The underground cracking gallery of Refinery Fourteen had become a howling crucible of boiling chemical sludge. It screamed high-pressure steam valves, and the dissonant, multi-throated shrieks of an enraged apex monster.
Refinery Fourteen’s fifty-year-old iron foundations shuddered wildly under the titanic impacts of the battle. Across the ceiling sixty feet overhead, massive cast-iron steam mains groaned in their brackets, showering the flooded basin with cascades of rusted rivets, flaking lead paint, and scalding water droplets.
The air in the chamber had climbed to over fifty degrees, soaked with thick, choking banks of boiled away sulfuric acid. Every breath Arthur Vance drew through his rubberized breathing mask tasted of scorched copper and battery acid, the soft silicone seals burning against his cheeks.
Around the central catalytic cracking towers, forty thousand gallons of purplish aether sludge churned in violent, nested whirlpools. It was driven by the thrashing limbs of the Broodmother. The chemical soup was dense with suspended heavy metal salts and raw petroleum fractions. That set off an eerie-soft glow that lit up the iron cave in horrible shades of violet and bruised magenta.
In the center of the flooded basin, Titus stood like an ancient dark rock battlement.
The two-ton terrapin’s webbed claws were anchored three feet deep into the sunken limestone bedrock. His dark armor scales glowed with deep amber-gold light as he held his [Tectonic Anchor]. Beneath his shell, his ancient, slow-beating heart pumped oxygenated blood rich in stone-glass minerals through dense blood-vessel channels. It took in the…
