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Leviathan: Chapter Eleven

Hunting or Hunted?

By Shalion

Leviathan was forced to continue swimming near the surface of the water even after she entered the wider ocean, the endless water around her a relief despite the ongoing pain of her injuries. All told, the pinpricks were perfectly tolerable on her vast body, and yet it had been so long since Leviathan herself had had to endure any real pain that she found she could not ignore them. At least, that is until she had finally managed to filter out the water filling her gullet so she could swallow the single splasher body she had managed to catch. It was so tiny, about as long, but thinner than a porpoise-analog daughter, that it was actually a tough for Leviathan to feel its passage down her enormous throat. However, she knew that Little Sister would carefully analyze everything there was to know about its shape and composition in a short time.

In fact, Little Sister contacted the head much sooner than expected across their long shared spinal nerve. "What is this thing that we have just eaten, Big Sister?"

"You know that it is the surface splasher that I managed to catch." replied the head, a little annoyed that the tail was asking her questions to which she should have already known the answer.

But Little Sister continued with her aggravation. "Are you sure? This is not the sort of composition I was expecting."

"Well, why don't you tell me what you think it is, if not a surface splasher. You should already know everything I remember of my catching it." said the head a little petulantly.

"Judging from the fact that it is composed nearly entirely of cellulose and no traces of bone or muscle or sinew. I would have to say that we have managed to catch a tree."

Leviathan's head was left dumbfounded, but could not argue with her tail as she passed up the undoubtable information from the object breaking down in her own stomach. Nevertheless, she said, "But that makes no sense, I am sure that I caught one of the splashers, it was even about the correct size as the shadows I saw."

"I have no answers as to the nature of these strange creatures, save to express that I too am very much interested in learning more about them if we can... Preferably without getting stabbed anymore." said the tail.

Leviathan's head made a non-communicative mental shrug of approval, but signaled nothing else, continuing to limp further out into the ocean.

There was another few hours of silence, but as the moon shone brightly down on the surface of the water where Leviathan drifted unable to even enjoy her stuffed full stomach, Little Sister intruded again. "What are we going to do about these barbs stuck into our flesh? We can't resign ourself to floating at the surface forever."

"Of course we cannot." said the head roughly, who had been pondering the exact problem. In fact, she had been more or less floating rather than swimming for the past hour or so, just to ease the many pin-like sores stuck into her all across her head and back and tail. The head did not say anything at first, but the tail continued to impress upon her wave after wave of mental anticipation until she could no longer bear it. "Can we not... work the flesh somehow as to... push the barbs out?" The head was unusually trepidatious, but then, she had retired her own mastery of her body's tissues so long ago, it was difficult to remember what was and was not possible.

"It... might be possible." said Little Sister hesitantly, "but it would take far too long. These 'teeth' as you think of them are only small on the scale of our whole body, but they have sunk deep into our flesh. Our blubber does not, as you might recall, have very much in the way of the ability to expand or contract and the barbs lodged deep in our fatty connective tissue will not allow these things to be pulled up from the skin. In fact, the only way I can imagine purging these objects at this point would be to slough off all of the tissue surrounding the foreign bodies and regenerate ourselves afterwards, but that too would take time."

"Perhaps that would be the best route." said the head somberly, perfectly aware that each barb would then basically take all of the surrounding flesh with it, an investment of hundreds of thousands of Calories for each sting.

"But we will need to dive again before I can make that happen surely." said Little Sister, to the head's chagrin. "I know that the wounds have been tugging at us when we drop below the surface, but perhaps the barbs themselves will be yanked free. Even a couple would help us in the long term."

But the head was afraid of exactly this kind of proposition." Yes, along with gobbets of our own flesh!"

"I know you fear the pain from the wounds. I can deaden the sensation, but I wonder at your hesitation. Surely, we have experienced worse pain in the past?"

"We have." said the head, though she did not like having this conversation at all. It felt almost as if her second brain were questioning her. The truth was that she feared the pain all the more because there was no control now, that function having been surrendered to her hind-brain. It was quite like a mammalian aversion to self injury, as much as Leviathan's head did not want to admit it, even to herself. Tacitly, she did not even want Little Sister to lessen the sensation, just to prove something to herself, even as she was aware that hiding weakness was itself another trait of a mere mammal. "And so I will try, even if it does rip the flesh from our body." resolved Leviathan's head, and even as she responded, she began to tilt her pectoral fins for a new dive.

