[OVERDRIVE CLOCK: 00:33.0]
The ground beneath the Lower Apron groaned as if the land-wide shelf were tearing itself apart.
Titus stood unmoving in the center of the 5.5G gravity dome, his broad snout lowered until his nostrils were barely an inch above the crushed cobblestones. His breathing was a slow, rhythmic, underground wheeze. His massive lungs drew in the dust-choked air and expelling it in short, violent plumes of steam.
Beneath his four anchored talons, the bedrock of Sector 7 was glowing with an intense, amber eerie glow. Through the deep-tissue link, Arthur felt the incredible strain coursing through the tortoise’s skeletal structure. Forty tons of moving slowdown was fighting against five times the normal gravity force of the planet. Every joint, every joint cord, and every six-sided bone plate in Titus’s dorsal back shell was shaking at a tiny hum of four hundred hertz. It drained away the blasting blast wave into the earth faults beneath the city.
The body reality of Titus’s Tectonic Gravity Well was a display of evolutionary physics that silenced every living soul in Sector 7.
A tortoise’s shell is an osseous box composed of fused ribs and skin bone. A passive defense gearwork designed to endure the bites of hunting beasts. But Titus was the descendant of the ancient Northern Xuanwu—the Earth-Core Island Titan that bore the foundations of the northern continents upon its back.
