In the recorded history of the Vanguard Federation, only three S-Rank Calamity Sovereigns had ever been confirmed slain since the Cataclysm of Year Zero.
Each victory had cost the lives of entire battle fleets, thousands of frontline tamers, and decades of territorial rebuilding. An S-Rank Disaster was not simply a wild beast of huge proportions. It was a living world-size phenomenon. An ecosystem unto itself that warped local physics, bent earth-shaking plates, and carried enough raw aetheric heat wave in its core to boil an ocean.
And now, at minus twenty-five thousand meters beneath the surface of the Pacific, the fourth Disaster had reached its critical mass.
The dying Thalassic World-Eater Kraken began to burn from the inside out.
Blind and mutilated, the ancient Titan knew its fifty-thousand-year reign had reached its end. In its final, world-ending fury, the beast started the total overload of its central living aether reactor. Deep within its eight-hundred-meter mantle, thousands of tons of volatile, tightly packed organic aether began to undergo runaway heat chain reactions.
The water surrounding the beast began to boil wildly. It reached six hundred degrees as massive plumes of overload steam blew up into the dark hadal basin.
If the reactor exploded at minus twenty-five thousand meters, the physical shifted weight would be equivalent to a hundred-megaton sun-hot blast. The entire Mariana land-wide shelf would be boiled away, plunging the Pacific earth-shaking plate directly into the mantle and triggering three-hundred-meter megatsunamis that would scour great realm from the globe.
