Inside the Grand Palace, deep under the ocean in the capital of Atlanti’lyeh, the Deep Empress went to work. Having secured her prize, she had made haste to her sanctuary to begin the long and arduous process of forcibly reengineering the entire biology of her foe. The spell she had used was only the beginning, now she had to spin stands of DNA and weave tissue and bone. The conversion process would be slow, painfully slow, but she was not aiming for a rush job.

Any sculptor or artist will tell you that to truly make a masterpiece you have to put your heart and soul into the work and spend both time and effort bringing out the potential of the piece, and Zalga was attempting to make a work of art in its own right. Spinning sequences and sculpting flesh was no easy thing to do, as to convert a surfacer into a Deep One required reengineering the organism from the ground up. Lungs had to be backed up by gills, webbing had to be added to feet and hands and skin, flesh and bone had to altered on a fundamental level to avoid hypothermia or death by pressure and reverse osmosis.

Normal Humans could be converted far more quickly, as they were not nearly as… unique as this specimen, and thus it would take days or weeks at most to rework to life of a Human into something… better. Of course, taking every male from the cults on the surface was not feasible, they would die off of old age, and someone needed to stick around to produce kids with the female cultists. There was also the reason that most Naga secretly liked the feeling of unaltered Humans, but they kept this to themselves for to admit such a deviance was shameful. Zalga knew this kink that the majority of her kind had, and this was another reason why she permitted her cults to keep most of their males.

But back to the matter at hand.

Zalga had started sculpting her new ‘child’ mere moments after the ‘egg’ had been formed. Sure, if that damnable lamprey found out about this there would be danger, but that was easily avoidable if the gestation and hatching went off without a hitch. Once her new ‘child’ was finished, she would be able to use its potential usefulness as a reason to keep it, and Lord Kain was always keen on getting new and useful beings to add to his repertoire. Using her arms and tentacles to knead magic, meat and bone into a new and exotic shape, The Deep Empress continued to work over the mutating pseudo-Hero far under the waters of the Atlantic.

…

Muffled sounds echoed in her head as a feeling of a sort of massage caused her to slowly feel different. She could feel her body was not what it once was, as she had parts that were not there beforehand. The muffled singing and fully physical massaging kept her in a docile state, not to dissimilarly from the cage she had been kept in back on the island. The Beast drifted in and out of sleep and consciousness as the feelings continued, slowly gaining more of a grasp on her sanity and more self-control each time she rose from her dreams. Just like when she was in the cage, she had no idea how much time was passing, only that she was in a kind of fleshy prison which was filled with a thick fluid. She felt at ease in this state; calm and collected, like a child in a mother’s arms.

…

The ‘egg’ that Zalga had created was nearly done, as was the being within. She would need a name befitting her status as a ‘child’ of the Deep Empress, and Zalga had decided upon one in particular.

“C’thylla. You shall be C’thylla.”

The being now known as C’thylla stirred in the egg that was in Zalga’s webbed hands. She could feel that being named meant a lot to her new ‘child’ and that the bestowal of a name had increased the likelihood of her new sire being more inclined to obey. Zalga had never asked for The Beast’s name and had not known about the suffering and neglect that The Beast and undergone before being ‘rescued’ by herself. The Beast had never been known by anything other than The Beast to the inmates, or Prototype Mass Producible/ Controllable Pseudo-Hero #150-Epsilon to her captors. Being given an actual name instead of a mere designation was enough to cause joy, and it signaled that she, C’thylla, would no longer just be a tool or pawn in someone else’s games.

Time passed, and Zalga was so invested in the creation of her new ward that she failed to heed the communications directed to her by both Kain and Alexis. This would have consequences down the line, but as Zalga was so interested in crafting her ‘ace-in-the-hole’ against her foes and rival, she was heedless of the storm she was bringing to her doorstep. Zalga continued to toil away, unconsciously ignoring the inquiries directed at her with more and more force.

