61. Entering the jaws of the Beast

Day 357.

Seated comfortably in the cockpit of the Rhyniocopter Liam was currently eating cleanly a neatly made sandwich worth ten thousand calories all the while studying the holographic in front of him.

His implant glowed as he mentally fiddled with the screen to have a visual representation of the multiple inbuilt scanner devices on the aircraft, as well as the ones currently held by Orien and Occiden currently flying around the aircraft. 

He was moving past a small archipelago where giant mangrove-like trees grew and in between their roots was interwoven plant fiber that made large structures such as bridges, saks, and storage areas.

The Na'vi of those areas were different than the ones on the continent, their skin was of a light cyan instead of navy blue, their tail was shaped like the one of a crocodile or salamander, and their arms and hands were modified for an amphibious lifestyle and their entire body structure was overall bulkier than their counterpart.

It was interesting to see how the Na'vi almost became a different species here. The potential of building a relationship with some of their clans was here but that will need to go through the Omatikaya or Olangi.

They didn't participate in the bloody battle but words spread and humans already had a very bad reputation to begin with. Adding that what he had planned might upset them even if he knew there was nothing of importance here, it was taken into consideration when this future mining area was chosen.

Errors from others are errors that don't need to be repeated.

It was too far from the reef bordering at the limit of the ocean, an area the reef Na'vi had no interest in going to and it was far from them, to begin with, but you never know they will get curious that is a fact. 

He wasn't going to do a large-scale operation either, not like he could even if he wanted to. It required manpower, experience, and resources he didn't have.

'Ah. A hit.', Liam smirked after one more hour of flight a signal was finally caught and it was by Orien's equipment. He reoriented his flight routine by a few degrees aiming where the signal came from.

It didn't change his direction as he was still going at the area he wanted to exploit but it helped immensely the ocean was vast and a behemoth of an apex predator wasn't going to stay still. 

He would have gone to find another nalutsa but he wanted 'revenge' since it could have killed him and would have if not for his reaction speed. And it was massive too, size mattered, and the bigger the better.

The signal soon disappeared but he kept advancing in the same direction and ten minutes later the signal of the drone was caught again but farther away. 

This repeated several times without any specific pattern and it was due to pandorium. It felt like playing whack-a-mole but with a superpredator.

His mind was split into doing multiple tasks, the cameras both regular and thermic, the various scanners, and piloting the Rhyniocopter several dozen meters above the wide expanse of the ocean, ready to fly back up at any given moment.

More than an hour and a half passed as Liam fine-combed ten hectares worth of salty water and still nothing and he felt frustration ever so slowly rising.

At some point he brought his tetrapterons into the safety of his aircraft; both were exhausted but overall fine. They needed rest and letting them fly out now was to put them in mortal danger, neither had they the speed or reaction time to dodge a surprise shark from jumping fifty meters into the air

Fuel wasn't a problem as he was using the one found at the roots of the Tree of Divergence and a fifth of a liter of this stuff, if refined correctly it gave five hours of normal use for this aircraft; the tank is close to hundreds of liters meant he had plenty of time. 

It was just mildly frustrating, nothing worth putting more energy into but that was to be expected. It was like finding a needle in a mountain of haystacks, a nalutsa as big as it was was not much bigger than a speck of dust in the ocean.

'Hmm, is the signal actually bouncing back like some kind of echo chamber or twisted tuning fork? Fuck, it explains a lot…', he suddenly wondered.

Each of his passages improved the three-dimensional underwater map in both size and precision thereby letting him see in further detail the irregularly shaped pillars reminiscent of hydrothermal vents that were kilometers in length, with pandorium within and rich in life. It was so rich in life that it created problems too.

After this thought entered his mind the monitor sensed a stronger, longer, more consistent signal and it was right below. Then a massive yet tapered shape was detected on the sonar.

Liam didn't need more than that to know what it was and what was going to happen, he was prepared for this, unlike last time. An almost feral smile formed behind his helmet as he ordered his tetrapterons to hold tight.

