Rodin waved with the casual air of someone hailing a taxi by the roadside. Beneath the sea of blood-colored clouds, a vague, enormous silhouette immediately rose up. It circled the distant blood-red cloud tornado several times, then, like a shark beneath the surface spotting prey, charged toward the cliff near Rodin and the Arcanist with visible excitement. It was a ray-shaped lower-plane creature named Insidious.
Salomon had seen this creature before in an underground cavern, gliding through dark, freezing waters like a predator.
Compared with the one he had seen before, this lower-plane creature's slick black skin was likewise covered in maddening, corrupted colors, but it was noticeably smaller than that previous monster, and its chaotic patterns were denser. Its pectoral fins stretched roughly twenty-three to twenty-four feet across. Even so, it was still a colossal beast. Whenever he saw creatures like this, he thought of bats—this creature was the embodiment of shadows and terror in the pitch-black Seabed, a silent hunter lurking beneath mud and reefs. Rodin invited the Arcanist to jump off the cliff, board Insidious's pectoral fin, and walk to the beast's head to look down at the floating rubble and islands below, along with all manner of small lower-plane symbiotic creatures. Completely ignoring Salomon's disgusted expression, the fallen angel craftsman called out. The ray-shaped lower-plane creature flapped its pectoral fins again and drifted forward with surprising steadiness, moving through the air thick with the stench of Sulfur as easily as though it were underwater.
Though they were still some distance from their destination, Salomon could already hear shrill female screams and gunfire coming from a barren floating island above the blood-red sea of clouds along their route. But that was not enough to confirm that Bayonetta was there. After all, during the few minutes he had