 3

By Shalion

Leviathan's long legs permitted wandering large distances and she saw much of the territory and more of the plain than she imagined existing. She saw rivers and lakes and forests and many, many other creatures, large and small. She sampled whatever she was able and learned from their compositions many things about the environment and many strategies which would have never occurred to her.

Leviathan learned, for instance, about venom when she ingested a largish bug with large pincers and a stinger. The proteins inside her attempted to act aggressively toward her, so Leviathan learned that the animals on this world were capable of utilizing chemistry as a weapon as well. And Leviathan saw many flying creatures, aside from the bugs of yesterdays. They had feathers and light bodies. Leviathan thought that such an ability would be quite useful, but already her mass had increased such that a proper pair of wings for her would be very ungainly. Leviathan learned that not all the creatures breathed air, some breathed water through slits in their necks and others were able to utilize oxygen through the skin as she was able to. The many varieties of plants taught her about many curious and potent chemicals and compounds. Eventually, Leviathan had wandered so far away from where she had landed now years ago that she was not certain that she could have find her way back if she had had the inclination.

By becoming a successful hunter and utilizing biomass wherever it presented itself, Leviathan became successful and her body grew to match and then exceed the proportions of the largest cats that wandered the plain. Her back rose over the tops of the tallest grasses, but her bite was so fearsome, she could battle with creatures still larger than herself. One day, she decided to hunt the largest creatures she had found so far on the plain.

It was grey skinned and enormous. From experience, Leviathan knew that the hide was thick and would repel any but the most determined bite. One of its feet would have been able to crush her entirely when she had first emerged from the cocoon, but even now, she had to be wary of the long tusks and its sheer size, which was about half again larger than herself. This was not a weakling, though it was isolated, a rogue male. Leviathan would not have considered such as prey before now, but... something within her wanted to see if she could pull it off. If she could, that much biomass would fuel a grand growth spurt indeed and place her undisputed as a queen among the animals of the plain.

Stealthily, she approached as it was sleeping. It was standing, leaning against a large dead tree whose branches had been long ago rubbed away but whose trunk remained. Leviathan knew where its weak points where, the throat, and the back of the neck. From a large cat she had slain not long ago, Leviathan knew that the space between her fangs was just right to slip between the vertebrae of the large beast. The huntress paced forward silently and braced her muscles for action. Slowly, slowly, and then, she leaped!

The massive ungulate roared in rage as Leviathan landed on its back, sinking her claws into the hide, not to harm, but to hold her in place. The beast under her took off in a charge, jostling and shaking the heavy predator on its back, but nimbly, Leviathan swung with the creature and brought her head up to the base of the neck. Sensing danger, the bull elephant roared again and reared up on its hind legs, threatening to fall on her with its great bulk just as she had done with her very first foe. Leviathan leaped away, narrowly avoiding the same fate as the herbivore threw himself down with a thunderous crash that broke the ground under it.

Seeing opportunity, Leviathan ran, jumped again, landed on the massive rib cage and rushed to the throat. Leviathan parted her jaws and clamped down on the thick, grey hide, feeling the canines puncture through into red meat. But the herbivore rose regardless of the injury, still roaring. Leviathan had failed to puncture the windpipe. Leviathan twisted her grip, chewing, rotating the fangs, but not letting go for fear of losing her grip. She was nearly hanging on upside down as the creature righted itself and charged again recklessly forward into the dark Leviathan knew he could not see in.

Leviathan felt some structure in the neck give way and her mouth filled with a torrent of hot, tasty blood that she eagerly imbibed. Thus distracted, the predator failed to see the tree into which the ungulate ran himself, bashing the cat-like predator along with it. Leviathan was stunned from the impact and knocked free, tumbling to the ground as the bull charged through, breaking more wood beyond and leaking out a trail of blood. Leviathan lay where she fell, reviewing the damage to her body and repairing it from her reserves. She felt no need to pursue. She had sliced a major artery, the bull would slow, and possibly die from that wound alone, but hopefully not before Leviathan found him again.

Following the trail of blood spilt out of the elephant was easy, even in the dark as Leviathan had increased the keenness of all her senses. She found it lumbering a couple leagues away, just before dawn. Leviathan watched it from a distance, watched the life leaving it. 'Poor, pitiful, beautiful creature.' thought Leviathan as she saw it stumble and pick itself sluggishly from the ground. In the end, she could not bear to witness its suffering. Despite the risk, she charged and leapt, finding purchase again on its back. The bull roared, but it sounded half hearted as he bucked under her. 'Rest.' thought the predator as she nimbly came to the nape of the neck and bit cleanly through, severing the spine in one powerful bite. The elephant collapsed suddenly and Leviathan was thrown again to the ground. She picked herself up and found herself panting to increase her blood oxygen again. She surveyed the reward for her struggles and injuries and found her mouth watering.

It took three passages of the sun to complete her meal. Unlike the other large cats, Leviathan was able to process nearly all of the biomass of her target, including the hide and hooves, even the bones and tusks. Leviathan fueled a great expansion of her frame, increasing the size of her bones, muscles and sinews until she was as large as some of the slightly smaller varieties of ungulate which wandered the plain.

