With quick but sure steps Zoah approached the Octopus’s vat, but when he peered over the edge he saw nothing but a thick slick of slime. The evil mollusc was either hidden in an undulating bath of mist or had fled deeper into its lair.

The world’s great mollusc is yellow, Zoah thought. As yellow as a Neptunian dung beetle.

“Where do you think the cowardly fish-bait is hiding?” Zoah asked Rhameo, who had just reached his father’s side.

They saw nothing in the moiling murk, and heard only the quiet plink, plink of slime dripping from above… then oozy silence. But suddenly, long tentacles as thick as an Amazonian anaconda whipped down and coiled around their necks. Quick as light stabbing the gloom of a Uranian moon, two more tentacles encircled their waists. The monstrous creature was hanging from the ceiling! Zoah roared and cut them free with two great slices of his sword. Stinking Octopoidal blood spurted, as thick as molasses.

The Octopus silently screamed as Rhameo stolka-jumped, gripping the two sides of the monster’s legendary genital cavity, then with a phenomenal burst of strength began pulling the ten-ton blob towards the floor, folding the body over on itself like a titanic sandwich. Zoah’s battle-frenzied blade transformed into a whirl of light as the Octopus was shredded into dozens of pieces. The screams, audible now – of pleasure or pain, Rhameo could not be sure – gradually subsided. And whether those severed hunks of Octopoidal flesh continued to spasm with the shock of the blows or whether, like sinister globs of mercury, they were slowly and surreptitiously pooling together again, it was hard to say.

“Vanquished,” said Zoah, wiping the sword clean on his robe.

“Thank you, Father. Never had a son such a father as you were today. “

Not yet. A mutant half-Octopus had reformed out of the severed remnants. What was previously almost shapeless was now disjointed like a jigsaw put together by a moody lunatic. Malformed tentacles shuddered toward them with frightening speed and gripped Zoah and Rhameo. The mutant monstrosity had redoubled its strength; stronger and stronger was the grip of the oily mollusc. A tentacle seized Zoah’s sword from his grasp and began to wave it at him in series of fever-delirious slices.

Zoah cried out in anger, raging as his neurotransmitters fired like liquid uranium pulse jets and poured a fresh frenzy of battle into his mighty arms, driving the monarch to new heights of fury. He knocked the sword aside and gripped the edge of the Octopus’s vat, then came a scream of tearing meta-alloy as he wrenched a strip of durametal from its side and wielded it like a blade, a metre across its gleaming arc. He whirled the makeshift weapon over his head to gain momentum then brought it crashing through the tentacle that held his son captive. The creature shuddered and exuded a nostril-biting, skunkish gruel, but even as Rhameo stumbled backward in retreat, retching as he fell to the floor, Zoah hacked off the creature’s head and held it aloft in black-bloody triumph.

Rhameo and his father shared a manly smile, and then they left the carnage and returned to the others.