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Leviathan Chapter Ten

The Splashers By Shalion

Over a decade passed, and the arrival of returning daughters doubled and then tripled Leviathan's annual caloric intake. They continued to find her in the summer or winter, and it was often the case that several daughters would be waiting either in the arctic or the spawning grounds. Due to the length of time it took to digest a massive daughter, Leviathan was frequently forced to begin her migration with her daughters forming part of an expansive entourage at her sides. This was especially the case when Leviathan reached her spawning ground, and her belly was already so full and distended with new daughters that she was literally unable to manage a daughter feast until she had brooded. During a couple years, there were so many daughters following her at the start of her migration that Leviathan had gone more than halfway north or south before she had eaten all of them.

Needless to say, Leviathan began to pile on weight tremendously. Little Sister worked their body hard to grow, more so than Leviathan ever recalled in their past. It got so that often Leviathan's bones would ache, especially when she was in arctic waters. Leviathan became only a little fatter though as her metabolism soared. In order to adapt to the wild influx of biomass each daughter or pod represented, Leviathan's abdomen became much more elastic and the size of her stomach doubled once, then twice, and then a third time until the cavernous folds of it were sufficient to consume even two very large daughters at once. Though she was so badly distended afterwards that swimming would be difficult for a time. However, her brooding pouch made even larger gains than that. It got so that daughters quite literally filled the vast majority of the space inside Leviathan's abdomen as the spawning day approached each year. The amount of biomass she released rivaled the combined body weight of two very fat filter feeder daughters. Only a constant diet of daughter flesh permitted such abuse of her body and Leviathan liked to complain about it.

'I feel cramped and bloated with this squirming mass of daughters inside of us, Little Sister. I can hardly eat anything.' complained the head about a week away from where she would spawn. 'My belly is empty and yet I bulge so large I can barely move us through the water.'

'What would you have me do, Big Sister?' retorted the tail, 'I am considering our future needs. Considering how successful our daughters have been, we must breed as much as possible. Even if it means sacrificing a week or two of eating. The mammals sacrifice much more for their offspring.'

'We are not mammals, though.' replied the head petulantly, 'And I do not see the need to sacrifice at all.' and then a sudden idea struck her, 'Why not build daughters who can reproduce themselves? At least enough to take some of the burden off of us?' And the head continued, feeling brilliant and proud of herself, 'Would that not also feed into itself and in time create even more biomass than we ourselves alone could produce?'

The tail was silent for quite a while. Then she said, 'Big Sister, the thought had crossed my mind, but are you not concerned about rebelling daughters? If we give them the power of

reproduction, then truly they could become independent of us even as the other animals of the seas and lands are.'

A chill crept down Leviathan's long, long spine. What Little Sister had said was true, but the mass of thrashing daughters inside Leviathan's belly, pressing on her organs reminded her of how uncomfortable she was in the moment. The risk of rebellion right now seemed remote, as Little Sister had been vindicated time and again, even since her inception. 'I... trust you to keep control of it, Little Sister.' said the head slowly. 'You have a skill with biology that I do not have. If you think you can do it, then please do so. I do not like spending so much of my time so uncomfortably pregnant as I am.'

'Then so be it.' said the tail, 'Starting next season, we shall begin to create our own ecosystems of self sustaining daughters.' The words were modest relief to Leviathan and her aching, distended belly.

However, before they enacted their plan, Little Sister brought up a bit of disconcerting news. Leviathan was forced to awaken again after the brooding for that year was already complete.'We are missing a few daughters, Big Sister.'

'What do you mean?' asked the head, waking up now as she swam northward, seven daughters in tow, two of which were lodged comfortably inside her tummy.

'I'm unable to account for seven daughters who should have returned to us by now. We have not tasted them, though their clocks should have inspired them to seek us now several years past.' said the tail.

'Why didn't you mention this to me?' demanded the head.

'I didn't feel it was necessary and that they could have turned up later. I only bring it up now as starting next season we will be unable to account for either missing or surplus daughters. I think we must assume they have met with some accident or misfortune.'

Leviathan felt uncomfortable with the news. Suddenly this daughter plan did not seem so foolproof. However she depended on daughter flesh now and more, the memories of both carrying a multitude of daughters inside of her and the lengthy spawning process were still fresh in her mind. 'I think there is little we can do with this information, Little Sister, but thank you for telling me.' said the head. She still suspected that there was much that Little Sister kept from her and not just details and facts that would have been over her head at this point. The tail exuded dutiful gratitude, but ended their transmission without further words. Leviathan was left to wonder what had happened to the missing seven, now likely lost for good. Eventually though, she forgot about them almost entirely.

