Worm

## Appearance

Worms of the Undercrust are huge, tunneling monsters empowered with ardor. The largest Greatworms can mass as much as a blue whale, with an even greater length. Their bodies squishy, slimy, yet very strong and durable due to ardor. They are not slow, and have been to steamroll through entire cities eating everything.

## Abilities

Worms are generally regarded to be more dangerous than feldeaths, as worms will actively hunt down anyone they see whereas feldeaths will settle for driving them off. They eat everything, including reapers and people.

Some worms can generate electrical currents so strong that they are able to spit lightning, others can spit acid, and there are some capable of both lightning AND acid, which can combust. Some worms also leave trails of toxic sludge behind, rendering places completely uninhabitable for decades.

Some worms have the capability to merge with others and make a much larger worm altogether, or split apart into a large number of mini-worms, each of which is a dangerous monster in its own right.

What makes Worms really dangerous, the big ones anyway, is the slime covering their bodies is a nasty glue that slowly digests anything that gets stuck in it, allowing the worm to absorb whatever it touches into its body and gain power from it. In the worst cases, worms can even absorb servant abilities or the powers of magical artifacts.

Worm eggs secrete sludge containing a powerful pheromone that attracts worms. Unsealing a single canister of egg-sludge can attract a city-destroying worm horde.

## Weaknesses

Worms have a particular sonic frequency at which they are vulnerable, and if you are able to strike that frequency using an Enhanced Wave Emitter, or EWE, with perfect precision, you can effectively put them to sleep. However, once an EWE has been used successfully, the worms will adapt and become immune. To affect the same population again, the EWE's wielder needs to retune the device by trial and error to find the worms' new vulnerable frequency.

Other than this, worms have few weaknesses and are tremendously difficult to kill. Most attacks can only destroy small sections of worm flesh at a time, and the worm can rapidly regenerate by consuming any sort of debris. Finishing off a worm typically requires cutting it into small pieces and destroying the pieces individually -- no easy task, as each piece will be fighting back and trying to recombine with the others.

The one saving grace is that worms cannot survive on the surface. This may be due to the low temperature, to a lack of ambient ardor, or for some other reason.

## History

Sermung , Morgunov , Dozer , and Sai-Hee  all have been known to hunt worms.

Killing worms is originally how Sermung got really famous. In particular, he killed Nla Erujeje, "The Great Terror", arguably the most dangerous worm which had ever lived. Nla Erujeje had devoured the previous leader of the Vanguard and many other renowned warriors besides, growing stronger each time, and the whole Undercrust lived in fear of it. Killing this arch-worm made Sermung the obvious choice for the Vanguard's new leader.

The strongest worms could fight a Feldeath, but they're incredibly rare.

While worms can naturally reproduce via eggs, they can also "hatch" from the cores of Hun'Sho exposed to the Sludge Sickness. It's possible that worms as a whole originated this way.