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Leviathan Chapter Four

By Shalion

It began on an unusually rainy day in the forest. Leviathan had filled her stomach with vegetation as was the norm and was preparing to lay down to rest for a couple hours to digest. However, out of the forest, she heard and detected a wild disturbance that could only be that of a large elephant. It was a bull, similar to one she had eaten months ago to trigger a growth spurt, but he seemed agitated and more, startlingly reckless upon encountering someone so much larger than himself. He blustered at her, splashing at the water of the creek flowing rapidly with water between them. Leviathan had never seen an elephant or any other such creature act in such a manner, but it had been a very long time indeed since she had tasted fresh meat and Leviathan was happy for the opportunity presenting itself in the form of a foolish, blustery bull. Leviathan noticed that the animal was foaming at the mouth, and eyes rolling, splashed at the water in a fevered way. Leviathan paid no heed, rising to her feet as quickly as her lumbering body could.

He charged before she was ready, catching her chest with both tusks. They pierced flesh, but nothing more as Leviathan had a generous fat layer coating her from her current prosperity. Her bulk was such that she was barely shifted from her position, though one of her hind feet slipped in the mud under her and she was forced to down to one knee. It was a bad position for getting up and with her body weight and lumbering, stiff limbs, it would have been impossible to rise tangled as she was with the mad bull. But she did not have to rise.

Leviathan twisted her neck and sank her fangs into the bull's neck, pumping him with all of the contents of her large venom sacks. The bull fell away, messily extracting his tusks from Leviathan's flesh, screaming almost immediately and stumbling, tripped in the creek bed and falling onto his side. The tusks came out roughly and over a gallon of white blood dribbled out of each gaping hole, but there was so much more contained inside her body now, she hardly cared. Leviathan did not scar unless she willed it to be so as it healed. Half covered in water now, the bull elephant twitched and shuddered as his life left him.

Leviathan looked down at him, her head now small compared to the vastness of her body, and her mouth watered. With an effort, she shoved the undigested plant material down into her lower stomachs to make room for the rich meal that awaited her.

Despite the rain pouring down on her head and making mud deep enough to suck at her feet past the ankles, Leviathan filled herself liberally with the meat of the elephant. She went for the rich muscles and organs first, knowing that she was not going to have room for the hide or bones this sitting, given how full she already was. Even so, the bull was fat despite his apparently fevered state and after taking some time to loosen and distend the folds lining her meat bound digestive tract, was able to get nearly all of the best parts into herself. Though afterwards Leviathan's middle was distended, vast and felt heavy to her. Her flanks had become large hemispheres and her belly dipped low into the water below her knees, making her bow legged once again. With the water washing over the emptied carcass and still raining down in a torrent, Leviathan knew that she ought to get to higher ground, but found movement to be difficult and slow, especially with the way all four of her feet sank into the mud surrounding her.

Leviathan had barely managed to extricate herself from the flooding creek bed and onto the opposite bank when she heard a rumble that she also felt in the padded soles of her feet. Leviathan struggled a few more feet upward, but quite suddenly, the water began to rise over the banks of the creek, first to her knees then halfway to her withers. Leviathan struggled to climb, already getting a stomach ache for the effort due to the volume of meat and plant matter lodged inside of her. Another step, and the soil collapsed under her, unable to support her weight as it had been undermined by the flooding water. Her leg sank and her wide belly splashed into the water and mud which smeared out to either side of her. Before she could even try to extricate herself, the whole bank of the creek began to collapse and slide down hill. Leviathan fell back down the bank which was now quite under a wash of white water and down into the creek which had transformed into a raging river in just a few minutes.

The mass of the water was such that it carried even her large figure away. Leviathan was just about buoyant with the water, but she was unable to lift her head out of the torrent as she was tossed forward and back by contradictory currents and eddies. Leviathan breathed through the pores in her skin, but found that there was not enough time to grow a set of gills sufficient for her mass. It was upsetting, but Leviathan did not think she was in terribly much danger, at least until a stab of pain lanced through her midsection.

Because of the awareness she had of her body, Leviathan was knew that her multifold stomachs had twisted inside of her from the stress and violence of the situation. Tissues were pinched, folded and starved of blood flow while the straining membranes where tightened to the breaking point. Quite involuntarily, a small flood of elephant meat came up from inside of her, almost matching the violence of the water carrying her off, but it was not enough. Leviathan was thrown against an unseen boulder or tree trunk and inside a membrane tore, spilling acid and gallons of dirty food matter onto her insides. The pain was incredible. It was so intense, in fact, that with her dropping blood oxygen levels, Leviathan found herself unable to remain conscious. She whited out, aware only of pain and the white waters filling her eyes, her mouth and her ears.

When next she came to, Leviathan was in darkness and aware of little other than that she was still submerged in water and unable to breathe. Submerged in more than water, as it turned out. Thoughts returned only sluggishly and to remain aware was a conscious effort. Leviathan's blood oxygen was critically low and it did not take long to figure out why. The taste of silt filled her mouth and upper digestive and respiratory tracts and most of her body was immobilized by a thick, pasty substance. Leviathan put together the sensations and came to the conclusion that she was buried nearly head first at the bottom of a deep lake or river. Only her tail and part of her left hind-leg was left exposed to the water, and so those were the only surfaces capable of providing the oxygen needed to catalyze the faster processes of her body. In fact, the vast majority of her cells had already switched to anaerobic respiration or gone into deep hibernation.

