The cataclysm struck Gate Seven with the force of a falling asteroid.
The two leftover Class-I Siege Giant statues, their thirty-meter bodies lowered into battering-ram postures, slammed their forged-bone skull shields at the same time into the fractured silver-steel apron. At the exact same split second, the nine heads of the Chimeric Hydra-Drake let loose a unified torrent of emerald rotting fire and high-pressure bio-acid directly into the load-bearing fissure.
KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The sound was beyond thunder. It was the sound of a world-ending earth-shaking fracture.
Three thousand tons of prestressed concrete and four-inch-thick silver-steel armor plating buckled, tore, and collapsed inward. A forty-meter breach ripped through the central face of Gate Seven, sending a towering avalanche of shattered stone, twisted iron rods, and smoking metal crashing down into the inner courtyard.
A blinding cloud of white concrete dust and yellow sulfuric smoke billowed into the air. He blotted out the morning sky.
Through the roaring dust cloud came the roar of sixty thousand chimeras.
“HOLD THE Backup REVETMENTS!” Valerie Koslov screamed over the ear-splitting din. She fired her combat shotgun into the blinding fog where the first wave of shock amalgams was already swarming over the rubble. “Riflemen, fire by squads! Packed volley on the breach!”
