Scaled Snapper

Scaled snappers are sturdy, turtle-like beasts armored in reinforced shells and armed with powerful, crushing jaws. What they lack in speed they make up for in resilience: their bite can shear through wood and light armor, and their heavy bulk makes them stubborn, territorial defenders of the ground they claim. They are found in waterways across Runeterra, thriving above all in the rivers, lakes, and marshlands of Demacia and Ionia. In the First Lands, the scaled snapper is bound up with Ionia's most ancient magic. In a vision granted to the swordsman Yi, the Vastayashai'rei, ancient masters of storm and stone, bent low and sprang forward into the shapes of scaled snappers, vulkodalks, and wolves to make war on a charging host of giants. As their bestial stampede overran the behemoths, several of the shifted snappers threw themselves headlong into the enemy, using their sheer mass to knock the giants off their feet where blade and wind could not. The creatures still lurk in the forgotten wilds of the First Lands, common enough that travelers learn to watch for them. When one of Bandle City's boldest scouts was mapping Ionia's uncharted forests and felt unseen eyes upon him, his first thought was that a scaled snapper had found him, though the watchers proved to be only forest spirits. Slow, heavily built, and hard to move, the scaled snapper endures as one of the quieter dangers of Runeterra's waters and wetlands.