Reproduction in the daughters proved to be a further boon for Leviathan, even more quickly than Little Sister anticipated. It was most apparent in the smaller varieties of daughter, the pack hunters and the bottom feeders. They quickly formed not just self sustaining, but growing populations and Leviathan observed her daughters replacing the species whose niches they filled. Only a few times did the native species prove to be more successful than daughters, and Little Sister was able to make adjustments to correct that. It was not very many years at all until

many of the creatures Leviathan passed in her constant migrations were of her own flesh, even if most only vaguely recognized her when she passed.

The tangle and interconnectedness of the daughter species grew immeasurably until Leviathan could not grasp it at all and had to rely entirely on Little Sister to keep track of what was happening. That she could do this, Leviathan had little doubt because Little Sister had expanded her own grey matter to over five times its original mass, adding new hemispheres that Leviathan herself could not comprehend. As for the head, there was not enough space inside the skull to expand as Little Sister had and she did not find the need for additional complexity in her day to day affairs, in fact, she still mostly suppressed her higher functions and operated on autopilot. Let Little Sister's mind expanded inside the fatty, cartilaginous cushion which protected her, one of them had to handle the task of managing their daughters.

So it was that Leviathan started giving birth to daughters already pregnant with yet smaller daughters who they would release in desirable environments. Daughters began to range in size from the massive whale-like filter feeders whom Leviathan fed upon down to daughters little larger than a herring. Leviathan could not expect such small creatures to make the long treks to find her on her migrations, so there were middle sized daughters to collect the small ones who would in turn find the whale-daughters to feed themselves to when they grew fat and slow.

It was when Leviathan was feeling extremely comfortable with her occupation of the seas and growing still fatter off of its bounty of biomass that she finally discovered what had happened to those missing daughters.

As Leviathan's army of diversified daughters began infiltrating the various ecosystems she visited in her yearly migration, establishing a-sexually reproducing colonies who sent their old or corpulent to middle level predator daughters in a grand chain leading to exactly one place, the massive sea beast did begin to communicate with her offspring, at least to an extent. The daughters of Leviathan did begin to slowly expand over a greater and greater expanse of the ocean and the great eater became dimly aware that they were moving even to areas that she had never bothered to explore herself. The distant places came to her as the taste and compositions of the bodies of the daughters whom she feasted upon more and more frequently and steadily. As daughters came to her from farther and farther afeild, Leviathan decided to help them find her by stealing a trick from the dwindling population of large cetaceans.

Leviathan began to finally utilize the sound producing organ on her brow high atop her wide head, far beyond where her two eyes on either side of her immense body could see. She emitted ultra low frequency calls to her brood, mostly to the big ones whom she most enjoyed ingesting. In doing so, she acted as a sort of beacon, even as she traveled from the polar north, to the equator and back. At first, Leviathan had only meant the calls to attract distant daughters who might otherwise have to wait for months at either spawning or feeding grounds for her to arrive, but to the giant's surprise, it was not long at all, just a few years, before she began to hear calls back. They were easily distinguishable from the rumbling echoes of the large native

sea mammals for they were mimicking her own voice, and yet they were different in their own right, not just from Leviathan herself, but from each other as well. Leviathan gained an awareness of at the very least many of her daughters' locations, even if nothing much, if anything, was actually said over the miles and miles of endless green sea.

Leviathan did find that she did rather enjoy listening to the various calls of her offspring echoing across the oceanic expanse, even if it did mean being more awake in order to process them, closer in terms of awareness to a rather dull cetacean rather than a big fish as she had been mimicking until now. The music that now existed in the deep was not just mentally stimulating for Leviathan, but it was also soothing in its own right, and not simply because Leviathan connected the sounds of her steadily plumping daughters to future luxurious meals. It was hardly surprising that Leviathan began to recognize and remember then, the voices of specific daughters and the directions and distances they were relative to herself.

But it was only because she had been doing this that she noticed at all when a particular voice in the underwater choir fell silent one day.

Leviathan tried discussing the matter with her hind brain, but Little Sister was not interested at all, merely replying, "Perhaps she got tired of calling back. I cannot fathom why they started calling to us in the first place."

