NOVEL WEB Great Archives (Sand Kraken)
The Sand Kraken.
The Sand Kraken is one of the few creatures on Alcheryos that bear the title of 'Worldbane'. Beast doesn't quite describe these abominations, nothing truly does.
Each is a highly unique, and extremely distinctive monster. Sand krakens are well known for being dormant most of the time, resting at the bottom of the sands of the wastelands, or even tunneling into the bedrock. That is mainly because they are so large and powerful that very few targets are worth the energy to wake up and attack.
This means that sand krakens are rarely encountered, and almost never considered a threat to wasteland caravans or travelers. They are, however, a massive danger to armies and fleets crossing the wasteland...or cities being established on the frontier. Every few decades or so a sand kraken will awaken and attack a wasteland border city and attempt to consume it to feed. It does not do so for the nutritional value of the inhabitants -all evidence points towards sand krakens being able to process minerals out of the very ground, and eating soil is more than enough for their biological needs-, but for their essence and mana.
This makes sand krakens one of the most hated monsters in wasteland border areas, and one of the most famous. This is not only due to their habits and sheer size, but also how dangerous they are.
The appearance of sand krakens varies, but their main, heavily armored body usually range from 15 to 300 meters long, alongside tentacles which can stretch to 3 times that length, with enough strength to crush Tarkian tanks or swat Erisian airships out of the sky and rip them to shreds. But their lethality comes from one, single fact : all sand krakens can use magic. Moreover, they can use extremely powerful spells, and sometimes multiple at the same time for the larger specimens, much like a wyrm. There are also numerous records of sand krakens evolving their tentacles and even bodies into more than just plain bludgeoning tools, some turning them into projectile weapons, akin to biological cannons, others as emitters of beams of pure energy, or even sonic weapons, so on and so forth. A few sand krakens were even recorded releasing lesser, ephemeral creatures from their carapace, akin to a carrier releasing combat drones. The creatures, dubbed 'kraken spawns', were only able to live for a few days before dying, presumably from starvation, as they did not possess a digestive tract, although the true source of their death is unknown. They were fierce combattants, and while they had no organization or intelligence whatshowever they were numerous, resilient, and equipped with the same strange array of biologically and magically evolved weapons as their progenitor.
One of the big problems of a dying wasteland is that sand krakens are forced to retreat deeper and deeper into the remaining areas, until their population reaches a breaking point and they start rampaging without stop through inhabited territory. Why they are unable to settle in the same type of hibernation in areas with ambient mana is unclear, especially given their demonstrated ability to dig through nearly everything, but in every case where a sand kraken was recorded trying to live in such an area, it fell into an unending feeding frenzy and was subsequently killed. Some extrapolate that the sand krakens were engineered this way, laying dormant under the sand until an area was recolonized during the Great Night, then going into a mad frenzy of destruction when the mana density reached a certain point. Under this theory the reason why modern sand krakens only behave this way once their habitat is extinguished is attributed to evolution, as all the ones who would immediately go on such a rampage were killed and thus could not reproduce. The sand kraken's reproductive cycle is a complete mystery however, as the sand kraken does not have any reproductive organs of any sort.
The sand krakens, also like dragons, come with an older, more evolved variant. The sand leviathan. There is...No real metric for these creatures, other than 'can kill an army with ease'. Only a handful are believed to be alive, and all seemed to have come to be from the wars of the Great Night, as some abominable weapon created by the madmen that brought Alcheryos to ruin, with implants and ancient technology buried in their swollen, old flesh. These creatures are most definitely sapient, and although no official contact has been made, it is believed that several organizations have managed to establish dialogue with these incredibly old beings, although what they said, if they ever did exchange anything, is unknown. Only a few have ever been slain, one by the Custodians of the Flames and the others at great effort by the WMC, the Orlov Empire and the Eris Empire respectively. It is rumored that others were hunted down and eliminated by certain individuals, notably by Eternium and Divinium ranked individuals, although why or how is a mystery.