Leviathan was not able to increase her size by the full amount of what she ingested, however. Despite the rain of sunshine on her back, Leviathan found that photosynthesis was no longer sufficient to satisfy the needs of her body. The problem lay in the fact that as she increased in mass, her surface area increased at a much slower rate. Even as her back broadened and allowed more Calories to be generated, her body's needs increased exponentially faster. Thus, now Leviathan exhaled carbon all the time, despite how she wished otherwise and lost biomass. Also, the energy needed to transform the biomass in her gut into that which she wore on her bones was far from negligible. More than three pounds of eaten flesh was needed to put a pound of muscle on her, more for some tissues, less for others, the waste was exhaled on her breath, the fumes of the bio-industry inside her body.

Leviathan was still keeping solid waste inside her body, mostly silicates and excess calcium. It was now a mass in her abdomen larger than her liver, the largest internal organ in her body aside from her collective guts. She thought she would have to find a use for it soon, or be forced to expel it from her body.

In time, though, Leviathan found she needed the excess calcium. It happened one day not long after devouring the rogue bull and becoming a giant herself on the plain, that Leviathan threw herself onto the back of an ungulate of similar size to herself but which had a fearsome horn on the end of its nose. It threatened her with it and Leviathan was forced to leap away awkwardly. She landed with most of the weight on one foreleg and to her surprise, the bone in her leg broke in twain and with a cry, she fell on it. The prey animal charged toward where she lay prone and gored her in the belly for her trouble before apparently deciding to leave her for dead.

In earlier days, Leviathan might have indeed died from such an injury, for the horn had been fouled with many a microscopic lifeforms and they eagerly set about multiplying inside her torn and bleeding organs. However, Leviathan countered the threat with compounds that plants used to defend themselves and the wound was quickly sterilized. Holding her guts inside herself with her good hand Leviathan waited until the flesh could mend itself before turning her attention to her broken fore-leg. Both bones inside had snapped cleanly and Leviathan could fuse them together just by holding the leg in the proper position for a few hours. But more troubling was a single question : 'Why?'

Leviathan replayed the scene in her mind, the angle and speed and force she had landed on her leg. It had been hard to be sure, but not harder than it had been in the past... or was it? Suspicion dawned on Leviathan as she thought about the large ungulates' thick bones in comparison to those of cats. 'My design is flawed for my stature. Obviously I cannot scale up indefinitely.' And indeed, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to be the case. So Leviathan lay and healed and at the same time plunged into her supply of calcium from the bones of her meals to thicken and reinforce her own.

When Leviathan eventually rose, she was less of a leather-skinned cat than a hybrid of cat and rhino. To Leviathan's dismay, her success at hunting decreased despite the 'improvement.' The thick bones made Leviathan's limbs heavier and stiffer. It was more difficult to bend in certain ways despite the necessity to prevent breaks from hard use. Her footfalls were far from silent, in fact, her weight sometimes cracked the dry earth under them and always crunched the grasses she passed through, making a racket in the quiet nights. Stealth seemed like less and less of a valid option and all animals avoided her hungry gaze for large distances around her. Grass barely sated her, her mouth and jaws not designed to pull in the volumes she needed to sustain her large body. And to her horror, Leviathan began to lose weight, and not grow at all!

'Perhaps this is why none of the other predators have grown so large...' she thought one evening as she rested, hungry after a futile chase after a nimbler prey. She thought and thought about her predicament and there seemed little option other than the obvious. 'I must go back to grazing and browsing...' Though, returning to the diet of before seemed somehow unappealing, despite the many things she had learned since emerging from the cocoon and the fact that creatures larger than herself subsided on just such a diet. And then Leviathan remembered the forest from several months ago, far to the south on the horizon. It was a wetter land and seemed plentiful in biomass, but at the time, she had been having much success hunting on the plain and had not desired a change in the stream of biomass entering her hungry maw. 'I'll make the journey' decided Leviathan, 'And I'll make a new body for myself.'

Leviathan started a new change that very night, digging again a burrow within to hide as she metamorphosed. She emerged from the ground, lightened drastically for the energy tax, again round bellied, but with long sturdy legs for marching. Her neck was long and her tail also, the muscles stronger and more reactive than her previous herbivorous incarnation. She sported horns on her brow and the end of her nose and thick lips capable of manipulating objects and eating even spiked plants. Her jaws were long and thick with muscles for chewing, but she retained canines and had given herself a venomous bite in case of emergency. The changes were exhausting, and to preserve her size as much as possible, Leviathan emerged emaciated and low on reserves. There was no time to rest, of course. She pulled herself to her four large feet and began the business of grazing, filling her empty, aching stomachs and meandering to the south.

