Chương 123: 4.13 The Kraken - Hans Zimmer (6:53)

MoronicMnemonic F5 F5 F5 See, I'm the only one allowed to do this. It's my bit, and I'm not having the rest of you steal it just because Zeke disappeared again. StoryLeech Moronic, I'll tell you the same thing I've been telling everyone since this whole thing started: be patient. Everything was going according to plan. Zeke told us that the armada was coming together, the fire ketches were ready, and he'd finished up most of the glyphwork. He was getting ready for the fight to happen and then it happened.

He probably is just taking his time to write everything out. I can see him sitting there and cleaning up all his grammar before he posts. You're acting like you expect him to give us a live play-by-play commentary on the fight, and truth is he's only done that a few times. And never in combat. So just be patient. ElTerrible00 Or he's been sick for three days. That could happen and it's been my experience lately.

I'm only just now reaching the point where I can sit for longer than 20 minutes without passing out or rushing to the toilet. Seriously, fluids were coming from my everywhere. It was disgusting and probably would have been educational for any doctors around me. Craaazzzzy Dood… we don't need to hear that. ElTerrible00 What?!? I'm just saying that there are explanations for why someone might disappear for a few days.

I went to a renaissance faire the other day with some friends, and I swear the people running the show were sticklers for authenticity. I think they released the bubonic plague on all of us just to teach us how the 13th century really worked. VeneratedWitchHunter Moronic, aren't you used to this by now? It's what Zeke does. It's his thing. There are patterns to how he posts.

Whenever something important happens, he gives us just enough information that we all know what's coming, and then he disappears before the interesting parts. Eventually he'll pop back on here with shouts and curses and complain that "you guys didn't say that X would happen," and then he'll drop five thousand words about fighting a giant sea monster. PuffPuffKeep It's deliberate and malicious. The man has figured out exactly how much info he can give us and still keep us on the hook.

He gets us all talking, lets us spend a few days arguing about what we think is going to happen, and then forces us all to refresh the thread constantly. CrushDaddyXx I've accepted that we have to wait for our desert. The desert, in this case, being the massive action set-piece that Zeke has planned for us. KickInator I am not able to properly imagine what the Krill Kraken looks like. It is a swarm of hiveminded krill that is in the shape of a kraken? Is it a kraken and krill chimera?

Is it just a kraken followed everywhere by a swarm of krills that feed on its leftovers? ThatBites ^Kick. I never actually got to play Syndicate's Wake before the servers shut down, so everything I know about the thing has come from the wiki. I know it's huge, I know it has tentacles, and I know that it's attracted to magical energy and heat. But beyond that, I've got no idea what Zeke is supposed to fight. CrumhatB Yea, you're not alone with that.

Nobody knows what the thing looks like and that's sort of the point. You don't actually get to see all of the Krill Kraken when you fight it. By the time you track it down for your quest, the creature is there in the water and it's already attacking boats. The whole fight is built around the tentacles, and the most you see are those and a small beak that peaks up out of the water. It's what makes the fight so dangerous AND memorable. You don't get a nice, clean view of the thing.

It's kind of horror movie vibes like that. As for the krill part of its name, it's because it uses krill as something like a mana engine. Mal already told Zeke about all the dangers he needs to look out for in Emberveil. One of those dangers was necromancers. Well, the Krill Kraken is basically one big necromancy factory. The thing swims around and devours all the krill it can find, but it doesn't just eat them. No. That would be too simple.

The Krill Kraken stores all those tiny crustaceans in a small chamber of its mouth - or maybe a pocket in its stomach. There are actually a bunch of theories about how it all works in the Emberveil section of the forum. That's not important though. The important part is that the Krill Kraken carries a massive amount of krill with it, and then it allows them to die and decay inside it. That creates this constant source of death energy the creature can feast on. Then, it goes out and hunts ships.