The pain again surged at each of the dozens of pin pricks stuck in Leviathan's great body, the barbs pulling fiercely at the flesh, though it was hard to tell if even a single one was torn free. Leviathan forced herself to keep going deeper, however.

But not far below the surface, there was a sudden release of the tension. First one, then two of the barbs slacked in their tugging and then a cascade of them all at once. Along with the relief, Leviathan heard the sound of many bubbles rising to the surface in a grand torrent along her back. _'Bubbles?' _ she wondered, but had no answer to the connection between them and the barbs still stuck into her hide, though hardly even nuisances now.

Little Sister proposed the idea that the buoyancy of the air was what had been tugging on the teeth the splashers had stuck into her, but likewise had no concept of how the air had been captured in the first place. It might have been helpful if Leviathan could have seen with her eyes even one of the puncture sites. But Leviathan's head was simply relieved that the pain was over now, and with surprisingly little effort. "These splashers were not so risky after all. I could have rid ourselves of these slowing bubbles even back near the island."

"And yet they remain strange to us." said the tail ominously.

The head said nothing more, perfectly aware that, although survival had not really been in question, the splashers had certainly had their way with her, and cost her not just the life of a precious daughter whale, but the metabolic cost of her injuries, and more uncertainly her mental anguish since being essentially chased away from the island.

Leviathan resumed her migration route back north after the encounter with the strange surface splashers, carrying their teeth in her flesh as she would continue to do so for years to come, though she mostly forgot about them in short order once the dragging bubbles had been detached from them. Daughter flesh and plentiful krill swarms helped take Leviathan's mind off of the indignities she had suffered at the hands of the strange predators and she allowed her belly to expand with growing daughters inside of her along with yet more blubber. She put on another foot in length, but naturally tens of thousands of tons more than was strictly required.

While it was pleasant to have daughters, huge and stuffed full of their own fat reserves waiting on Leviathan's whim and stomach capacity to come and devour them, the great beast still enjoyed the hunt for krill swarms as well. When she had been no larger than most of her daughters, Leviathan had fed much as a regular whale, scooping up the densest part of the swarm in her mouth while around her head and body, the remainders scattered and flowed like pink rain. But Leviathan was so huge at this point that entire swarms could vanish into her gaping maw with plenty of room for empty water around all the sides, the tiny creatures perhaps unaware of even Leviathan's presence as an animal until the sunlight was suddenly blocked. Only the truly prodigious blooms of krill and phytoplankton, the kind that occupied entire areas of open ocean were beyond Leviathan's ability to ingest, though she loved these even more as she could swim open mouthed until her mouth was nearly of full of living, squirming creatures as when a daughter whale would willingly dive into her jaws. Leviathan knew that to swallow these mega swarms whole, she would need to be the size of a large island, or greater still! Such an idea was preposterous, and yet when Leviathan's head let herself drift into sleep, sometimes strange thoughts like these would run though her mind.

When it came time to head back south, Leviathan's mind resumed more of its higher order thinking. The squirming and kicking of the lives inside her vast tummy reminded Leviathan that there were predators in this world who were capable of killing even her largest kin. The titanic sea beast did not want that fate visited on the least of the lives housed inside of her, even the ones quickening themselves in the bellies of her middle sized daughters.

But Leviathan had to admit to herself, though she had mostly forgotten the problem for the past several months, that she did not see a clear solution. It was difficult for her to even observe the splashers clearly and painful to get near them. She did not really want to go chasing after them, and yet what both she and Little Sister needed most was more information about the strange predators. Leviathan thought about it a bit more, but gave up after a couple days of strategizing as she swam steadily and languidly south. She binged on the fattest of her accompaniment of daughters, though at this point, her uterus was so large, there was little room left for her stomach to expand for even a single daughter whale; though that pain of over-fullness was actually pleasant for Leviathan in its own way. Sated, and thus more given to abstract thought, Leviathan's head contacted her tail, saying "I have been thinking about the splashers and what we should do about them, but I have to admit that I am at a loss as to what we could do to learn more about them without being attacked."

Little Sister replied amiably enough, though her response again made the head feel less than redundant. "Oh, I never thought that we ourselves should scout those pesky predators. I am still drying out the calluses around each of those barbs still stuck in us. I've quickened a few amphibious, meat-eating daughters who ought to clear out the problem for us. And if they don't, we can just try again next year."

