Chapter 3831 Exploring Purgatory
Purgatory was a paradise.
An alien paradise.
That was what Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson thought as his Dark Zephyr flitted from asteroid to asteroid.
Each of the ones he visited were occupied by different numbers of fish-whales. The more desolate ones only contained a few hundred of the beasts while the more populated ones easily held hundreds of thousands if not more of the massive creatures!
The more fish-whales he encountered, the more he wondered how these creatures even kept themselves fed.
Though his Dark Zephyr had spotted plenty of areas that contained alien flora, none of them contained any beasts as far as the sensors could tell him. Even if the fish-whales were herbivores, there were way too many of them for the plants and forests to keep their bellies full!
So far, Tusa had only spotted one of the means the fish-whales sated their hunger.
They grouped up with each other and targeted any of their fellow brethren that looked a little weaker than the rest. As long as the conditions were right, the hungry fish-whales did not hesitate to gang up on their target in order to secure their meals by force!
The disturbing part of this process was that any of the attackers that sustained serious injuries often turned into an extra snack for the fellow victors!
"What a cruel and vicious race!" Tusa sneered.
Though his initial explorations did not leave him with a lot of respect towards this primitive and unintelligent race, that slowly changed as he examined the circumstances on the other asteroids.
The initial ones he explored were all filled with large populations of fish-whales. Many of them tended to cluster at certain locations, though he did not know why at first.
Up to tens of thousands of the fish monsters milled about at certain spots. The elite fish-whales generally kept the stupider and more unruly white fish-whales under control, but with so many aggressive creatures concentrated in specific areas, fights were bound to happen!
Venerable Tusa actually looked forward to these frequent incidents. As long as his Dark Zephyr flew close enough, its passive sensors could record a lot of useful data from the various bouts.
Of course, the ordinary brawls between the grunt fishes weren't worth his nice. The white fish-whales were too ordinary to catch his attention.
What Tusa was keen to observe was the other varieties of elite fish-whales.
He and many other humans had long suspected that the fish-whale race had more subspecies than three different colored variants.
Now, his Dark Zephyr obtained conclusive proof that what the expeditionary forces encountered had only exposed a fraction of the diversity of this race!
He had spotted plenty of new varieties among the crowds of grunt fishes on the most populated asteroids.
The one subspecies that caused him to feel a bit of alarm was when he stumbled upon the fattest fish-whale he had seen so far! The yellow monster looked as big and massive as a heavy mech, but that wasn't all. The new variant also stood out because it possessed more eyes than the other fish-whales!
Twelve big eyes were placed around its body, providing the fat, yellow fish-whale with all-round coverage.
Initially, Venerable Tusa thought he had kept a safe distance from the cluster of fish-whales that he was studying.
The yellow fish-whale soon proved him wrong by locking on to the expert mech with its dark eyes before spitting a powerful jet of liquid straight towards the Dark Zephyr!
"Damnit!"
Venerable Tusa did not expect to encounter a fish-whale with a ranged attack. All of the ones he had seen so far only used their physical bodies to attack their enemies. The yellow fish-whale's actions completely caught him off-guard for a moment, so much so that his Dark Zephyr had to adopt an awkward posture in order to get out of the way of the surprisingly accurate ranged attack!
The fast jet did not soar up forever. Eventually, the low gravity of the asteroid exerted its effect and dragged it down until it hit the empty rock.
The sizzling and other disconcerting reactions showed that the yellow fish-whale attacked by firing a jet of corrosive liquid!
Though Tusa did not think that the corrosive spit could burn through the Unending alloy plating his expert mech all at once, the more vulnerable components could easily be taken out. He would have to end his scouting mission early if all the sensor arrays got taken out at once!
"You can't take me by surprise anymore!"
Now that Tusa became fully aware of the threat posed by the yellow creature that he had taken to calling the spitter fish, it was trivially easy for his expert mech to evade the follow-up attacks.
The Dark Zephyr nimbly weaved and dodged as Tusa sought to test the spitter fish's combat capabilities.
Though Tusa did not dare to go too close and get surrounded by all of the grunt fishes, he did his best to explore the spitter fish's strengths and limitations.
After dodging a few volleys, he gained a good measure of their threat.
"This spitter fish is like a cannoneer mech. It can't spit that fast, but each hit can disable a mech! The accuracy and precision of its attacks aren't bad either."
The biggest constraint of the spitter fish was that its spit could only reach so far. They arced back to the surface of the asteroid after flying a moderate distance.
This meant that ranged mechs could easily eliminate this spitter fish by hovering beyond its maximum range!
However, the spitter fish appeared to be well-geared towards resisting ranged attacks. Their large, meaty bodies were able to absorb a lot of hits.
"Is this all you got?!"
Perhaps the yellow fish-whale took offense at Tusa's impertinence, because it suddenly spat a different glob of spit that happened to be glowing like a green lightbulb!
As soon as this bright green jet launched in the direction of the Dark Zephyr, the hundreds of white grunt fishes that accompanied the spitter fish abruptly left their positions and followed the path of the glowing spit!
"Yikes! It's time to leave!"
The Dark Zephyr was a poor whale-killing mech. It did not carry a long and massive whale-cutting saber like the Bolvos Rage. Though its knives were still deadly enough to carve up the grunt fishes, their killing efficiency was too low against these monsters!
Tusa had no qualms about running from the provoked fish-whales. His job was to scout and collect valuable observation data. Fighting only inhibited his purpose.
After stumbling upon the spitter fish, he encountered several other rare varieties among the clusters milling about on different continents.
He encountered a purple fish-whale that was three times the size of an ordinary mech and possessed a huge maw that it used to the fullest extent.
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