Leviathan might have let the matter rest then, but the thought of the possibility that this was now an eighth missing daughter continued to gnaw at her, like the hunger in her belly. Just the thought of those tens of thousands of tons of meat going to waste made Leviathan anxious. And the daughter's silence continued into the following week, and then the next month and several months until Leviathan was again in warm waters, her belly expanded with so many new daughters that she could not bear to eat the mouth-wateringly corpulent daughters who swam at her side. As usual, it took days for her to finish spawning the large, heterogenous brood.

There was mostly one type of extremely large daughter now, the filter feeders who were also able to swallow smaller, mid-level predatory daughters, although Leviathan did spawn the occasional big whale hunter, the whales were getting sparse enough that she did not make very many of the latter at all.

The rest of the daughters were actually of similar size to the filter feeders, but unlike their sisters, they were actually born at close to their adult weight. Little Sister had arranged it so that these daughters were born already bulging with pregnancy, dozens or in some cases hundreds of tiny daughters that would have been troublesome for Leviathan to spawn herself from her immense body. They would spawn far from their own place of birth, either setting up a new population of smaller predatory daughters or replenishing the population of an area whose individuals had grown out of date with Little Sister's latest genetic tinkering. After spawning, they doubled as mid level predators, preying on their own elderly offspring or whatever was available before eventually flinging their own selves into the mouths of a passing filter feeder daughter. So far, while each daughter did retain photosynthetic skin in addition to their individual traits, every single daughter was a predator in some respect. Little Sister had seen little benefit in trying to usurp the bottoms of the food webs, at least so far.

Although the daughters could essentially clone themselves through a-sexual reproduction, a heavy burden of breeding still lay on Leviathan, especially to maintain the population of whale-

like daughters whose own gestations took years and who Leviathan herself preyed upon heavily. So Leviathan finished shoving out the last of the latest batch of daughters, the least of which was still the size of a grown medium sized whale, 108 all told, a dozen in each horn of her expanded and branching uterus. Leviathan felt drained and the skin on her belly was slackened, folding back into the vertical ribs she wore during her 'lean' season. Still, she found the strength to invite one of her waiting daughters into her open maw, swimming languidly behind her until her programmed behavior took hold and she stopped, falling virtually straight into Leviathan's eager stomach.

Although Leviathan had greatly expanded both the length and the breadth of her body since the daughter industry had started, her shovel-like head had not grown tremendously, there not being any particular need seeing as her mouth was already vast enough to encompass even a very fat whale-like daughter and entire swarms of krill. But more importantly, keeping her head at close to the same size allowed Leviathan to feel the delightful pressure of straining to swallow a huge daughter, even if her stomach was more than large enough now to fit two corpulent whale-daughters comfortably. Leviathan had already decided a while ago that it was more fun to eat daughters when they did not slide down her gullet with no effort, as the fast swimming pod daughters did. As well, there was something to be said about the appearance of herself with her great body expanding behind her now somewhat out of proportion head. Leviathan thought that she felt even more vast and gigantic than she would have had her head been much larger. Of course, it had been years and years since Leviathan had had a proper look at herself, not since she had lost her long neck in favor of a filter feeder model. But with her two eyes set on opposite sides of her, minuscule points in the scope of her vast self and set into gently curving walls of smooth skin, dark above, and light below, she was at least aware of how her tremendous girth continued to expand behind her head, slowly, very slowly eating away at her field of view behind and replacing it with a dark wall of herself, though most of the time she only saw her continuous silvery cloak of swimming sea life she wore all the way back until they, and her body itself disappeared into the distance. On a particularly clear day, she might surprise herself by seeing the shadow of a tail fluke at the extremity of her flex, but that was pretty rare, especially now with her expansive girth making it more difficult to see anything behind her at all.

It was fortunate that eating daughters was so effortless as Leviathan knew she was getting to be a cumbersome kind of giant, even if she could float without effort in the vast oceans. Once her belly was partially filled with a fattened daughter, now gone into a peaceful and final hibernation inside of her, Leviathan found it easier to think about the lost voice that continued to concern her. It was still concerning her so much, in fact, that she did not immediately eat a second daughter, even though there were several who had been waiting for to finish spawning. They continued to swim around her vastness, circling slowly like reverse vultures.