Whenever the Krill Kraken breaks a ship and carries it down into the deep, it'll gobble up all the sailors and passengers, and then it stores them in the pods on its tentacles where it saturates them with all that krill-necromancy stuff, eventually bringing them back as puppets under its control. MoronicMnemonic Well… shit. F5 F5 F5 Z3ke (Original Poster) Hey everyone, I'm back and ready. No PuffPuffKeep, my giving updates and disappearing isn't meant to be malicious.

There's a reason for all of it and it's because I'm not trying to get myself killed in the middle of a big ass battle. Think about it for a second, if you were getting hunted by all that I've faced so far, would you pull out a Tech Slate and start updating the forum while getting shot at? I figure that if something is trying to kill me, it deserves my full attention.

CrushDaddyXx Zeke, glad to have you back. Now, normally I'd let you build up to the fight. I respect your process and your storytelling. BUT, I've been good and patient, so instead of giving us the context for the fight, can you just drop us into the middle of it? Z3ke (Original Poster) Really? I mean, I had a bunch of stuff planned out. I was going to talk about the difference between quiet and silence, and then I was going to tell you about how the thing finally showed itself and messed us up.

You just want me to start with the action? MushroomCleric You do you Zeke. Take your time and tell the story how you want to. You spent the last few updates telling us about all your preparations for the fight, so getting to the start of the actual battle matters. I want to know what it felt like when everyone in the armada realized how big the Kraken was and how it had found them. CrushDaddyXx I want ALL of the fight.

I was just hoping that you'd skip past the part where you spend 2000 words telling us what you had for breakfast. Tell us about the silence. Tell us about the water. Tell us about the part where something enormous tried to kill you and you Rockstar'd your way to freedom. Z3ke (Original Poster) I wasn't gonna talk about breakfast. I was gonna start by saying that everything had become pretty quiet and boring.

Simon had us spread all the ships out and keep their distance from one another so the Kraken couldn't come up from underneath us and wipe us out with the first attack. But beyond that, there wasn't much to do. Our fire ketches were prepped, everyone was checking and rechecking and re-rechecking their equipment. We were all just waiting on Simon and seeing whether he had a plan that was more than just meandering around and hoping to draw the Kraken's attention.

Now, segue to where I talk about the difference between quiet and silent. I can't think of a better segue than simply saying "segue" so that's what you're all gonna get. If you've ever spent time on a boat before, you'd know that there is a difference between quiet and silent. Even when nobody is talking, there's always some sound happening around you. Water laps against the hull, the ship creaks, the wind catches the sails, the rope shifts as the ship moves. You can feel it under your toes too.

There's never complete stillness. The boat is always rising and falling with the waves, rocking from side to side, shifting slightly when the currents change. After a while, you kinda tune it all out because it's just background noise and background movements. You just accept it all. So it's really jarring when everything just stops. I don't know if you've all ever experienced anything like that. One moment everything is fine and dandy and the next it feels like someone hit pause on the entire world.

The waves disappeared. The ship stopped rocking. The sound of the waves against the hull vanished. I swear I thought I'd gone temporarily deaf because what other explanation could there be for everything going so quiet? I was at the rail, looking out at the rest of the armada when the silence hit, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the ocean. When something that momentous happens, obviously you're gonna look at the most dangerous or most intimidating thing around, and for me that was the ocean.

The water was flat. There wasn't a ripple around. It was like a sheet of dark glass had been stretched out beneath us, and when I looked further out I realized that everyone else was slowly starting to realize what was happening to us too. I saw a sailor on one ship look over the side and peer down at the ocean. Someone else followed him a few seconds later, and he was joined at the railing by more and more people. Pretty soon, sailors on my ship were drifting to the railings without anyone speaking.

We all had the same thought: something was wrong with the ocean. We all gathered along the railings and leaned over the sides of the ship, staring into the waters as if it would give us an explanation for why all the waves disappeared. While I was peering down into the water I heard Simon's voice. I didn't even know that he was nearby until the sound of him cut through the silence.

