The Titanic Leech was a monstrous thing—nearly a kilometer long and thirty meters wide at the mouth. This monster surged forward, using its sheer mass to displace any obstacles before it. Its hide was leathery and a deep crimson, darker than blood. Across its body were what looked like boils, which served as gestation chambers for its young. The entire creature secreted a slick slime to shield it from the wrath of the sun and the dry climate of the surface. From its mouth came the grinding sound of uncountable numbers of teeth—a constant grating noise, only punctuated when a tooth finally broke under the pressure.

  Other than those features, it looked like a massive leech. Yet one could easily infer from its body language that it hated its existence. It despised being forced to crawl across the ground. It hated how thin the natural mana was. It hated the sun. Still, it pushed forward relentlessly.

  Villages it passed simply fell silent, everyone bunkering down in their basements lest they draw its attention. But it never deviated from its path. It continued surging forward, moving toward the fertile lands its dungeon had promised it could invade.

  Then the hydras crested the horizon. They spotted the leech first, as its methods of detection did not reach as far as their eyes could see. The Primeval Hydras had grown accustomed to the Devourer they traveled with, but they felt the shift in its temperament the moment it saw the mountain of flesh that was the Titanic Leech. Against the sun-bleached land, it may as well have been a beacon.

  The eyes of the Devourer locked onto the titanic mass of muscle, and it began making a clicking noise of anticipation. It did not rush—not yet. It prowled. Its tails lifted from the ground as the Devourer eased forward. Inside its body, its blood pressure began to rise. The Devourer possessed no single organ that could be designated as a heart; its body was far too large for that. Instead, it had many smaller organs that served the roles of both heart and adrenal gland. As its blood pressure rose in anticipation, its body began to quiver—yet it still prowled, heads held high and back arched as it drew ever closer to its perceived prey.

  It was only when the distance had closed by half that the leech noticed the Devourer. To the leech’s senses, the hydra was a massive ball of heat. The traces of mana within it were minimal, to say the least. The enormous thing before it was all muscle, bone, sinew, and blood. Its stomach growled in protest at the sight of such a mountain of flesh.

  The leech trembled before picking up speed. It quivered in anticipation, eager to sate its hunger—if only for a time. The grinding of its teeth redoubled as it hurled itself forward.

  The Primeval Hydras stopped at a distance, giving the Devourer space.

  It seemed to take the Devourer a moment to process that the leech was coming to it willingly. A deep growl escaped its many mouths before it lurched into motion. It began bounding forward, no longer restrained, acidic spittle running freely from its many hungering maws.

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  The blisters along the leech’s body began to burst. Leeches of all shapes and sizes spilled from the ruptured flesh as the distance between the titans closed.

  Then the Devourer roared.

  What emerged was not so much a sound as it was a wall of pressure—so intense that most beings with ears could not hear it, only feel it as it ruptured their eardrums. The pressure wave washed over the tide of leeches and forced them to falter. Many of the smaller ones simply died outright. In the larger ones, blood vessels ruptured.

  The Titanic Leech paused involuntarily. It was not fear that halted it, but the demands of its own body. The Devourer’s roar had been designed for this—not as a warning, but as a charge-break. It existed to cause damage, to force massive prey to pause as their bodies rebelled against an unseen force.

  Thus, the Devourer struck the Titanic Leech with full, unapologetic force.

  There were no bones in the leech’s immense body to break, but it still felt the impact of nearly two hundred tons of hydra slamming into it. The leech’s less-dense flesh could do nothing but yield. Blunt force was not the most effective method of attack—but it was still first blood.

  The hydra’s many heads immediately tried to tear into the leech’s flesh with fang and acid. The slime coating mitigated much of that effort. The leech retaliated with a bite of its own, suctioning onto the hydra’s chest and sinking in its teeth. It immediately attempted to pull back as the Devourer’s toxic blood corroded its teeth and flesh on contact, but it could not pull free. Grasping talons finally pierced and raked into its leathery hide, and the many heads of the Devourer plunged into those rents, greedily tearing chunks from the leech’s insides.

  Still, the leech did not yield. It used its immense mass to hammer at the monster it could not consume, its indignation at meeting an unconsumable foe made manifest. The tide of smaller leeches attempted to chew their way into the Devourer, only for its blood to melt them as it had their progenitor.

  The battle raged for nearly a full day—a true testament to the sheer vitality of both combatants. Yet the outcome had been decided in the opening blows.

  In the end, the Devourer sat amid a pool of torn and partially dissolved flesh. It loosed a triumphant cry toward the sky before turning its attention back to the remains of its meal. The carnivorous heads focused on the larger chunks of flesh, greedily consuming everything within reach, while the herbivorous heads slurped up the surrounding slurry of liquefied remains. As it fed, its wounds hissed with heat and steam, its body burning the newly consumed flesh to repair and reinforce itself. The beast swelled as it ate, like a muscle engorged with blood.

  Only when there was bare dirt left did it finally shake off its feeding frenzy. Even that description was generous. The Devourer scraped at the ground with claw and tongue alike, peeling away the upper layers of soil where blood, acid, and liquefied flesh had soaked in. Mud was drawn into its mouths and filtered relentlessly—minerals crushed, water extracted, dissolved nutrients stripped free and consumed. Leaves, roots, and stones caught in the slurry were ground down or discarded only after every trace of usable mass had been pulled from them. Where the battle had raged, there was no stain, no corpse, no lingering moisture—only dry, compacted earth, as though nothing living had ever died there at all. Only then was the Devourer able to refocus itself and continue its relentless march toward the dungeon that had birthed its meal.