3-16: So Long, Leviathan

The gang is on a flat ridge on a high cliff in the mountains overlooking the city of Blister Hill below. It'd be pretty much a sheer drop down. It's too high up to see any of the people milling about the city below, just the walls and buildings. In front of the city, wide pathways cross this way and that, leading across the flat brown plain and down into the green river valley of Okran's Pride.

The gang makes it to Blister Hill to turn in the Cannibal Grand Wizard and cannibal chief without issue. Cat and Riddly do the legwork while the others camp out on a high mountain cliff overlooking the city, keeping well out of sight of any paladins.

Pocketing the 50,000 Cat combined reward, the two make a stop at the bar to restock the gang's food supplies—they didn't run into any beak things on their latest excursion and the only other food available in cannibal territory is, ah, not something they'd prefer to eat. Here, the meat is probably of more agreeable origin, but the lingering thought puts Riddly off the idea of eating despite her grumbling stomach. She distracts herself by skimming the posted bounties. It occurs to her she's already met some of the targets. There's one for Moll of the Flotsam Ninjas, a woman she'd love to get to know better. There's also one for another old pal.

WANTED: The Black Dragon Duo

Buzan

Race: Scorchlander
Gender: Male
Description: Has a limp in his walk and a 'sluggable face'

Dimak

Race: Shek
Gender: Female
Description: Stub spiked, grey skinned and 'beady eyed'

Wanted for multiple counts of murder, robbery, assault, arson and kidnap. A purely blackened couple who have left a trail of corpses along their path. Most recently reported to be raiding caravans in the swamplands. Both of the above are dangerous characters likely to attack on sight.

REWARD: c.20,000 per head

Ahh, Dimak, who jumped the gang with a bunch of her Black Dragon Ninjas when Ells walked up to their tower in the Border Zone (Buzan was there too but stayed in the tower). Good times. Riddly still has her Meitou-grade ninja blade. The gang may have decided to turn her in for her bounty at the time if the Shek Kingdom was interested in it. Only the Holy Nation is interested in the Black Dragon Duo, however, and those two didn't seem anywhere near bad enough for the gang to feel okay with consigning her to Rebirth. Riddly hopes she's doing well. She can have the sword back over Riddly's dead body but surely she can still get up to her banditry and mischief with a sword of average quality.

The gang spends the next day bumming around the mountains while they decide what to do next. They wind up stumbling across another ancient library.

From an elevated path, the gang looks down into a plateau with a well-preserved circular metal ancient building stands flanked by four dilapidated ruins. This plateau is still partway up the mountain. It's enclosed on either side by sheer mountain faces leading upward, and in the back with one leading downward. A river can be seen at the bottom of this sheer face in the back with another sheer mountain face on the other side.

The loot found at Lost Libraries—maps, a few research books, a couple Ancient Science Books—is useful but not too exciting at this point. I feel like the maps would be a bigger deal for a player who's less of an exhaustive explorer but I genuinely enjoy going everywhere so I end up finding the ruins they point to anyway. What is intriguing, though, is the view from the library.

On the cliff's edge at the back of the plateau, between a couple trees, one of the dilapidated ruins perches as if just a little more erosion would send it tumbling into the river below. On that note, the river already holds three mostly-submerged buildings in a line which presumably at some point did tumble down from above. Just past those three, there's a fourth building sitting at a jaunty angle on a little shelf of rock at the water's edge. It looks potentially explorable.

Several ancient buildings fallen into the river in the deep gorge below and another teetering on the edge of the cliff, looking like it's going to go next. It's hard to imagine what this place might have looked like in the time of the ancients, what the land might have looked like that would have made space for these four pretty large buildings before being weathered away. In any case, it makes for a pretty cool scene. The gang will have to make a point of going down there and taking a closer look. Not now, though; these cliffs are far too steep to walk down.

The gang takes in the view as they discuss their next course of action. They'd like to be done with cannibals. There's so much more of the world to see. There's still a lot of good loot to be found in the area, though, so they resolve to make one last trip up through the Cannibal Plains and across the Leviathan Coast at the continent's northwest tip, thoroughly exploring all the ruins across the latter so they can put both regions behind them for good.

The trip doesn't start well. Feeling cocky after beating the Cannibal Grand Wizard, they waltz right into the middle of the nearest cannibal village and start taking on all comers. While the gang is much stronger than cannibals now, taking on a few dozen of them is a bit arrogant. Beep pays the price.

Beep lets out an alarming beep of agony as he uses his right arm to swing his katana. His left arm is gone. The gang is triumphing over the cannibals; there are six of them in the shot and only one cannibal left standing, blood staining the ground between them, but Beep has been unlucky.

Beep: BEEP!

Beep: BEEEEEEEEPPPP!!!