"There you are." A few seconds passed and a green light appeared underneath the water. At first it was small and I thought it was a flashlight or something just bobbing below the surface. Then it started getting brighter and bigger. Fish were appearing in it. I could see them just beneath the surface, hundreds of them moving through that sickly green glow, and I was wondering why they all seemed panicked and trying to bolt out of the way. The green light kept expanding.

It spread beneath our ship and then further out, illuminating the water all around the armada. I could see shadows moving underneath us, shapes disappearing and reappearing, and I remember thinking that maybe I should move away from the railing. And then the water broke. I mean that literally. Something came up from beneath the green light and the surface of the ocean seemed to rip apart around it. For a half second, I thought it was the Krill Kraken.

It was massive and it was coming from the water and it was what we were hunting… so that thing had to be the entirety of the Krill Kraken. But why was it coming up out of the water? And why was it still growing? A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. It rose up beside the ship in an enormous column of flesh, water pouring off of it as it unfolded into the air. The underside of the thing was covered in suckers, each about the size of a door.

There were barbs between the suckers, thick and curved and long enough that each looked like a great sword. That's about the time that Simon started shouting orders. I couldn't make out what he was saying or what everyone around me was doing because my brain was broken. There was movement all around me. Someone screamed and sailors were racing in every direction, but my brain had basically just stopped at that point. I was just standing there in awe and terror at a skyscraper appearing in the middle of the ocean.

It wasn't the Krill Kraken. It was a single massive tentacle from the beast. My brain was crying and I was wondering how the hell we were supposed to hunt something that big. I was screaming at you all and I was cursing myself and I was wondering if there had been a better way to get to Emberveil. And if there hadn't, why hadn't I just stayed in Frontiers? The tentacle slammed down and swept across the deck.

It was my luck which let me reach out and grip the railing in front of me to steady myself, but that almost didn't matter because the impact of the tentacle threw the ship sideways. My feet came up off the deck and I was, what, vertical(?) or parallel to the ship? I don't know. I was floating in midair and the only reason I didn't get swept into the ocean was the stranglehold I had on the railing. Then a small voice in the back of my head was screaming something important at me. YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO SWIM.

Which, I might have forgotten to mention to all of you. How was I supposed to learn? I grew up in New York and, sure there are swimming pools around, but most involve joining a gym or a club or something. I could have gone swimming in the Hudson, I guess. But nobody does that. The whole place is a breeding ground for waterborne diseases, so why the hell would I go swim in that cess pool? So, no, I don't know how to swim. I'm terrified of large bodies of water.

And I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean getting attacked by a massive kaiju. Finally sound came rushing back into the world. I slammed down onto the deck and had the air pushed out of me and the tentacle withdrew. Fewer sailors were standing around now and our ship had taken a hit. And amidst all that chaos, Simon was shouting orders. Our entire armada started spreading out farther across the water while the crews followed the plan we'd spent all that time putting together.

The second fire ketch moved into position and erupted into flame. Within moments the little vessel was surrounded by smoke and fire, throwing heat into the air like a beacon. I was able to look around and notice that, while all the other ships in the armada had been rocked in the opening attack, nothing had been sunk. At least not yet. Two of the three ketches were racing away from the kraken, trying to draw its attention… which was working.

The Krill Kraken saw the ketch on fire and the water around it began to churn as one of the enormous tentacles raced at it. The rest of the fleet was spreading out, keeping their distance from the Krill Kraken. As we moved, more and more and more and more tentacles started emerging from the water and the heart was stolen from everyone. For a moment. Until the guns started going off. From all throughout the armada the sailors opened fire. The sound of rifles and pistols littered the air.

I swear I saw a cannon on one of the small fishing boats and it made me wonder what time period I was stuck in. People were chucking molotov cocktails at the nearest tentacle, knowing it wouldn't do much but hoping to score some hits against the massive beast. The tentacles were getting smashed from every direction as the Krill Kraken reached out for the fire ketch, and I remember thinking to myself that this whole fight was kinda like the Reclaimer one. The similarities were all there.