---

Leviathan slowly replenished herself as she crossed the plains, heading for the wetter country. She'd lost both weight and stature for the transformation, both sorely needed for her new design. Her most dangerous days were immediately after she started. The other animals were able to sense her weakness and no displays of aggression had been able to dissuade some stalkers. Her tail, which could move much more quickly and fiercely now, helped fend off packs of opportunistic hunters and scavengers, but what saved her in the end was the venom now produced in each hollowed canine. After watching a fellow carnivore fall convulsing to the ground less than a minute after encountering her teeth, pursuit usually slackened, at least for a while. And as a bonus, Leviathan was able to supplement her vegetarian diet with the meat she was now of course too slow and cumbersome to collect on a regular basis anymore. By the time she reached the edge of the plains where they intercepted the vast southern forest, she was as large and heavy as any great elephant.

Walking under the boughs of the trees, Leviathan found welcome relief from the sun, though she was able somewhat to regulate the temperature of her body. That task became more difficult as her mass increased and heat generated within had a harder time radiating away in an efficient manner. Her belly was full and heavy again with a generous surplus in addition to the great sac of digesting plant and animal matter she kept topped off as well as she could. Her legs were thick and meaty, with heavy bones inside to support the mass of her. She could not sprint like a cat anymore, but she found that she did not need to. Her body had become an armored fortress and hardly any predators dared to bother her anymore.

Within the forest, the humidity increased greatly and Leviathan found an abundance of water free for the taking. Before, she had made use of the water vaporized in the air as well as in her food and even that produced by the metabolic processes in her body. Never had she had such an abundance, though. Also, on the edge of the plains and the forest, Leviathan found a curious relationship between the trees and the elephants who lived in this terrain. Leviathan found in wandering this boundary that in places where there were few elephants, the forest surged north into the plains, as far as there was water to take them, however, where packs of the great herbivores migrated, the forest retreated south regardless of how the rain fell in the area. Leviathan studied the behavior of her former prey, who were still quite wary of her and would not let her approach, despite the change in appearance. It seemed that they had a habit of ripping up and eating the saplings which were the offspring of the trees and frequently felled or broke trees in their passing, or during ritual combat.

The wonton cruelty to the great plants on display alarmed Leviathan, as it had seemed that only predators seemed to thrive on violence. But here were great beasts who at all stages of life seemed to be waging a war on the forest. Leviathan wondered how long the conflict had gone on, and if there would ever be a victor. There seemed no clear answer, but Leviathan saw herself more similar to the elephants than the trees, so she too began to uproot and devour the saplings, though she did not pointlessly break the trees.

The large trees did made for difficult passage through the terrain at times, but Leviathan grew more comfortable with forcing herself blindly through endless waves of foliage, leaving her mouth agape to ingest whatever fell into it. Biomass was everywhere and Leviathan grew and put flesh on her body at a prodigious rate until her back began to eclipse the tops of many trees. Eating the woody plants taught Leviathan how to digest these tough, durable trees, quite different from grass. Inside her bulging, ponderous middle, Leviathan had to segment her stomach into many chambers. Her digestive system became labyrinthine as her palette increased and she was less able to separate the incoming torrent of seemingly random things she pulled into her mouth and swallowed.

Everything dumped into the largest chamber, which contained a large number of acids and general enzymes which helped break down the non-plant matter, such as the many bugs she ingested regularly along with the multifold roughage and branches. The insects and spider webs broke down quickly enough, but sometimes birds and small mammals got caught in the destruction. These, Lethiathan separated by feel and muscles she taught to instinctively move such fare down a short, meat based digestive track. It also happened to take the larger animals who were unfortunate enough to either succumb to a venomous bite or simply be scavenged upon. The rest was shoved into another large chamber. Most of the branches, stems and leaves were still completely intact and coated in an acidic slurry of broken down animal proteins and enzymes. Here, the plant matter was broken down in stages, first mechanically by powerful muscle contractions which pulped the contents then chemically. The extra availability of water was greatly appreciated as thick branches tended to be dry and needed liberal amounts of liquid to lubricate their passage and allow digesting. The pulp was passed into a third stomach, almost as large as the first, where the fermenting occurred. Here the plant-based pulp was left to break down over a long period. Leviathan did not regurgitate and swallow again her bolus, the pulp was acted on by powerful enzymes to break the cellulose down into its constituent sugars. The liquid product was moved along in spurts to yet another stomach where it could be transported into Leviathan's twisting intestines. With the sheer variety of things that she devoured entering her lower stomaches, Leviathan found that waste was unavoidable. She attempted to recapture some of the methane gas and other products in yet another chamber, but sometimes, after eating heavily, the gas found its way back up the tracts regardless of her thriftiness.

Leviathan learned in time that eating everything was a complicated affair and that sometimes too much complexity in a system was not worth the effort. For example, sometimes Leviathan experienced painful cramps in her bowls when fluids or gasses either accumulated or moved in a way they were not intended. Also, there were so many chemical processes going on inside her heavy belly, that the large omnivore found she was expending a great deal of energy in their manufacturing, and indeed she did have trouble getting it straight sometimes. This was like as not to happen after eating something dead and she needed to produce compound to kill or mitigate possible parasites within the carcass. The end result was often heart burn or more stomach cramps.

Then one day, an unfortunate series of events put Leviathan through a great deal of pain and trouble.