As Little Sister had already expressed an abject lack of interest in the missing voice, the head of Leviathan did not bother consulting her tail further on the matter. For the first time in a very long time, she bent her thoughts towards something other than eating and getting larger. While Leviathan's head had gotten out of practice of more abstract thought, she had enough sense in her to realize that she would never find out what happened to her missing daughter's voice here in her spawning ground. It was only a short time then, before the mammoth creature began angling her blunt head and wide mouth not north as was usual, but instead south and east, the direction in which she had last heard her silent daughter.

Complacently, Leviathan gently chased a sluggish, fattened daughter until she went still and allowed her body to be caught in the massive mouth of the much more immense creature. It was another hard swallow making a meal of the wide, fattened animal, but she fell alongside her sister deep inside the widened abdomen of Leviathan, enough to even visibly distend her again. With two huge creatures inside of her, Leviathan could do without eating, other than the constant filtering and photosynthesis she did constantly, for a week or two. But that did not stop Leviathan from looking wistfully from time to time at her remaining three daughters, trailing her and awaiting their turn to eventually fulfill their own destinies.

There was a mild sense of trepidation as Leviathan broke with her decades-long migration habit to make her way further south and east of the spawning grounds. But there was also an excitement, similar to how she first felt upon entering the ocean, though it was less tense than before now that she had a secure line of food to sustain herself in the form of her convoy of daughters. Although there was not much to see in the open ocean, there was variety in the audioscape of sounds which echoed around her, bouncing off of and produced by her round bodied daughters and also the ocean floor in shallow waters and far off rocky mounds. Over the years, Leviathan had gotten to know the local waters very well, at least in the fifty or so mile radius of the area where she typically spawned. It was an area of open water, not especially deep, but with enough space for Leviathan to freely move about at her regular depth, typically keeping her back twenty feet or so below the surface. There was a reef not far away - by sound at least, it was not at all visible though the murky, plankton filled sea - and beyond that, a small island, though Leviathan had never even considered visiting it; the dangers of beaching herself was not at all outside Leviathan's awareness, though she almost never put herself in danger of moving through water which was too shallow.

Leviathan's migration route never took her much closer to land, and of course, there was not much land in the arctic sea either. However, as Leviathan continued to swim in the warm waters near the equator, more or less in the general direction of where her lost daughter's voice had once come from, she found more and more places where there were rich, vibrant reefs, underwater mountains and sometimes the occasional island. Often these seemed to be small, it was a little hard to tell from under water, but others were enormous and required Leviathan to make detours many miles in length to ensure that her belly, which sank far below the mere twenty feet of water she kept on her broad back, came no where near to the bottom of the seas she traversed.

Leviathan was not sure at all what she was looking for exactly. She did not really expect to stumble upon even the corpse of her still silent daughter, the chances of which, despite the great mass of her, must be vanishingly small given the many miles of ocean she could have migrated through. Despite this, Leviathan was more or less optimistic about the expedition, perhaps out of mere curiosity than anything else. It did feel good to be doing something new, at least while she had spare daughters trailing her behemoth self, ready to sate her appetite when needed. She ate another one about a week after starting the expedition and might have felt the need to be a little more conservative with the remaining two, but as she was beginning to feel her stomach loosen up once again, she was joined by two more daughters who had undoubtedly tracked her down by her subsonic vocalizations. Eagerly, Leviathan invited one of the newcomers to stuff herself into her eager maw to top herself off.

And so it went for the next six weeks or so, Leviathan only able to continue her exploration of these unknown waters because new fattened daughters continued to track her down. Leviathan

did not like to think that she was a slave to her appetite, but it was ever so hard to think about anything else but eating on an empty stomach, or even a merely half full one.

In this time, Leviathan had gone from areas rich in her own spawn, already her own get were beginning to outnumber the native predatory species around her spawning grounds, to places where her characteristic dark green was rarely seen, if at all. The chorus of her own flesh was more distant now, replaced by the sounds of the whales and smaller cetaceans and of course, the sounds of the ocean itself. Leviathan might have liked to spread daughters around these untouched areas as well, but growing new life, especially the multi-ton creatures she issued forth, took a great deal of time, even if she could, by virtue of her incredible genetic gifts, mature life inside of her in a mere year that took other creatures, even her own daughters multiple years to accomplish.

