The underground basin at minus twenty-four thousand meters became a tiered arena of primal thunder.
The Thalassic World-Eater Kraken rose from the earth-shaking wound like an island breaking the sea. Its eight-hundred-meter hard-shelled dome, crusted with stone-hard coral and veined with pulsing cobalt bioluminescence, displaced millions of tons of hyper-dense salt water with every painful heave of its mantle.
Around the huge sovereign, the water churned with violent bio-magnetic discharges. Sparks of blue Saint Elmo’s fire danced along the jagged edges of its hard shell plates. It sent rhythmic blast waves of high-thickness magnetic interference through the underground sea. The surrounding heat of the water fluctuated wildly, shifting between freezing two-degree salt water and seventy-degree plumes of white-hot-water venting.
Inside the command bridge of the heavy dreadnought Vanguard-Ironclad, three miles to the north, the shipboard self-running combat displays went dark.
“Self-running targeting radar offline!” the tactical officer shouted through the bridge intercom, fighting to read clockwork brass dials under the dim glow of emergency red battle lamps. “The creature’s magnetic field is inducing three thousand volts of leech-like power-coil through our hull plating! Micro-processors are frying across all fire-control directors! Main battery railguns have lost sight servo lock!”
Standing on the armored watching overhead frame of the flagship, his uniform coat drenched in salt spray and his white beard bristling with defiance, Admiral Douglas Kincaid gripped the brass railing with calloused, iron hands.