The head inquired more and learned that these new amphibians were based mostly on the pinniped body plan of mostly sea based mammals. They breathed air as they did, but had a lighter body than many of the varieties that Leviathan had tasted over the years, a thick layer of blubber not being needed so much in the warm tropical waters. The idea made sense to Leviathan, though these daughters could not move especially well on land - though obviously much better than a daughter whale or many of the fish analogue daughters could - after all, she had only ever seen the splashers at sea. It was possible they did not even go to land and perhaps only needed shallow water for whatever reason, but that was more do to the extent of her ignorance than anything else. The head learned that two of the mid-sized daughters inside of her were quickening with about three dozen of the seal sized creatures each. When the head inquired of their predatory abilities, Little Sister merely replied, "Oh, teeth, keen sight and hearing, the usual." She went on, "They can digest cellulose as well and instinctively look for the long shapes we saw in the water, but I can't really do much else at this point until we learn more."

"And how shall we ever learn more about these things if we cannot approach them ourselves?" asked the head.

"Well, hopefully, by the time our new daughters have aged and fattened, they will have fed on at least a few of these splashers. Their bodies will contain information about them then."

The head, however was dubious. After all, she would not even be eating the tiny predatory directly, they would have to feed themselves to a mid-level daughter such as the one currently carrying them and she to a daughter whale before Leviathan herself would ever taste them, many levels were information could be lost, especially since Little Sister had clearly not designed their feeding system to analyze new creatures like this. But, then again, did it really matter if the goal was accomplished? That of course, being the extinction of those aberrant splashers interfering with her food chain. If Leviathan had that symbolic language as she had been considering now for over a decade, she might have asked a daughter what she could discover about these creatures almost instantly. But the head did not feel like bringing the matter up again. Little Sister was not interested in the idea, but more importantly, making a daughter who could process a symbolic language would mean a bigger brain was necessary and perhaps greater independence than was strictly required.

So Leviathan's head accepted the plan as she swam and descended back into her quiet animal depths. That year, she spawned not far from the island where the splashers lived. Her mid-sized daughters could have carried the seal-like predators a long ways before calving themselves, but Leviathan wanted to put the experiment into motion as soon as possible, and more, the areas around the island were ripe with unsuspecting native sea life, untouched by her own flesh.

More for curiosity's sake than anything else, Leviathan puttered around the island, watching the new daughter seals be calved, already near their own adult sizes, and begin to run amok among the island's shores and reefs. Sometimes she did see splashers in the distance, at least their shadows on the surface, always moving in a pack, but Leviathan kept herself submerged and hidden and always at a comfortable distance. She did not see them often either, the splashers seeming to prefer to stay close to their home island. Whether or not they were already being slaughtered by the new daughters was likewise hard to tell. Leviathan did not witness a hunting event herself, but that hardly meant it was not happening. Time only would tell in the end.

Leviathan did not stay nearly as long this year as she had spent on the previous year's expedition, however, this year, on her way back past the equator, she did take a week or so off to head even further east. She found a few more undersea mountains and reefs, but little else. Leviathan figured that it was not good to be too complacent. After all, what if there were other colonies of these splashers about on different islands in the vast ocean? What if there were even worse things?

While Leviathan did resolve herself to commit some time each year for continuing exploration of the ocean, it rarely turned out to be more than a week or so at a time, and again, only after she had finished spawning. The lush krill swarms in the arctic summers were too arousing a stimulus for the gluttonous sea beast to resist returning in haste each year and lingering until the life inside of her was mere weeks from bursting forth. Even then, only the growth of sea ice and the inevitable dwindling of light and food made it amiable for Leviathan to again migrate south.

The new trend was to continue adding a foot or two in length each year, though Leviathan could have easily managed a lot more growth. Instead, her blood ran thick with lipids and she continued to pack on blubber by the ton each meal. Her body expanded and did continue to get wider and rounder, but it hardly impacted Leviathan's sea-bound mobility. Really, the only signature of her ongoing obesity was the way the fat bulged over and then consumed the bases of her pectoral fins as well as the way her thick, round body narrowed rapidly into her muscular, hydrodynamic tail. But to Leviathan, the process of adding more and more mass of her body, especially in the form of blubber, was luxurious. She felt as if she were continuously basking in the riches this world had to offer.