But try as she might listening and watching the world closely around her, even continuing to observe the disturbances in the planet's magnetic field, Leviathan was left with no answers as to what could have happened to her missing voice, who she now feared was certainly gone forever. There was only the continuing vastness of unending ocean, the only landscapes being the reefs and mountains who she had to keep a safe distance from, lest her titanic form be placed in danger, either by some quirk of sea currents or a sudden storm which might throw her soft body onto jagged rocks or coral. For all her current success, Leviathan realized that right now almost the only feature protecting her was her sheer size, all other defensive measures having lapsed into negligence over the years. Of course, Leviathan could not imagine any sort of creature posing her impossibly large self any sort of harm at this point, other than the very tiniest of creatures, and she still retained powerful chemical countermeasures for them. And yet she knew that her hide was soft and porous, filled mostly with blubber, her mouth toothless, her gills sensitive and fragile, filled with feathery soft membranes filtering the water of all lifeforms constantly. Her huge body was round and inflexible, the tail being chiefly her only means of locomotion, her flat pectoral fins only used for steering and themselves rarely moved. While Leviathan felt drawn to the dry land jutting out of sight above the water, she felt a sense vulnerability that she did not feel when surrounded by uniform, unending water. Leviathan felt confident that should she somehow end up beaching her mammoth self, the weight of her body alone would kill her almost immediately and not for her mass pressing itself upon any set of lungs, but her arteries themselves might collapse under her hundreds of thousands of tons. Her hide and connective tissue itself might split if she were pressed under her own great weight. With such risk, it was little wonder that Leviathan herself did not dare venture too close to land, or even shallow reefs, despite how curiosity drew her.

But time passed and the que of daughters waiting to add their bulk to Leviathan's cavernous, blubbery confines dwindled, even as new ones occasionally rendezvoused with her. Leviathan could tell that there were no more daughters anywhere close to her by the time that she found herself approaching yet another island jutting forth from the deep, and there was but one daughter left, slightly less than ideal in weight and bulk whom Leviathan had kept around nearly since the start, hoping she might fatten a little. She swam ahead of Leviathan towards the landmass, despite her cosmetic age dulling her body, she seemed to have something of an independent streak, at least insofar as she liked to swim ahead of Leviathan rather than trailing behind or at her sides. Leviathan was curious too about what might be going on in her daughter's mind, but of course, there was still no symbolic language in use among any of the daughters. But Leviathan's belly was waning on fresh daughter meat and blubber. Already she could have easily fit in this under-grown specimen, but Leviathan had wanted to drag out the

expedition as long as possible. She was aware that it would have to end shortly, however. Not only had Leviathan lingered in waters around the equator far longer than she had ever had previously, but even Little Sister, normally completely absorbed in the functions of their own body was beginning to notice that something was amiss and was already urging her to resume their migration to the arctic. Leviathan, though she had been keeping herself more than sated, in fact actively putting on weight, on daughter flesh alone, was thinking more and more wistfully of the blooms of pink krill that filled the cold waters of the north, a not insubstantial portion of her yearly fare, despite how she had added daughter meat as her primary staple. But Leviathan knew that when she turned her head towards the north, the chances of her returning to look for the missing voice would be slim, in fact, she did not trust herself to even remember the matter after a summer of feeding on krill and yet more waiting, fat saturated daughter whales.

As Leviathan was considering the near future, however, both she and her remaining daughter, still swimming ahead of her, made a slow circuit of the mountain, seeing that it was indeed a decent sized island. Leviathan kept a safe distance from the jutting rock and the sporadic reefs, but her daughter was able to move much more freely and closer to shore. Sometimes Leviathan even saw her surfacing momentarily to allow a single eye on the side of her broad, flat head to peer above water. Leviathan, whose eyes were located along the coronal plane of her body, well over sixty feet below the level of her back, would have had to rotate completely onto her side and even jut one of her pectoral fins into the air to accomplish the same maneuver. Needless to say, she did not feel like expending the energy to do something so silly, even if she wished in vain that she could see what was above the surface or even ask her daughter what it was that she saw.

Her daughter continued swimming closer to land and Leviathan made to follow at first, however she was soon deterred by some colorful coral rising up from the bottom in an underwater atoll between the island proper and the deep sea beyond. There was probably just enough clearance for Leviathan's rounded tummy, but not enough to try to risk following her daughter into a corridor between land and rock that would not have even allowed her to turn around. Leviathan took a longer route around the outside of the coral, even though her daughter was soon out of sight.

