Sorry I accidentally deleted my last post. I appreciate the answers the two people gave.
This is some big larva I found and the head looks centipede-ish but the body is short and fat with less legs.
I went through my images and found an old photo of a beetle that was on my screen door. Maybe it's a larva for one of these?
That looks like a cutworm to me, and if there's one that big, there should be more, some shallow digging should bring out more. Any plants just randomly dying and falling over?
I had commented on the original post saying I called these cutworms as a kid.
I remember seeing them around the compost piles along with some yellow and brown/orange beetles.
Always assumed these cutworms turned into the beetles because they could be found inside these little hard mud pods and sometimes you'd find them in a larval state.
Just looked it up, yeah... fruit chafer beetle in South Africa ( a few different names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachnoda_sinuata) and they start off as these cutworms.
That's how I know them as well, around compost heaps these yellow and black beetles hover, and then you find those guys in the ground, but I am south African so that might be why I know them as cutworms