Little Sister continued to indulge her, Leviathan knew, but as a cost she also continued to expand the horns and compartments of their breeding organ, increasing the number of whale-sized daughters she could hold each year. Little Sister was contemptuously clever in the way she did so as well, never increasing their reproductivity by so much at a time that Leviathan's head felt she had adequate grounds to argue with her, especially since she continued to get fatter even faster than she was growing. And yet, by the very fact that they were not growing so much each year, the uterus grew proportionally within the confines of Leviathan's abdomen. It continued to grow until Leviathan found that longer and longer stretches of the year were spent so congested with daughters' bodies inside of her, that she could not eat. What started out as a week long period before spawning grew to encompass the entire time it took Leviathan to swim south to the equator and then even infringed on the last week or two of the summer fat season. By then, Leviathan was holding 168 lives inside of her belly at a time, not counting the additional lives inside the bellies of her middle-sized daughters, already pregnant themselves inside the womb.

The head was prepared to draw the line there, but Little Sister did not even attempt to further increase the number of horns on their uterus past that point. "We need a suitable length of time to supply enough calories for these pregnancies anyways." she told the head when Leviathan had inquired as casually as she could. Although Little Sister seemed apathetic when it came to interactions between different organisms, she seemed surprisingly canny when it came to interacting with the head at least, perhaps she understood her more than the head did Little Sister herself.

So while the ongoing birth cycle was a heavy tax on Leviathan's stamina, it never got to the point where she felt like complaining about it again. She endured it doggedly, perhaps just as the mammals did their own births, and accepted the routine, despite the necessity of sacrificing many tens of thousands of tons of blubber in the months leading up to each spawning, though she gained it back and more each feeding season.

Little Sister informed Leviathan that she was still producing the seal-like predators to hopefully stamp out the splasher problem in time. Little Sister claimed that she felt she were perhaps even over doing things by producing new predators each year and maybe saturating the environment around the island to the point where the daughters themselves might starve. But it was a small risk, given the number of calories that each mature daughter whale contained.

Leviathan did return to the island a couple more times, but the habit lapsed over time, especially since visiting cut into the tiny time commitment she set for exploration each year. Cycles past and Leviathan became content with the state of things once more. No more of her daughter whales' voices disappeared and so the matter of the strange splashing creatures vanished from the sea beast's mind entirely. Leviathan continued to glut herself on an ever increasing supply of daughter flesh, her mind immersed in the eating and a sea echoing with the sound of her own kin, her own flesh.

After a decade, the old rotting barbs still stuck in Leviathan's hide were finally surrounded in dried scar tissue and new skin welled around each clotted nettle, pushing gradually upward with a gentle pressure. They itched fiercely as they were slowly exhumed from her hide, occasionally helped along by some enterprising fish or parasite, tugging at the dead tissue with eager jaws. As the dozens of barbs fell away one by one, deep depressions still marred the vast, gently curving expanse of Leviathan's figure. These would take additional years to fill in until the great sea beast was left as perfectly smooth and flawless as ever she was.

But Leviathan hardly paid any heed to her healing process. In fact, she did not even realize that she had tasted new flesh until Little Sister brought her out of a decades-long reverie, nearly 25 years since being attacked by the queer predators in shallow water.

It had been a long interval indeed for Leviathan's upper cognitive functions to lay dormant. In fact, Little Sister spent some time stimulating the atrophied neuron's in Leviathan's upper brain back into full activity before the head could fully comprehend Little Sister's complex signaling. Leviathan was sure she could have recovered her full faculties on her own of course, if she had really needed them. It was just faster having Little Sister assist her in this way.

"What is... it?" asked the head muzzily, still expanding her personality from that of a not particularly bright sea mammal.

"I said that last daughter we ingested has some interesting biomarkers stored in her tissues." said the hind brain.

The fore-brain gave an uncomprehending mental blink as a response. She had not the slightest idea what this news might have to do with her. Little Sister guided the forebrain back into her years-long episodic memory to quickly recall their trials with the Splashers before Leviathan's head understood completely. "Oh right..." confirmed the head after essentially reliving the affair in her mind, "...It certainly has been a long time since that happened." The head could not think of a more constructive comment than that at the moment, so she asked, "Are you able to be sure that it is them we have tasted?"

"I am reasonably confident the markers are them. This bio-information is quite different from our regular fare at any rate." said Little Sister, almost dismissively, "But it has taken far longer than I would have imagined for their flesh to make it back to us through our daughters and that troubles me."

"Perhaps our hunters are not very effective." said the head, feeling it was necessary to take a jab at Little Sister's usually unassailable hubris. She mellowed the criticism by adding, "You were planning on redesigning them at some point weren't you?"