Sight, but not beyond hearing. Both Leviathan and her daughter continued to ping calls back and forth and Leviathan felt comfortable in knowing that her daughter was still nearby. However, that sense of comfort vanished as soon as she heard a very different sound from daughter whale, one that she had never before experienced, and yet still understood the meaning of viscerally. Her daughter's subsonic call jumped up in both pitch and volume and became an erratic squeal more than anything, just the sort of sound mammals frequently made when they were in pain. 'Is she in pain?' Leviathan thought to herself and wondered if her more independently minded daughter had somehow managed to beach herself on land or had injured herself on the sharp coral, though both seemed unlikely.

But there was no easy path to find out what was happening, even as her daughter's calls became more and more frantic. Leviathan could have risked swimming over the coral, but with her sight so limited around her huge self, it seemed almost certain that she would hurt her soft underbelly in the attempt. So Leviathan had no choice but to go around the coral. Rather than taking the time to make a complete U-turn, she pressed forward, hoping to find an end to the reef where she could cross over and get closer to the island, but it took time, agonizing minute after minute and just like the last voice, her remaining daughter for this expedition fell silent too,

long before Leviathan found a place where she could maneuver her body past the sharp edges of the coral.

Though no longer able to hear her daughter, Leviathan found that she was able to follow her by another sense that had so far been underutilized, but had not completely vanished. Leviathan could smell her daughter's blood in the water. The sea beast followed the scent, moving in between the land jutting up on her right and the treacherous reef on her left. There was a good hundred to hundred and fifty feet of clearance around Leviathan below and to the sides, but even this was not really enough space for her to move freely, given how inflexible her blubber filled body was. Leviathan could not bend her spine much more than as needed for her tail strokes and could not flex her torso at all, so she could not turn back on herself or even have any real option for moving backwards at all. Given her mobility restrictions, Leviathan was nervous to encounter what was harming her daughter whale, even though she was still confident that it could not possibly pose a threat to herself.

Leviathan heard them long before she able to catch a glimpse of the creatures, and at first, she did not understand the sounds she was hearing at all. There was a lot of slapping near the surface of the water, but the sounds of swishing fins or flukes was almost completely absent. As Leviathan got closer, however, her sight became obscured by an opaque white cloud in the water, her daughter's life blood leaking out. Leviathan mostly had to rely on her other senses, like her sense of electromagnetic fields. In this way, Leviathan could tell already that her daughter had been slain, or at least very nearly so, her heart beat was undetectable. The creatures which were massed around her body seemed located primarily around the surface of the water, it was also were the splashing sounds were coming from.

As the strange lifeforms were located near the surface of the water, Leviathan sank until her belly was touching the sandy coastal bottom. These things were an enigma to her, even how they managed to slay her daughter was a mystery, though clearly it involved sheer physical violence. Her senses of smell and electromagnetism were not telling her much about the new predators, they smelt of little more than regular sea flotsam and more disturbingly, Leviathan could not sense a single heart beat or electrical signal from any of the figures, even as she heard them very noisily splashing at the surface.

To say that Leviathan felt fear would have been incorrect, but there was a slight trepidation, or perhaps merely caution. It had been a very long time since Leviathan might have been regarded as prey, but she remembered how easily the roles were switched. After a few minutes spent observing the predators, who seemed to be attempting either to consume her daughter whale now or perhaps somehow dragging her carcass closer inland, she came to the conclusion that there were a number of these creatures and they must have been quite small, even in comparison to the size of a underfed daughter whale. Leviathan knew that she would need to do more about these strange aquatic creatures in the future, but presently, she felt more affronted by the prospect of any creatures eating the flesh of her flesh other than herself. Already, so many precious Calories had been dumped recklessly into the open sea water in the form of her spilt blood. The waste could not be allowed to continue.

So Leviathan forced her lumbering body up from the bottom at as much speed as she could muster, which was not very. She had a tough time even being able to angle herself enough upwards to catch the body of her daughter, she had not used her pectoral fins for such aggressive maneuvering in a very long time indeed. But she just made it.

Air kissed the tip of her nose as Leviathan opened her mouth wide to receive the remains of her daughter, just ten feet or so, a tiny portion of her even her head. Leviathan had to work the side of her mouth so that the carcass went in tail first as was usual, their relative body angles were not ideal. As she did this, Leviathan's broad, flat back rose to the surface where she rested for several minutes as she gummed at carcass, trying to pull it steadily in. Leviathan's eyes were still below the surface naturally and there was still not much to see other than blurry shadows floating on the surface. But Leviathan heard many strange sounds coming from the dark shapes floating on the water. They did not sound at all like the clicks and whistles of cetaceans or even the moaning of whale song. If anything at all, they reminded Leviathan of the songs of birds on dry land. Were these creatures then some sort of amphibious species? But the calls did remind Leviathan of cetaceans in one respect, there seemed to be intent behind the rapid and rhythmic sounds that the floating creatures were using.