He veered the Rhyniocopter backward at the exact instance a giant jaw full of teeth breached the water. Piloting it felt right as if he had done this before but not specifically with this type of machine, and as such everything came instinctively.

The nalutsa's gargantuan maw missed the aircraft by ten meters as its body flew higher into the sky, a cable half its size trailing behind. He didn't stay idle as the tail tip of the aircraft reoriented itself, the barrel of the autocannon and its mounted laser pointing five meters behind the last set of gills. 

Then the deafening sound of an explosion resonated as a 60 mm round flew out of the autocannon barrel and dug itself a meter deep within the bony armor but it violently stopped its course as powerful mechanisms inside led to eight sturdy spikes of titanium and carbon fiber that used the remaining momentum to dig in the exoskeleton.

All happened in a few seconds, nine more such rounds were shot each at a specific location along the still-rising body of the nalutsa. And when it fell back into the water creating large waves and a drizzle as it did so Liam moved back down again. 

The giant shark barely felt the rounds dig and lock itself in its thick plate as it stared at the strange shiny food it missed not once but twice and that was currently playing a dangerous game taunting it.

Its tail slapped several tons of water in the air as it dived and disappeared out of the Rhyniocopter's scanners for a few seconds.

'One, two, three and… Dodge!', Liam thought as he maneuvered back causing the nalutsa to miss him for the second time of the day, and then he proceeded to shoot six more of the same rounds at specific locations before it could touch the surface of the ocean.

"To the surface you stay.", he said as the shark fell back into the ocean, and with a mental command all twenty-two rounds shot did what they were designed to do.

Those weren't any regular 60 mm rounds with an explosive charge within, he didn't want to reduce the nalutsa to minced meat even if it would take quite powerful rounds for this, they were highly modified anti-tank slugs. It spoke volumes of the creatures found on this moon.

The rounds were made to be only powerful enough to dig in the plate but resistant enough to not get too damaged while letting them anchor themselves and not destroy their internal systems that by his command would deploy a large inbuilt floater filled with compressed helium.

And that was exactly what was happening, each and every one of the rounds popped ejecting a fist-sized grey cube attached by cable made of carbon nanotube, and as soon as they got out of the holes dug they expanded into a large spherical floater.

One wouldn't have been enough for this mastodont but multiply that by twenty-two, each of those twenty-two placed at strategic areas and you have what Liam was currently seeing.

A super predator nearly two times the size of an average blue whale with a body covered in an extremely thick exoskeleton that made it essentially invincible, all of this for it to swim defenseless white belly in circles while in visible distress as it couldn't swim down or shift back up. Swimming on its back like a dying goldfish.

Liam didn't waste time, the sight wasn't particularly pleasing, he wasn't sadistic, maybe a monster to the eyes of many but not to that low of a level and he needed to act fast anyway. 

The floaters weren't going to hold forever and a struggling beast of such stature and power could royally mess everything up. He wasn't here to play.

He stood up and walked up to the back of the cockpit to the ammunition chamber of the tail, the floater rounds being displaced to the side in a rack full of plant-based foam.

In his left hand appeared a strangely shaped bullet the length of his forearm, it looked like the mix of a rocket and a harpoon and it protected a large tranquilizer dart that might as well be considered a comically sized and overengineered syringe.

He placed it in the slot, then took out his inventory two more and did the same, the total quantity of the chemical inside being the right amount for the calculated weight of the nalutsa. 

It wasn't a video game, tranquilizing an animal is a precise affair if you don't want to die or have a dead animal. He just hoped his calculations were correct which they should be by what he has but he didn't have all the factors so errors were bound to happen. 

The three new rounds loaded he started to aim from where he stood all the while clasping a harness over his armor that was attached securely to a cable. He was too dense and heavy to even attempt swimming, even with contingency having a way to drag himself up was better.

The exposed belly of the nalutsa sported many scars from small to big the opposite of the exoskeleton until he shot at it. The shark was an interesting fact that might show it either could perfectly regenerate its biological armor or it could molt but it was of little importance as said armor didn't protect its underside.