"I was... Though it had been so long I had hoped the problem would have resolved itself, since none of our daughter whales seem to have been taken in the mean time." said Little Sister a little shakily. "At any rate, I've learned that these are indeed strange creatures. I can tell that much, even though the genetic information has been somewhat degraded by passing up through the chain."

"Tell me about the Splashers." said the head amiably, she actually was curious now.

"Almost certainly, they are terrestrial in nature. They are most closely related to some mammals we happened to dine upon way back when we still walked the land." Little Sister started. "But I cannot explain why then they would be so deft in the water. From what I can tell, they are only medium sized primates, perhaps with brains more on the line of cetaceans than the tree climbing variety."

"But what about their large bubble teeth?" asked the head, referring to the painful dragging floats she had been punctured with. "And their trick with the tree trunk?"

"To those questions, I still have no more answers than you." said the hind brain. "But I think it is enough to finally confirm that these are land dwelling creatures, perhaps attempting sea life, but not yet strongly adapted for it, whatever strange abilities they seem to possess. Perhaps it would be worthwhile after all to collect a complete specimen ourselves." Little Sister ruminated for a second or two, adding, "But for now, I think I have a better gauge of their physical abilities. Our seal-like daughters would have been ideal for a coastal species, but it seems clear to me that our next generation of hunters will have to venture much further inland."

"What sort of form might these daughters take?" asked the head. Although she mostly left the reproductive affairs to Little Sister, she did take an interest in at least the variety of life she was producing almost constantly.

"I've been tinkering with a canine body plan, they usually make for good generalists." Little Sister ruminated. "But I also have to consider how they will eventually find their way back to us. I believe I will make use of a larger variety of our amphibious daughter seals. Their body plan can accommodate a great deal of blubber, making them dense enough to be worthwhile intermediaries between these new terrestrial daughters and our existing mid-sized and filter feeding daughter whales."

The head appreciated the complexity of Little Sister's job, but her talk of fattening daughters really only served to entice her appetite, despite her stomach full of digesting daughter whale. "That sounds good to me." agreed the head and did not bother asking if these creatures were already germinating deep inside her belly or not, because of course they were. But in time, Leviathan learned that her layered pregnancies were becoming still more complex for these new daughters were quickened not in the bellies of her mid-sized daughter whales, but in the bellies of the modified seal-like daughters they contained. Leviathan wondered how much further this nesting would go in time even though she herself was aware of no changes, other than the increasing pressure in her midsection which heralded the end of her fat season and the time to migrate south once again. There was an added caloric cost to making additional bodies in the nested offspring, but in the scope of Leviathan's vast warehouse of blubber and expanding yearly fare, it was almost negligible.

But later that year, Leviathan did return to the Splasher's island in order to spawn. Well off from the invisible coast, she gave birth in safety, the multitude of bodies squeezing out of the slit in her abdomen at a rate of one every hour or so. Many of the whale-sized creatures, already at their adult weights, were bulging with their own offspring. Most of them went their separate ways, but Leviathan carefully observed the few who lingered during her week-long labor. Leviathan saw a few of the newly emerged creatures move only a little inland before they too calved smaller creatures who did not at all resemble themselves but rather bloated pinnipeds who Leviathan knew each carried a dozen of the new wolf-like daughters the seals would give birth to on land. It was an amazing process to watch, even though Leviathan could not witness all of it herself naturally. Similar to watching dominos fall after spending a very long time setting them up, but far more visceral knowing that these creatures were an extension of herself, her flesh and her will, even if they themselves could not comprehend their place in the larger scheme.

But Leviathan was relieved when the spawning was at long last over with, her belly shrunk just slightly inwards. Over the years, her blubber content had increased even more, to the point where even her large pregnancies did not show especially much. But that did not stop Leviathan from feeling fatigue at the passing of so large bodies out of her singular orifice. Even her tissues themselves somehow felt worn out and used. Leviathan feasted on two of her waiting daughters, of which there were a number now, it having been over two months since the last time she could accommodate even one. Daughter whales were becoming rather plentiful at this point so that there was only six or so weeks a year where none were available, though she ate them as rapidly as she pleased and was able the rest of the year. Already she was working on a stomach of such volume so as to take three of the giants at once, but that was a goal for another day.