Finally, she was ready. The egg was complete, and so was the being within it. C’thylla began to stir from her sleep and like a scene out of a twisted version of The Matrix, the yellowish fluid that filled the membrane distorted and eventually burst out. Zalga was ecstatic, but this excitement was quickly removed and replaced by abject horror as she realized only too late that she had ignored hundreds of telepathic calls from her beloved and her rival and that the both of them were on their way through the sunken city to find out why she had been ghosting them.

Panicking, Zalga cheered on her newborn ‘child’ as it grew more accustomed to its new existence, before hurriedly cleaning and dressing C’thylla and trying to get her to be presentable. It would take a great amount of convincing and possibly even brown nosing to get out of this one, but Zalga had ‘survived’ certain death once before, and the addition of a new, extremely powerful subordinate to her beloved’s service might be just enough to turn the tide.

Zalga prayed for a miracle and moved to the audience room, followed by the curious and dutiful newborn Naga.

…

Kain and Alexis were not amused by Zalga’s placations. Due to her refusing to answer their calls, they had been forced to delay their invasion of Teutonia by weeks. They had intended to invade both by land and sea, using the Naga as a sort of Coastal Raiding and Occupation force while the bulk of the Empire focused on sweeping across the land. The plans had been in place, and only Zalga and her Naga were out of the loop. Now the invasion date had been set back by at least a month and a half, and the two rulers of Darksol were quite keen to get the empty placations out of the way and get to the meat of why their puppet had failed to respond and accept their duties.

What made things more concerning was the fact that Zalga was going out of her way to avoid talking about the new Naga that hung on to her like a baby chick. The power from this newborn was unreal, and almost matched that of a Hero, but was slightly off. Alexis was no longer willing to entertain Zalga’s whims and drove home the point that she had engaged in dereliction of duties, but Zalga adamantly refused to talk about such things and continued to meander on to different subjects.

“Enough.” Kain’s voice boomed through the room, stopping Zalga’s train of thought.

“It is plain to see that you were ‘busy’ with something that you thought would justify delaying the war. I am assuming the reason for this refusal to respond is related to the newborn next to you, the one with the Hero-like feeling about it. Explain. Now. And skip over no details and diverge from the topic no more. If you do… well there are plenty of Naga in the dungeon that could replace you, just so we are clear.”

Zalga gulped and began to recount the events that took place between her arrival at the Black Site and the moment Kain and Alexis arrived at Nezperdia. Alexis grew livider with each moment that passed, while Kain merely took everything in. As Zalga ended her story, Alexis screamed at Zalga in anger that she had taken so much valuable time to do something so childish, but Kain calmed her and locked eyes with Zalga as best he could.

“So, this newborn was so dangerous, and we had no idea of its existence… Most troubling indeed. By my estimations, the only way to kill something like that would have been to destroy its soul rather than its body. In a way, its regenerative factor is only eclipsed by mine and Alexis’, but this is mostly due to our souls being more reinforced. Nevertheless, the amount of energy needed to destroy a soul is exponentially higher than the energy needed to reduce the body to subatomic particles. Going by the fact that you did not know this, what you did is the next best thing.”

Kain reclined in his chair and continued to speak to Zalga. He was not happy that the invasion had been delayed, but he was quite eager to see what this newborn could do. Despite Zalga’s pleas, Kain wanted to give C’thylla a mock battle to see what her capabilities were. The second time that the Monster would face a God was close at hand and Kain had the perfect idea of a battleground. While the invasion had been delayed, if the two of them fought in the area north of Teutonia, then the wake of their battle would be felt all over the Knightly Junta’s northern coast.

Kain smiled on the inside as he pictured the tidal waves and storms that would be ravaging his foe’s beaches. While he would have preferred the invasion to have been underway already, adding a new WMD to the arsenal was a good way of increasing his odds against any Heroic Incursions. Once he knew the limits of the new tool at his disposal, he would be able to modify the plan to account for the new variable.

Or at least Krueger would.