This was a massive kaiju, we'd gone into the fight with a plan, we'd figured out the mechanics of the boss battle and it was working. The Reclaimer fight had gone roughly the same way. We'd kited the thing into a bunch of different glyphs and that would have killed the beast if a bunch of assholes hadn't decided to pour into the research district and screw up all my hard work. This time, though, there wouldn't be an unseen element screwing everything up. Nobody was on the ocean who didn't know the plan.

All we needed to do was outrace its massive tentacles and we'd be good. Everything would work out. Then the Kraken adapted and I didn't know what else to do. The second fire ketch was still burning and the Kraken was still steaming towards it when I noticed one of its tentacles disappear into the water. A few seconds later it emerged and smashed into a nearby ship. I heard the cracking of wood and fiberglass, even from halfway across the battlefield.

The Kraken seemed to know that we were trying to tire it out and keep it focused on different targets. It was a thinking creature, and a thinking creature wasn't gonna just let us pick it off. It shifted against and another tentacle rose up from beneath a boat a couple hundred yards away. The tentacle slammed into the side of the thing, punching a hole through the boat while another tentacle rose up from behind it and curled over the deck and swept across the sailors before any of them could react.

I saw, from a distance, as the sailors scattered and the tentacle passed through them and then disappeared back into the ocean. One minute there were people there and the next the railing was gone and there was nothing but a dark smear across the boards. There was nothing that I could do to help them. They were too far away and, how the hell does a single person go up against a skyscraper tentacle that can just smash boats to kindling? Even if I had an answer to that, we had our own problems to deal with.

A tentacle jumped up out of the water beside the Why Not and it wrapped itself around the front of the ship. Another slammed into us and our ship lurched so violently that I was thrown sideways. I went down in a heap and the deck tilted beneath me and the ocean started rising up. I was falling overboard, but the glyphs that I'd worked on for the past few days were able to give me enough friction to pause my fall into the ocean.

I tumbled and spun and was able to reach out and grab a piece of the railing before going overboard. All around me the other sailors on the ship were in the same predicament. They'd been tossed to the ground and trying to grab whatever they could to stop their fall into the ocean. Then the ship righted itself and I heard cracks and looked around and noticed where I had carved the glyphs into the ship they were blackened and warped.

The energy that had been required to keep all of us from tumbling into the ocean had worn out the glyphs and there was no replacing them. Sailors got up and scrambled for weapons for a few seconds before they fell to their knees again at the sudden lurch happening to us. The ship was moving and, for a moment, I thought maybe we'd been caught in a current or something.

Then I saw the wrapped tentacles around the hull and realized that the Krill Kraken was dragging us along as it raced to another one of the ships in the armada. Three tentacles had wrapped around the Why Not, one at the front, one at the back, and one in the middle. There were screams and cries and babbles and the sound of fighting all around me. Sailors had finally found their feet and started attacking the tentacle in the middle of the ship with whatever was at hand.

They were slashing at it with swords and stabbing at it with spears and firing their guns into it. Whenever a cut opened or a stab wound emerged or a bullet struck the rubbery mass of the tentacle, black fluid leaked from it and fell onto the deck of the ship. The middle tentacle stretched back and I thought that it was winding up for a slam on us that would crack the keel and send us sinking into the ocean. But the tentacle didn't fall on us.

Instead it just paused and let me see these enormous swollen growths clustered throughout the flesh of it. The growths peeled open and something fell from it with a wet tearing sound. A goopy mess hit the deck hard enough to crack the wood and all I could do was shift and watch and wonder what the hell was going on. I mean, I knew. I knew what was happening because Malv0lio had warned me about them. But there's a difference between knowing that something would happen and being prepared for it.

