Zalga emerged from the rather rigorous training montage that she and Alexis were engaged in with a new yet begrudging respect for the woman who currently had what Zalga desired more than almost anything else. During that time in the…. What was it called? Hypersonic Lion Tamer? Heightened-Optics Cyber-Maimer? In the whatever the hell that thing was called, she and Alexis had been forced to spend no small amount of time talking to each other, even if only to avoid going utterly mad due to isolation.

As a result, Zalga had learned that, if Alexis’ words were to be believed, she wasn’t the only one who had size issues. She had heard of the insectoid savages that Alexis could create, not to mention the creature called the ‘Swarm Queen’, but she had always assumed that these things were just heavily bastardized versions of Undead Vampirism. According to Alexis, this was both true and untrue.

Alexis had, for the longest time, been hiding a dark secret that she had hoped even Kain never knew about; a monster within herself that, if unleashed, could quite possibly drain the entire universe dry in a maddened hunger before moving on to the next, and the next and the one after that. The way that Alexis had spoken of her, as she put it, Last Recourse, gave Zalga the willies and made her all the more convinced that Alexis was not suitable for the position that she had.

For such a potentially world-ending beast to be the husband of Kain? Such a thing was unacceptable! However, Zalga was smart enough to realize that if she did manage to take Kain from that lamprey, she would most likely take out her rage by destroying everything. With that said, Zalga decided to play the long game and prove herself more invaluable than Alexis. After all, if there was ample evidence to point to herself being more valuable than the leech, then of course both parties would accept the new status quo.

But, such plotting and scheming would have to wait for later, as there were other, slightly more pressing matters to attend to down under the waves. Some diminutive people with overly large amounts of facial hair and a stubborn streak that could not be fully accounted for had, for quite a while now, been making the lands… or perhaps seas of Atlanti’lyeh their stomping grounds. Their boats and massive naval stations were bad enough, but the fact that they had begun sending underwater boats to scout out her realm for places to mine and extract raw resources was utterly unacceptable.

She would need to teach these hairy, pint-sized masses of sentient stubbornness where their lands ended and hers began.

…

“Your majesty, you need not trouble yourself with such matters.”

Zalga ignored the words of one of her ‘guards’ and continued to make her way towards one of the numerous battlegrounds that had emerged from the struggle between Naga and Dwarf over sub-nautical territorial disputes. She was already tired of their shit the first time they had established an underwater mining outpost in her realm, but all the niceness in the world, combined with all the threats in the world, were not enough to get these stubborn idiots to abandon their designs on her domain and the wealth that it contained.

Even though she had only been in the Highfalutin Wire-layer or whatever the hell it was called for a few days outside of it, the Dwarves had refused to give her people much of a break. Now they had pushed too far, and it was high time for the undisputed master of the world beneath the waves to show these puny little bundles of overwhelming avarice why they held no power over her world.

As she approached the newest battlefield, she saw what could be construed as a hundred thousand fire ants trying to take down a bear. The stubborn little bastards had really pulled out their best for this one, sending one of their artificial mobile island fortresses to the bottom after somehow modifying it to be both a submarine and a tank. As Zalga took I the sight, she was quite honestly unsure of how the buggers had done it, only that they had. Then again, such things were beyond her desire to understand, and she really did not feel the need to care about the how and why of it at all.

But while the workings of it did not really matter to her, she knew full well that any salvage from the destruction of this gigantic underwater tank that was handed over to Darksol would net her some brownie points and further her ambition to replace Alexis. And that was what really mattered to her in the end. She would need to be careful and make sure that the machine was intact enough to be worth something to Darksol’s R&D teams, otherwise she would just be handing over some useless metal and that would be far less useful to her designs than what she was currently envisioning.

She ordered her people to retreat and was about to attack the oversized submarine tank herself when she came to the realization that she lacked the means to personally deal with the tank without causing undue damage. Now she was in a bit of a pickle, for how exactly was she to deal with this irritant without crushing it or frying the electronics?

Then, salvation arrived when her ‘daughter’ made her way to the scene.

“C’thylla, take the machine. I want it as intact as possible and with as little damage to the electronics and components as possible.”

Zalga’s orders directed her ‘daughter’ but C’thylla refused to move to her target.

“Child, do you dare refuse me?!”

C’thylla shook her head in reply, showing that she did wish to do as her ‘mother’ asked, but her general refusal to speak was not helping her in the slightest. Instead, she gestured towards the machine and then pointed up towards the surface. Thankfully, C’thylla’s insistence on playing charades to get her message across was something most of the Naga, including her mother, were used to.

“Fine, I’ll take it closer to the surface. But make sure that you work quickly. It looks heavy and I am not interested in lugging that thing around for too long.”

C’thylla replied by pointing to the machine and then towards where Darksol’s westernmost coast was before using her hands to measure distances.

“…… fine. Be that way, you ungrateful child.”