Comfortably sated on the round bodies of two blubber-rich daughters, Leviathan did move closer to the island for the first time in over two decades. Mostly, Leviathan observed the reefs surrounding one half of the island, the same one which had trapped her years ago. Leviathan noticed how in the past it would have bee risky for her to try to swim over the reef, but with her girth having gotten even wider and her belly hanging still deeper into the water, the coral was as good as impassable now, not if she wanted to avoid beaching herself and tearing her under belly to shreds.

The midday sun shone down and nicely illuminated the colorful, rocky landscape, but there was not terribly much of interest to Leviathan as she swam slowly past. She did spot a number of her own offspring, mostly fish hunters looking like dark green tuna, or slender barracuda. What Leviathan did not see very many of, however were her pinniped daughter seals, which was strange since Little Sister had mentioned long ago that she feared they were producing too many.

It had been a very long time since Leviathan had spent this much time fully awake and as she cruised around the outskirts of the island and its coral reef, unable to get closer than about half a kilometer due to her titanic bulk, she thought again about how useful it would be to communicate with her more nimble daughter-flesh. 'They would be much better at exploring now...' thought Leviathan slowly, her back warmed below about a foot of water by the midday sun. Her 200 foot long tail waved languidly behind her still-fat body, completing a stroke about once every fifteen minutes while a living curtain of fish swam in her wake, nibbling skin flakes and barnacles from her smooth hide.

She had barely a week before she needed to begin the long swim back to the northern pole of the planet, and it was frustrating that again she felt the need to concern herself with this miserable little island when there was so much of the grand ocean which she still had never seen. Leviathan still had only two eyes, located on opposite sides of her extremely wide, wedge-shaped head. With massive blind areas in front, above and below her, she felt particularly unsuited to the task of puzzling out the mystery of the splashers. Watching fish swim in and out of rocks completely oblivious to her presence which was more like a mobile landmass than any sort of predator they needed to fear, Leviathan thought, 'Why can't Little Sister work on this?'

She knew it was petulant and that her hind-brain hated dealing with things outside of their own body, yet what was she supposed to do? Already she was too big to even attempt the reef crossing that had gotten her into trouble the first time decades earlier, larger and more cumbersome than ever with meters-thick blubber bulging in puckering folds over her pectoral fins. Her fastest speed was a stately 10 miles per hour and unlike the whales she once chased merrily, she had no ability to put on a burst anymore. Her prey all dove willingly down her throat to return the flesh they had been given with dividends. 'It will be a sheer matter of luck if I see anything other than fish and rocks and...'

But Leviathan did not even finish her thought before the sound of a loud splash accompanied by fish diving for cover in all directions caught her attention. Her left eye, still barely more than 12-inches across, rotated where it was ensconced in a gently curving wall of blue-speckled flesh. Leviathan had no particular need to see extremely well, but her eye retained its acuity from a time when she had had to carefully place large flat feet and navigate a rough landscape when falling might mean breaking a leg or all of the ribs on one side of her body.

She spotted the sharp-toothed pinniped rushing through the water in a wake of bubbles, the first one she had seen since she had begun her lazy circles about the island. Leviathan realized in that moment that she had never actually seen her splasher-hunter perform her assigned function, though an understanding of her purpose in the hierarchy of flesh Leviathan was creating had been impressed (albeit loosely) in her mind by Little Sister. Quickly the sea-titan became excited. 'Perhaps she will catch a Splasher and I will finally be able to see what the rude little beasts look like.' She would have loved if the pinniped could actually retrieve a Splasher and bring it around to her mouth so she could devour it and its essence directly, but there was no way to compel the pinniped to come; the creature, in all likelihood, would not even recognize Leviathan as her original progenitor. Her daughter did seem like she was actively engaged in something as she darted through the water, but it only took a few moments for Leviathan to realize that something was not right.

'She's running from something.' thought Leviathan with cool detachment, though it was not as if she could do anything to assist her tiny daughter, not with her smooth, soft body that required almost a whole kilometer of space to even turn around. Then the familiar shapes darkened the sparkling ceiling of water overhead, and the usually placid sea-beast felt a flicker of anger in her hill-sized breast. The Splashers were pursuing her pinniped daughter, the one who was supposed to hunt them!

Anger lapsed into incomprehension. Her daughter was clearly fleeing from the smaller, surface bound creatures, yet there was no obvious reason why. She was faster than they were in the water and with her powerful jaws and larger size should have been able to at least intimidate the obvious pack-hunters. Leviathan watched as the pinniped retreated to the safety of deep water and rested for a time. The sea-titan then noticed how lean her body was, far from the fat successful huntress she had invested in, though Leviathan had no way of knowing if this was a young or old specimen.