And that's exactly what Liam was going to exploit. Hesitation absent from his body he shot, the round planted itself deeply in the rough skin leading to the nalutsa panicking further as it understood it was in danger but it was too late, the tranquilizer was spreading within the touched area numbing it.

Two more shots rang out each from the same type of round that dug in its flesh at an equal distance from the other.

The panic increased for the nalutsa as more and more, its main heart and many accessories heart pumping the chemical cocktail into the entirety of its massive body became numb, then came the loss of movement, heightening the earlier sentiment to an unprecedented level, then after two long minutes it lost nearly all of its senses and fell into a half-dream half-awake state.

"Time to jump into the jaws of death.", Liam chuckled with a hint of excitement as he jumped down from his insectoid aircraft onto the belly of the beast. The waves around caused the nalutsa to rock back and forth quite violently but his footing stayed stable.

The ten-meter (~33ft) fall neither bothered him nor damaged the shark. He became pretty much desensitized to what a normal and sane individual would do. By many metrics he, like he was now, would be diagnosed with several mental health conditions.

A significant amount of Pandora's fully aquatic fauna such as this nalutsa possessed neural queues, they just weren't on the outside for various reasons. It varied where they could be but for the most part, it was within their mouth.

Walking up toward the slightly open jaws he marveled at the sheer size of the teeth for a few seconds, the average one was a bit more than half of his size. They were unlike that of a shark, it looked more like a giant canine tooth with serration all over its length.

Liam felt small not like with the Na'vi, they were tall but other than that were very lean and lighter it counterbalanced, or with some of the land wildlife, he did have the same feeling here as with the Great Leonopteryx but not to that degree. 

It made sense most of the King of the Sky's size was its wingspan, here the nalutsa was built like a barrel full of armored muscles with only its tail thinning out a bit at the end. It was a gigantic animal and to think it wasn't even the biggest thing down here.

Now it was time to improvise, mostly. Liam passed between the massive teeth with not much difficulty and entered the jaws, rays of light came from the gills slit and bathed the cavernous area in their light. 

His helmet shifted as the air entering his lung changed to one brought by two flat tanks on his back and he moved in carefully. Even through his boot, he felt the skin of the mouth shift with occasional teeth.

The further he moved in the more the water level augmented until he was fully submerged. The multiple cameras helped him to look for the neural queue but without much success and so he further advanced until he was past the gills, the cable of the drone going toward what he supposed was the equivalent of a closed throat not far from him.

'Is that it?', he thought with relief as three of the cameras focused on two triangular shapes, it looked like a second mouth but with a constellation of bioluminescent cells lighting it. And since it was on the upper part of the mouth he knew there weren't a hundred possibilities on what that was. 

'Right there.', Liam smirked while crouching down as he studied the 'mandibles', it was a bit like an unbloomed flower and since he wanted it open there weren't many options aside from using force. Maybe there were others but he wasn't aware of them and the clock was ticking.

He took a better position, the 'mandibles' were huge, both of them combined, likely weighing in tons, but he did as he must to access what was inside. Slipping both hands in the interstice between to get a gist of how it was.

Deciding he got enough information after more than half a minute he switched position yet again. He grabbed the end of the left 'mandible' and by using the space between the two pushed both hands deeper until he got a strong grip.

"One… Two… Three!", he mumbled to pump himself up as he began to lift. For the first few seconds nothing seemed to happen as he used more and more strength but then the left 'mandible' started to weaken slightly and he used it to begin opening it.

Encouraged by this he rumbled internally, veins popping up at various points on his skin as he continued on even when it was half opened and he could begin to see what it was supposed to protect.

It was a fleshy cavity with a translucent membrane covered in a kaleidoscope of points and trails, behind it what looked like blood and nerve could be seen but what interested him was none of those things.

What took his attention was a bright red frill growing out of a bifurcated root-like structure right in the middle of the cavity. It was the neural queue of this species, he knew it because similar structures were found on smaller species of the same genus.

But it was far from being a victory, it was only the beginning of the battle, he felt the pleasant burn in his back muscles and leg as he lifted it further and when he deemed enough he breathed in and out deeply the recycled air within his helmet and he let go of his hold.

 *

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