Just because I knew what those things were didn't mean I wasn't caught flat footed. The mess on the deck clumped together and a second later a body began dragging itself up from the goop pole. It was bloated and damaged, and the skin had gone a pale-gray from being drenched in salt water. There was barely enough of a person there to understand what I was looking at, but… I'm rambling. It was a fucking zombie. That's what it was. A fucking sailor zombie that was straight out of a horror movie.

The thing stood and gave off this wet clicking sound which made me wonder if it could even speak, and then suddenly two completely different fights started up. The Krill Kraken was still trying to pull the Why Not apart with its tentacles. Sailors were trying to avoid being grabbed or smacked aside or stabbed at with the barbs. They were slashing out at it and shooting it and stabbing at it, and at the same time all those goop piles were creating dead sailors that were hell-bent on killing all of us.

While I stood there, slack-jawed and probably in shock, everyone else was still fighting. A sailor rushed up to the closest zombie puppet and slashed at it with his sword. The cut ran from left to right across the belly and I expected to see a liter of blood spill out onto the deck. Instead, the slash cut across the zombie with a wet slick and a black wave of ink and half-rotted krill fell onto the deck, carrying with it scraps of flesh and about a gallon of seawater. The smell of it hit a second later.

It was thick and sour and made my eyes water. The sailor who'd slashed at the zombie stumbled back, retching as the smell hit him too. The mess of krill and ink spread across his boots and his legs shot out from under him and he went down hard. The inky sweater mixed in with all the krill made the deck slick, which is exactly what you all warned me about and why I'd been writing up all those glyphs.

The problem there was that the Kraken had knocked us sideways and everyone tumbled into the glyphs I'd written had burned them out. They were utterly useless now. All my hours of hard work over the past couple days had managed to stop sailors from falling off the edge of the boat, but they were doing absolutely nothing now that we needed them. The ship rolled and sent the foul mixture sliding from one side of the deck to another. My mind raced as I tried figuring out what I could do about it.

Maybe I could carve some glyphs into the deck? If I worked fast I could give us all something to hold onto, but that idea died almost as soon as it appeared. I wasn't Milicent who could throw down half a dozen glyphs in a matter of minutes. Another pod opened, another mess of goo slammed onto the deck, another corpse crawled out of it and I had another mess to deal with. I thought about pulling my guitar out of my storage, thinking that I could blast some music at the zombies. It was my best weapon.

My music had saved me from nearly every fight since I unlocked my class, and whatever had happened back at Cliffhaven had to have had an effect on it. I could almost hear the first chords of a song waiting beneath my fingers. All I needed to do was play and I could change the shape of the battle. I could play something that would give everyone better footing, or maybe I could play something that would make the little fires burning on the tentacles from the thrown Molotov cocktails rage into something bigger.

Or maybe I could… I don't know. PLAY SOMETHING. But the problem was that as soon as I started playing, I'd become a stationary target. I couldn't really move around while strumming with my guitar, and there wasn't a shortage of stuff on the ship that wanted to tear me apart. Still, I reached into my inventory anyways and pulled out a weapon. Searfang. The knife came alive in my hands and heat immediately crawled up my arms. The Pale Regiment guy who'd sold it to me hadn't exaggerated about that.

The blade grew hotter by the second, its metal taking on a dull red glow as if a furnace had been shoved into the weapon's core, and I felt sweat break out all across my body. I swung at the nearest zombie puppet and Searfang slashed through it. The blade cut through whatever passed for flesh on the creature, and the zombie fell sideways as black water poured from the wound.

I knew my melee skills were shit; I wasn't Zorro or Aragorn or any of the other fictional swordsmen that all y'all will probably post about later on. I was a brawler, really. Most of what I did came down to adrenaline, panic, fear, and very small modicum of skill. But that was apparently enough for this fight because the zombie puppets weren't all that dangerous to me.