Leviathan's heart beat so slowly, barely once every one and a half minutes. The current predicament was not one that she could not have adapted to, however, things were complicated by the situation inside her midsection. The torn sacs of her stomachs had released a large collection of bacteria currently thriving off of her hard earned tissues, creating a massive infection which has progressed to a severity that Leviathan would never had allowed had she been conscious. Though she struggled to even remain awake with her limited oxygen supply, Leviathan began to enact a vast, chemical war inside the great distended bulk of her midsection.

Despite her advantages in chemical production, the war was long and painful. The manufacture of antibiotics inside her was expensive and without oxygen, even her vast reserves of adipose could only be partly broken down, the waste products accumulating and requiring sequestering lest they become toxic in themselves. The bacteria also had large areas inside of her in which to multiply and hide against her deadly secretions. Rotting meat from the elephant had slipped into her innards in a hundred places from where her gut had torn, along with gallons of fermenting plant juice and protein slurry. Leviathan's midsection swelled painfully into the mud, her insides inflamed. If her hide had been compromised as well, she was not sure she would have won the war with the bacteria. As it was, though, slowly, ever so slowly, she restored order within herself, isolating and then dividing the areas of infection, adapting to the trillions of bacteria attempting to break down her body even as they too adapted to her chemical arsenal.

Many rotations passed inside the watery tomb. Leviathan was largely aware of her surroundings only by disturbances in the electromagnetic field around her. Tiny living things flitted by, almost too fast to notice, 'Or... am I... moving slowly...?' Leviathan thought sluggishly. As the massive infection wound down and Leviathan set about the tedious task of collecting the pus and fluids and gasses that had accumulated in her bowls as well rebuilding her entire digestive system, she began to give thought to escaping. She thought about it for many hours, then settled on a plan where she would loosen the silt around her using the waste products of the anaerobic respiration she was currently employing to survive. Her skin could secrete the waste gasses she usually tried to sequester and break down inside herself. Given time, small bubbles would form around her, perhaps making enough room to wiggle free.

However, as she went about these tasks, the buried sauropod became aware belatedly of a second, far more worrying infection. Leviathan only became aware of it as her body, usually little warmer than her surroundings, began to heat involuntarily. Though she tried, she seemed to have lost control of that critical function of her body. This alarmed Leviathan greatly, who had never experienced such a thing before. She perused the many layers and areas of her body, searching for the problem. It helped that she was now wiggling her tail and left hindleg_,_ slowly, but in a way that did stir the mud slightly, increasing the area of her skin exposed to the water and providing more oxygen. She finally came to inspect her own brain, and found the parasites, viruses in fact, already established throughout.

Leviathan became afraid and wondered how she could have let this happen and wondered too at the strange behavior of the elephant she had encountered at the start of this awful series of events. The buried sauropod was not sure at all what the effects would be of waging war inside her own brain, the host of her thoughts and personality, her will itself. Tissues and membranes could always be coaxed to regrow, but what should happen if Leviathan herself became too damaged to order the tissues to do so, or became altered in some way that she would not recognize herself. It was dangerous and every moment that passed more cells were infected, her thoughts themselves already were using synapses connected to compromised, malfunctioning cells. Leviathan wondered if this would be her last fight.

But no, she refused to consider that. She had known since emerging from her cocoon that this world was her birth right. The chances of her landing on a world as rich as this one were vanishingly small, so Leviathan was full of the conviction that she could not let this magnanimous chance fail with her death. She would need to do something drastic.

Leviathan turned her attention away from the infecting spreading in her brain to the thick nerve cluster that existed at the base of her tail. The cluster was there to help amplify the nerve signals coming from the far reaches of her now large body, just like a relay station. It was composed of similar nerve cells to those found in her own brain. With only mild coaxing, they began to differentiate into neurons with manifold synapses linking each other. Leviathan began to grow a second brain.

The days went on and Leviathan remained pinned and helpless and allowed the infection in her brain to progress rather than waging war, which would have caused inflammation and immediate damage. She concentrated on her current plans, repairing her innards, stopping and containing the infection, reabsorbing the rotting, spilled food remnants and pushing the gases out of her skin at all areas. Little by little, Leviathan became addled in her mind and lost control of her bodily functions.

The virus even tapped into her ability to control the cells of her body, but obviously did not know what it was doing. Nodules began to appear, thousands and then tens of thousands through all the tissues of her body, clumps of undifferentiated, rapidly dividing cells. Try as she might, when Leviathan coaxed a dozen back into their proper shapes and behavior, ten dozen more began to act wildly until her body was sick with the out of control cells. They invaded her blood vessels, choking and damaging areas of her body, even breaking the great bones from the inside out. Above all, Leviathan kept her heart free of the disease and the blood flowing, but her control was waning and her thoughts had a tendency to wander and become incoherent. In time, she became aware of little more than the pain of her body destroying itself and the desire to fight, to live.

At last, with the virus in every single cell of her brain, Leviathan blissfully began to shut down areas of herself, first the sensations of the outside world and then of her own body. She could no longer even command her immune system well enough to do battle in the brain, which probably would have destroyed her regardless, but offered a glimmer of hope. In the blackness Leviathan found a modicum of relief as she let go of memories and then thought itself. The last sensations that she had were that her immune system seemed to have gained a mind of its own, for the warrior cells were penetrating the brain barrier and engaging the virus at last. But perhaps that was only a fantasy cooked up by a fevered brain.