For ten minutes, she sat on the bottom of the shallow reef, breathing through her skin and conserving energy. It struck Leviathan as a decent strategy as the Splashers seemed restricted to moving along the water's surface, but the entire time, Leviathan wished she would dash back up and take a bite out of the awful monkey-things as she was designed to do. The entire situation was utterly befuddling to Leviathan, even as several more Splashers appeared on the surface, their hard oval bodies blocking out the sun and reflecting sound-waves. These ones were dragging something behind them in the water, but Leviathan lacked any frame of reference to make sense of what she was seeing. It was long and fell down to drag nearly at the reef floor and like their wooden shells also did not appear to be a natural part of the Splashers' bodies. The pinniped also seemed confused because she simply continued to rest in her shelter at the bottom of the reef as the long, wide thing was eventually dragged all around her. The thing was mysteriously insubstantial, creating only a weak impression on Leviathan's sonar. The fact that she was watching all of this as she floated half a kilometer away did not aid in figuring out what was happening. Yet, the whole proceeding was so unusual that Leviathan decided to risk the sharp rocks against her soft under belly to get a little closer. She had to do so carefully, however, since she could see almost nothing directly in front of her, but she was almost incapable of moving any direction other than forward. Her own stiff pectoral fins were useless for almost anything other than controlling the angle of her body now. As she struggled with the limitations of her body design, Leviathan wondered for the first time if she might need a few more physical capabilities other than eating and birthing.

She almost missed her first blurry glimpse of a Splasher. She heard the dive clearly enough and in enough detail to detect the rocking of the thin wooden board which supported the creature as it detached itself. The monkey-thing did indeed bring about distant memories of devouring forest canopies and anything too slow to escape her flat-toothed jaws. It's four-limbed profile shimmered in the brightly lit water, but details escaped Leviathan due to the curtain-like object partially obstructing the view. The Splasher dove down into the water, far deeper than terrestrial animals were usually comfortable. 'So Little Sister seems to finally be getting her genetics mixed up.' Leviathan thought smugly to herself. But Leviathan was in truth more befuddled than ever, to the point of wondering if this was some sort of suicidal behavior trait in Splashers to willingly descend down to a larger and ostensibly more fearsome predator where it was at a natural disadvantage.

Leviathan did not see what happened next, however. A stray current tilted her head just so, but with her lack of maneuverability and the fact that she had been angling closer to the scene at the edge of her field of vision, it was enough for her bulbous snout to occlude the key moment. 'No!' cried the sea-beast in her own mind as her own face blocked what happened next. Her eye strained and roved, but to no avail. The moving parts of her body had been whittled down to bare necessities and the blind spot in front her had grown to over 45 degrees across the huge expanse of her wide mouth. She did smell the blood, however, and knew immediately that it was not that of any mammal.

Leviathan pushed her massive, blubber-stuffed body to its limits to turn her head ever so slightly back to the right, though her 'thrashing' would have been barely perceptively faster than they had been previously; she had almost no fast-twitch muscle fiber in her entire body and a very low muscle-to-fat ratio to begin with. So slowly, her long tail fin counteracted the effect of the ocean current and began to bring things around, eventually rewarding Leviathan with the sight of her pinniped daughter entangled in the curtain-like thing and bleeding from multiple puncture wounds, coloring the water with her dark, midnight blue blood. Leviathan was barely able to register shock before a much more immediate concern than the countless thousands of tons of her precious biomass she had invested in her predators turned prey struck her.

The pain slashed into her underside, unfamiliar and acute, very unlike the exhaustion and abrasion of birthing pains. Leviathan emitted a low moan as she realized she was being sliced open on a sharp protrusion below her massive frame, the coral ripping through the soft skin and blubber as easily as opening a zipper, driven by Leviathan's own unstoppable inertia. Gallons of blood began to saturate the entire cove, spreading in a slow-moving cloud that would eventually lead to an especially good fishing year months later. Leviathan continued to be cut open, the rock being forced deeper from her chest to her low-slung belly, the tip eventually crumbling under the sheer weight of flesh moving across it only to create a rougher gash with the blunter rock. At least her belly was not full of offspring at the moment, Leviathan reflected as she struggled to tilt her frame even a little bit to the side to ease the pressure, but it would naturally have been even better if her stomach was not full of three whale-sized daughters; in fact, she might not have been cut at all...