A cannibal chops Beep's left arm right off. To his credit, Beep barely misses a beat, swapping from his polearm to his katana so he can keep fighting one-handed. In game terms, this doesn't even qualify as a setback—Jam opted to hang on to their old Specialist-grade skeleton arm in case of just such a scenario, so Beep gets it as a hand-me-down—but for Beep in the moment, it still hurts like hell.

The rough fight convinces the gang to avoid getting into more scraps on their way to the Leviathan Coast, where they take shelter in a crumbling old ruin and sleep off their wounds. They spend the next couple days working through ruins systematically, starting with an armoury Burn has to tackle as the ground floor is fully underwater.

Ruins aside, the Leviathan Coast would be a great place to stock up on supplies if it wasn't so remote. Beak things and garru fight each other frequently here, making it fairly common to come across a herd of dying garru or half a herd of dying garru mixed with a couple dying beak things. One such scene nets the gang 75 chunks of meat, enough to keep everyone fed over a long journey and still have some to take home for later. It's a good thing food doesn't spoil in Kenshi.

Sometimes, beak things also pick fights with leviathans, to their immediate and violent detriment.

A beak thing attacks a leviathan with its trademark attack, a nasty downward peck where it uses its long neck to bring its beak crashing down on its prey. It only comes up to the leviathan's knee, though, so it is not having much success. It is about to get stepped on. This struggle is taking place in the middle of a shallow lake of orange-pink water, which is littered with dead and dying beak things and garru. A second lake stretches into the distance, bordered by the pleasantly purple land of the Leviathan Coast.

I'm not entirely sure but this group of beak things may have gone after the leviathan because it got too close to their nest. An understandable if fatal impulse. The herbivorous leviathan simply plods off after defending itself; it's the gang who profits from the beak things' mistake as Burn plunders six of the beak thing eggs to sell later.

After a few hard days of exploring, fighting animals, accidentally fighting a few security spiders, and Ells getting his head stomped on and nearly dying when he tries to fob off the security spiders chasing him onto a nearby leviathan, the gang can officially say they've fully explored the mainland of the Leviathan Coast.

The map, showing the Leviathan Coast jutting into the ocean at the northwestern tip of the continent. There are many icons here for many ruins. South of this region is the Cannibal Capital and then the rest of the cannibal villages across the Cannibal Plains.

The Old Empire Watchtowers and Fallen Tower don't have anything other than scraps but the Lost Armouries and Lost Library pay off. The one place left is a little island off to the west. Careful to avoid the still-active iron spiders lurking all around the island, the gang makes it to the far western tip where an ancient lab stands on a hill, surrounded by tall, pale trees.

An ancient lab indeed stands on such a hill. It's a pleasant day just before noon; the sky is a pale blue with scattered white clouds.

This is the motherlode. It's got Ancient Science Books, Engineering Research, medical and repair supplies, CPU Units and Power Cores to sell, and even gives us our first look at the highest tier of research material: AI Cores!

Silvershade is looting an Ancient Safe, which contains various research materials and tech parts. An AI Core looks like a slate blue coloured ball with interspersed nodules all around it. Two thick, stubby brown cylinders are affixed to it, one on either side.

AI Core

A rare piece of ancient technology, anyone capable of researching it could unlock the most advanced technology of the modern age.

It'll be some time before the gang reaches a high enough tech level to even use these but they'll be letting us build some really cool stuff when we get there. Yeah they look like dog toys, what of it? They're incredibly valuable whether you care about research or not, selling for a staggering 25,000 Cats if you decide you don't care about base-building for whatever reason.

The excursion goes well until I lose focus for a moment on the gang's swim back, letting them walk past an iron spider just as they're about to get in the water. Helpless as they swim, they suffer some pretty horrendous wounds before they get away. Ells nearly loses his leg; between that and getting stepped on by a leviathan, he's had a pretty rough couple days.

Thankfully everyone stays in one piece and makes it to a tiny little strip of land poking out of the water; it's far enough away that the iron spider loses interest. As a silver lining, the gang convalescing on this tiny islet gives me a chance to snap a pretty shot of the scenery as a send-off for the Leviathan Coast.

A rocky light purple ridge stretches across the horizon, its face rugged, folded, and cracked. Behind it, the planet Kenshi orbits looms large in the sky, cast in white in the sky's gradient blue. In the foreground, on a tiny little strip of an island, Jam, Ells, and Horse rest on bedrolls while the rest of the gang stand watch. Pilaf stands out; she has reached the Elder stage of life and is now huge.

The gang probably won't be coming back here unless, I dunno, they get really desperate for meat while visiting Flotsam Village or really want to hang out somewhere purple. It's a shame; I like this place. The world has plenty of other sights to see, though, both charming and... interesting in other ways.

For their next destination, the gang plans to return south and see if they can reach those river-drowned ruins they saw from the mountains by Blister Hill. Hopefully they'll be more on the benign end of “interesting”.

3-17: ARMOUR KING ⮞