“Sir, the damnable primitives have ceased their assault on the craft!”

“Good! At last, they realize the futility of making this glorious machine cease to be! Let us continue; we’ve wasted enough time on these watery wenches. If sonar scans are anything to go by, we should be coming up on a place filled to the brim with excavated wealth! Investors will be willing to pay top dollar for stock in the company once we make those glorious metals and gems our own.”

“Aye, sir… wait… there is something wrong with the sonar…”

“And what could possibly be wrong with something that the company made?!”

“Well, sir, the sonar is picking up something big.”

“That is obviously our target, idiot employee! I should have you fired for making such an unneeded fuss!”

“Well, sir, not to refute you, but I doubt that our intended target is many times the size of this vessel, has four arms, snakes for hair, and massive octopus-like tentacles. But I might be wrong.”

The Dwarf in charge finally stopped smoking his oversized cigar and looked down from his seat at the 3D sonar scanner. Dwarven tech was advanced, but most of their most advanced stuff was just ancient tech made by those who had long since passed into memory and left no knowledge of how to replicate it. This scanner and the associated mapping system were a package deal, and the company had shelled out a very tidy sum to take the impossible-to-replicate tech for themselves. Rather foolishly, they, like all the other companies that gained such tech, did not choose to try and reverse engineer it and instead kept it as a kind of useful piece of art.

Now said ‘art’ was showing a massive feminine monstrosity closing the distance at an absurd rate. At first, those in the command deck assumed it was just a very fancy glitch. Ancient Relics were occasionally prone to such things. But the growing sense of dread and primal fear that was encroaching more and more with every passing moment was enough to make the men aboard consider the very real possibility that they were about to come face to face with some kind of leviathan.

“No, this will not do! They tried to bargain before, did they not? I read the notes and memos, so they should be willing to negotiate!”

The Site Manager pressed a few buttons on his oversized and overly cushioned suede-covered chair and the Massive Aquatic Acquisition Tank began to project an oversized version of his face into the inky blackness of the deep ocean.

…

Light broke through the darkness and Zalga stopped in her tracks just moments before she would have made contact. Before her stood a three-dimensional construct made of beads of green light in the shape of a standing and well-dressed dwarf. Of course, the image would have towered over any of her kind, but it barely was big enough to be the size of most of one of her humanoid arms.

“Hold, creature!”

A sound pulse came from the machine and dispersed through the water around it. She could understand it just fine, but she knew that her own words would either be unintelligible to them or would drive them all mad. She was, of course, more than willing to speak if the latter was to be the end result rather than the former, but the chance was 50/50 and she had already made up her mind to capture the underwater tank and send it to Darksol for study.

Then again, she had time to kill while C’thylla got into position and she needed someone new to talk to after being stuck with Alexis for a few years. While her own vocalizations would not work, perhaps telepathy would be better?

…

“Speak, land-walker.”

The voice of a very cross and rather wrathful woman entered the minds of the dwarves in the command deck.

“Ah, good! You are still interested in negotiating!”

“Excuse me?”

The Site Manager did not seem to notice that Zalga was not feeling very cordial and continued.

“I represent one of the many Corporations where I am from. Now, I have paperwork showing that these lands are under the direct ownership of my company, but I would be willing to permit your people to have a few hours to gather some minor belongings and leave the area. My company currently has direct ownership over everything within two hundred miles from the surface above us and that extends down to the bottom and beyond indefinitely. I know, I know, this does not seem fair, but the hand of the free market does not play fair, you know? I would be willing to, as a show of good faith, offer you some nice blankets that I can assure you have absolutely no diseases upon them as payment for what you have been forced to give us. How does that deal sound?”

…

Zalga was stunned into silence for a moment but then turned her head to face her people and mouthed the words, “What the actual fuck is this guy on about?” in her kind’s native language. She was actually both impressed and insulted that someone in such a situation would make such a blatantly stupid choice and somehow think that his overly one-sided offer would be accepted. This dwarf either had balls of steel the size of wagon wheels or he was a bit ‘touched’ in the head.

It was probably a bit of both, to be honest.

But someone so utterly mad deserved some kind of a response, and despite wanting someone to chat with, Zalga did not want to engage in dialogue with someone who was both utterly crazy and so utterly arrogant. And so, there was really only one course available to her.

…

“We will refuse your deal and instead offer you one of our own. Leave our domain and never return in any capacity. These are our lands, and you cannot take them from us.”

“Ah, but we already have! But, since you do not wish to take our amazing deal, then there is no use talking to you. Men, launch a few torpedoes at the beast. That will scare it off.”

…

Zalga overheard the last two sentences as the hologram cut off and half smiled as she watched the machine send out a few torpedoes at her. She didn’t need to respond to that kind of idiotic aggression, as such attacks were both beneath her and utterly impotent against her. After her years of training, she was, to quote a certain rapper on the N64, ‘Bigger, Faster, and Stronger, too’, so even the payload of these dumbfire bombs was nothing to her.

With a brush of one of her hands, the devices detonated and were swept aside. With that done, she grabbed the machine with one of her tentacles and moved with it towards the surface. She would need to go slowly, though. Extreme decompression via rapid ascension towards the surface from lower aquatic elevation was a bitch for those who were not like her or her kind.

…

Hours later, Zalga dragged the now empty submersible tank to the shores of Darksol, leaving it there in the dead of night to hopefully be found by the right people when the morning came. She knew that she could not stay long enough to be seen, as being what she was had a… detrimental effect on the mental wellbeing of the average Joe. She had, however, left detailed notes as to what the object was, why it was where it was, who had been responsible for leaving it there, and, of course, the reasoning behind why she had done all of that.

She very much wanted this whole series of incidents with the Dwarves to end, and, hopefully, the loss of something so valuable would be enough to put a significant hamper on any activity in the immediate future. However, she did feel that perhaps she was being a bit too hopeful. These assholes had been a pain in her side nearly from day one, always accosting her domain even as she set it up.

As much as she wanted these skirmishes to end, she figured the only way to finally put an end to them would be to destroy the Corporate States of America themselves. Unfortunately, her kind were not suited for invading anything other than the coast, and even if they did assault the States, the overwhelming pollution made an attack by all but the NecroNaga (such as herself) a near-suicidal endeavor.

Besides, she was having her hands full cleaning up the crap that they kept letting runoff from their factories and foundries and the trash that they kept dumping into the ocean. Until Darksol had utterly crushed the pointy-eared militant hippies that dominated the jungle-covered green hell that was most of Arcfira, she would have to content herself with the destruction of naval shipping, submarine mining, and naval military patrols. She and her kind had a grudge of their own to settle with the bastard who, like ungrateful house guests, kept leaving their trash all over her home while also trying to weasel the housing and mineral rights of said abode from under her nose.