Embarrassingly, as the cutting rock broke down while gouging her blubber and required ever more force to push through her still-deepening belly, Leviathan began to list and flounder in the water, her inertia finally giving out as she fetched up against the shallow reef, still pumping her blood in buckets into the water while gobbets of loosely attached blubber strayed freely into the cove, attaching fish and sharks. Of course, to Leviathan, even the largest sharks were little better than minnows, so that was of no concern. More distressing was the fact that she was stuck with several feet of calcium-rock stabbing into her blubber, her movements almost too feeble to move her massive body at all; that and the stinging pain, of course. Even as the sea water clouded to zero visibility with Leviathan's dark blood, she was conscious that she had suffered only a mild flesh wound, yet at the same time, she was no longer used to dealing with pain.

'Ah, ah, ah, ah!' Leviathan wailed in her own head as she waved her flippers and tail uselessly. Her basic animal nature threatened to rise up and consume her higher mental functions on the spot, just to escape from the stinging, and the burning, and the feel of things with teeth nibbling the edges of her 50 foot long wound.

Then Little Sister was there in her mind with her, her calm layering over Leviathan's head like a veil. "What's happening?" she asked, thankfully with no traces of accusation in her metal signals.

Leviathan related her recent memories to the tail, interpreting the sensations of sight, smells and sound into a story that the inner-world obsessed hind-brain could understand.

"And so we ran up against the reef..." said the tail, and though her mind-voice held no trace of disappointment or frustration, Leviathan believed she could almost feel the unexpressed emotions pressing against her mind from the other brain.

"Yes..." admitted Leviathan shortly, feeling her failure in her role as pilot for their incredible body all the more now that the gouge on her belly and chest was not aching so. And the pain had undeniably begun to subside as soon as Little Sister had made her presence known, even as she felt sea water and small creatures flushing and wriggling into the three-foot-deep gash.

Leviathan tried to relax, accepting Little Sister's comfort as she intercepted the pain signals from her body, yet was aware that her other mind was still filtering through an uncomfortable soreness, especially where her flesh welled up against the rocky protrusion stabbing into her blubber. Whenever a stray current brushed up against her body, the skin and fat tore a little more, the force amplified across her titanic surface area.

Little Sister was quiet for dozens of long seconds which dragged with the speed of their communication. Finally she said, "We'll have to use a lot of calories to heal this wound and replace the lost blood, but its not dangerous. Are we stuck on this rock?"

For once, Leviathan was not at all concerned with the energetic cost of her mistake, especially not with the gaping near-realization of decades spawning useless hunters that only fed the creatures they were meant to exterminate. "Of course we're stuck!" Leviathan scolded her tail. "This thing is stabbing into me, into us!" She waved her pectoral fins as a way to express her pain and frustration even though Leviathan knew her tail would not care about or even understand the the meaning of it.

Little Sister seemed to take this into deep consideration. Then she said simply, "Can we get off of the rock?" For all of her talents, the shape of Little Sister's thoughts betrayed her poor understanding of spacial awareness and the sort of pathfinding Leviathan's animal brain did constantly while on autopilot.

The fore-brain was left in a miserable long second of speechlessness. "What do you think I've been trying to do?" She sent angrily down the long, football field length of spinal cord that separated them. "I can only swim forward, and the stone just pushes deeper into our belly." Naturally, Leviathan did not mention whose idea it was to maintain a massive, fat-filled belly in the first place.

"Have you tried swimming backwards then?" Said Little Sister unhelpfully. Leviathan thought her hindbrain must have been completely absorbed in the designed of smaller daughters to so completely lose scope of what it was like to maneuver their small island of a body.

The brain which took up a surprisingly small area of Leviathan's skull did not even bother to respond to that, instead focusing on thrusting herself forward with continuous slow strokes of her massive tail. The blubber on the side of her wide belly gave a little, but Leviathan was not actually able to produce as much energy as even a slight ocean current. The soft flesh tugged and bled, eventually locking around the sharp stone and refusing to budge. Nevertheless, Leviathan kept at it. For all of the injury she had done herself, proportionally speaking, the rock trapping her was smaller than a paring knife. It was more or less the fact that her body consisted of little more than a mouth attached to a gigantic sack of blubber that rendered her unable to deal with the present crisis.

Leviathan was completely blind owing to her dark blood dyeing the water near the entire shore of the island. However, that did not prevent her from detecting the approach of the Splashers when they came.