At first, the splashing bird-callers only scattered as Leviathan emerged from the deeper water. The great sea beast thought that was the end of it, but then their dark shapes regathered a short distance away where they stayed for quite some time, long enough for Leviathan to start forcing the thickness of her daughter's torso down her throat. By feel alone, Leviathan could tell she had suffered many puncture wounds, but there was also a strange roughness to what should have been a completely smooth texture as Leviathan forced her down, almost as though one or more teeth of one of these creatures had gotten lodged in her daughter's flesh and was protruding from her hide as she slid down into Leviathan's warm embrace. It scratched Leviathan's throat all the way down, but she did not pay it mind, the injury was minuscule in the scope of her bulk and she would digest a tooth as happily as anything else.

She was almost done hoarking down the remains of her daughter whale when the floating splashers seemed to decide to approach all at once. They split into two groups and came nearer to Leviathan from both left and right sides. It did not occur to Leviathan that they might like to make prey of her until they were almost on top of her already drying back. That such tiny lifeforms would want to attack her seemed ludicrous to Leviathan, and yet she did feel the needle pin pricks stab into the thick sides of her fat-filled head as she struggled to finish swallowing the last of her unfortunate daughter whale. Leviathan was more surprised than in pain, though her massive body jerked with the shock of sensation as the... whatevers struck her hide, sinking past the skin and lodging into her dense blubber layer. Leviathan still could not see the surface splashers very well, but it seemed odd the way they seemed to be stinging her without actually latching onto her the way a regular beast might, their scent-less non-conductive bodies were still a good way from her, and they were even retreating after their initial attack, possibly fearing a thrashing attack, though Leviathan moved so slowly that they really did not have much to fear at all of her breaking their bodies unless they were all but suicidal.

The pin-prick teeth continued to sting abysmally, despite their diminutive size. Leviathan tried shaking her head a little, but it was no good trying to dislodge them and the movement in the water worsened the pain, she knew right away that these were an odd sort of tooth from the surface splashers, long and barbed and thin, in addition to the way they had been detached from their hosts. 'What could be the purpose of such a modification?' Leviathan wondered and decided to save the memory to share with Little Sister later. At the very least, these teeth in her hide posed absolutely no threat to her, even if she had no idea how she would dislodge them, she hardly even bled from the wounds.

Leviathan settled back down and tried to submerge closer to her regular depth of twenty feet, pulling down the carcass still filling her mouth. However after the first few feet, the stabbing pain from each of the pin pricks worsened significantly, each barb pulling at her flesh as she tried to drop below the surface of the water. Leviathan tugged a couple times, but the pain resurged each time. She was not sure what devilry was happening at all. Nearby, the surface splashers seemed to be mustering for another rush, at least, that was what Leviathan guessed, their forms still hazy and hard to make out with her available senses.

"What is happening, Big Sister?" queried Leviathan's tail, the first time she had spoken since the start of the expedition, but then it was hardly surprising, given the abnormal level of pain she was experiencing.

"I think I have found the creatures responsible for our missing daughters." replied the head matter of factly. She still did not feel in any real danger.

The tail, however, seemed less optimistic. "Is that what is attacking us?! We should flee! Kill them, or flee!"

It was strange seeing Little Sister be so emotional. "These tiny things hardly pose a threat to us, Little Sister." replied the head. "I merely wish to learn as much as possible about them."

"Then let us learn more at a safe distance." said the tail, already having accessed the head's short term memory, "We are not in a safe position! We have no defenses against these agile stingers."

Leviathan took a moment to savor her throat being pressed open around the widest part of her daughter whale's torso. The rest would slip into her stomach more rapidly now. "What are a few pin pricks in the blubber?" the head retorted. "Their deepest bites can do us no harm, though I do not know how it is that the wounds tug on us when we try to sink deeper."

"We should just kill them and eat their bodies. Their flesh will tell us everything we need to know about them." said the tail with cool bloodlust.

Leviathan's head was not adverse to the idea, but was skeptical about her ability to catch even one of the nimble surface splashers. She finished swallowing the last of her fallen daughter, and received another salvo of barbs to her head for her trouble. Just as the last, these stuck into her flesh, biting feet deep and sticking immovably with jagged barbs.