They were dead creatures that were being dragged around by something else, and they didn't know how to block and they didn't have any weapons other than their hands. I brought the knife around again and slashed another zombie across the ribs. The slice sent it sprawling to the ground, almost followed by me when I lost my footing on the slick deck. I only stayed upright because of a ridiculous amount of luck.

I recovered and drove the heated blade through the creature's skull, and steam hissed up from the wound as it collapsed. That's how the rest of the battle went. I can't tell you what the other ships were doing, because I wasn't watching them. I don't know if the Krill Kraken was chasing the fire ketches, or if the armada was still firing on it, or if everything had been sunk and we were the last ship left. The whole battle narrowed down to whatever was directly in front of me.

We fought and hacked and slashed at the puppets. I swung and cut and stabbed with Searfang, trying to put down whatever undead monstrosity happened to be closest. Gunshots rang out all around me as the sailors fired at the three tentacles wrapped around the Why Not, trying to force the Kraken into letting us go. I was slipping and sliding while the crew carved into the zombies. Krill and ink and seawater and pieces of whatever had once been human saturated the deck, turning every step into a potential fall.

I could feel something activate around me, letting me keep my footing. It obviously wasn't anything to do with my music skills because, how the hell could Persona keep me balanced. Oh, I'm a fucking idiot. Balance. Okay. You know what, I'm not even gonna delete what I just wrote because I think it would serve as a reminder to all of you that sometimes I can be stupid and forget the skills that I unlocked. Balance activated, and I think that was the only thing that kept me upright.

Even if the whole fight hadn't come down to what was in front of me, and even if I could look out and see what everyone else was doing, I wouldn't have been able to see much. The Kraken had swallowed the horizon in a forest of tentacles, and whenever I managed to catch a glimpse beyond them, ships from the armada appeared and disappeared beneath the waves. For all I knew, the battle was going well. For all I knew, it was going shit and we were losing badly.

For all I knew we were winning, or it was a draw, or we were about to get wiped out. There could have been a dozen ships firing or there could have been nothing left but wreckage and I wouldn't have been able to know the difference. Then a tentacle slammed into the ship and pulled back. A railing disappeared and I heard the craaack of the mast. Shouting and screaming erupted as the ship lurched and my feet finally went out from underneath me.

One of the Kraken's tentacles swept across the deck, its barbs biting into the wood and dragging massive furrows through everything as the ship jerked and shuddered with the impact. I landed hard on my back and the air was pushed out of my lungs. I rolled over, hoping to get to my feet, when I saw Simon Pucco. The asshole was standing there with a massive grin split across his face. His red cowboy boots were planted firmly on the deck, a pistol was in one hand and a sword was in the other.

The man looked like he'd wandered into a theme park and was having the time of his life, even as tentacles slammed down across the deck around him and the ship came apart beneath our feet.

"She's going down!" he shouted. You know, I kinda expected him to be a little bit sadder about it. Wasn't there supposed to be a special connection between a captain and his ship? Here was Simon watching his vessel get torn apart by a giant sea monster, and he was grinning like he'd been handed the best seat in the house. He pointed and I twisted to where he was pointing at. Another ship was coming up behind us, already close enough that the crew was throwing lines across the gap.

Simon started shouting orders to abandon ship. I scrambled to my feet and raced towards the stern(?) of the boat. A few of the sailors jumped the gap between the two ships while others grabbed the lines and crawled across. I followed Simon to the railing and we stood there as the Why Not gave another violent shudder beneath us. Then we jumped. I hit the other deck hard enough that the vibrations ran up my body and made me scream out.

Simon landed beside me and rolled across the slick planks before catching himself against the railing. I grabbed for my balance as the ship rocked beneath us and then saw a few chalk lines flare up around me. Thankfully, this was one of the ships I'd managed to cover with my grip glyphs. I went over to Simon and we stood there and just watched as the Why Not was battered again and again by the three tentacles. I heard a massive crack, and that had to have been the keel of the ship.

"Time for round two," said Simon and I looked over at him and wanted to slap the grin right off his face.