The clearing of the whirlpool revealed the true horror chained to the High Altar of the East.
Rising from the deep trench behind the jade ziggurat was a beast of nightmarish proportions—the Deep-sea Maelstrom Hydra.
It was a draconic titan over one hundred and twenty meters long, its massive, armored torso covered in linked plates of deep cerulean scales that had been warped and pitted by hundreds of years of void corruption. In place of a single neck, nine massive snake-like heads sprouted from its chest girdle, each neck thirty meters long, swaying in the turquoise water like a waving forest of sea-dragons.
The creature had not chosen corruption. It was an ancient guardian of the Azure Well that had been infected from within.
Buried deep between the beast’s shoulder blades was a pulsing, tumorous growth of dark purple void coral—the Void-Root Core Parasite. The parasite had driven hundreds of stringy, black fungal roots directly into the hydra’s central main spine nerve, hijacking its automatic nervous system and forcing its nine heads to vomit nonstop streams of skin-burning hydro-acid into the sacred spring.
The hydra’s nine heads locked their milky. Then, weeping eyes onto Arthur, they opened their jaws at the same time.