Diving hurt even worse the next time Leviathan tried to sink below a foot or two below the surface, every single pin prick, now well over two dozen hurt and pulled at her yielding flesh. Still, below the surface, where Leviathan still kept the bulk of her body hidden, she tried to angle her head towards a cluster of three splashers. Seeing as the island and the reef were too close to really manuver here, she knew she would only get a single chance at this. But even as she angled her massive body, they splashers seemed to guess her intent for they began to spread out. As quickly as she could, Leviathan swung her tail back and forth furiously, it was so close to the sandy bottom that she could feel herself stirring up thick sand clouds far below the surface. Leviathan opened her mouth wide, filling it with sea water.

Her speed was pathetic, barely enough to lift her head partially out of the water, not so much a jump or even a hop as a lazy breach, even as Leviathan worked her muscles to her limit. It might have helped if she had ever needed them for anything else than a lazy back and forth motion before, or if her body weight were not over 65% blubber. Nevertheless, the sheer size of her mouth made escape more difficult, and ultimately unsuccessful for at least one of these nasty surface splashers. Leviathan barely caught it on the edge of her mouth, but closed her jaws down as quickly as she could before quickly sinking back into the water, meeting a fresh surge of pain from the barbs lodged in the top of her head.

With one splasher specimen captured, Leviathan felt more than confident enough to continue to escape, actually pressing herself for the first time in many, many years. But while she wanted to follow Little Sister's advice and retreat to a safe distance, the barbs continued to tug on Leviathan's flesh, as if they were being dragged in the water. Leviathan had to slow down, but really not by all that much, from her maximum speed. More worryingly, the splashers continued to follow her along the coast back towards the place where Leviathan had first separated from her daughter, now several hours ago. Meanwhile, Leviathan slowly filtered the water filling her mouth out through her gills. The splasher body within bobbed along with an air bubble along the roof of her mouth, rather like a kernel of corn.

Although Leviathan was kept at a slower pace due to the dragging wounds in her head, she was pretty sure that even if she had been unencumbered, she could not have escaped from the fleet surface splashers. Though they had dispersed again at her initial charge, once her back was presented to them, they seemed to gain a new vigor and came after her, splashing even more noisily than before. Such a racket they made! and yet their bodies slipped smoothly across the water regardless. Quickly, they were alongside of her, and there was nothing Leviathan could do any longer. There was no where to go, either left or right, up or down and she could not stop, turn around or swim backwards. More barbs, more pinpricks of pain lanced her in places up and down her body, even through the dorsal fluke of her tail! Anywhere that came anywhere close to the surface of the water. Leviathan was clever enough to already come to the conclusion that whatever methods of hunting were being employed against her, they only seemed to be viable at the surface of the water, seeing as much effort they were going through to keep her hostage within a few feet of the surface. But that did nothing to help her now, trapped as she was. Leviathan began to wonder if she were going to be forced to submerge despite the pain afflicting her when she did so, redoubled every time a new barb was latched into her. How much longer were these splashers going to hound her like sharks nibbling at a dying whale?

These surface skimmers in the end proved far more tenacious than Leviathan would have liked. In fact, the great beast herself, having experienced now the precision and tactics used against her could very much see how several of her very large daughters could have met their end like this. Only by virtue of the fact that these strange barbed teeth could not penetrate past the score and more feet of blubber she wore was Leviathan herself left relatively out of danger. She was too big for these creatures to hunt after all, but not by such a large margin as she would have thought reasonable. There was something admirable, after all, about creatures willing to hunt prey so many times their own size.

Leviathan also noticed how, after a while, though the surface splashers continued to follow her around the island, the barbed teeth no longer bit into her hide. Perhaps, like venom, or shark's teeth, they needed time to replenish their supply. Leviathan felt less in danger once the bites stopped coming, though at this point she was rather like a pin cushion and each pin dragged in

the water as she moved and pulled on her flesh whenever she moved below the water. These strange wounds concerned Leviathan more than the splashers themselves who were reduced now to merely following in her wake like her regular entourage.

An hour or so later, Leviathan finally reached a passage across the shallow reef, allowing room for her great, deep belly. She turned out to sea around the same time that the sun was lowering in the western sky. The surface splashers at last abandoned their chase and turned their still mysterious bodies around to head presumably back towards either the island or shallower water.