The concrete foundation of Biodome 01 didn’t merely shake. It snapped along a fifty-yard underground fracture with the ear-splitting sound of a heavy coastal artillery battery firing through solid bedrock.
From the main outflow under-road drain beneath Terrace Four, three-foot-thick slabs of heavy ferro-concrete were blasted upward into the humid air, tumbling through the mist and crashing down into the flooded paddies in massive geysers of mud and shattered rice stalks. The self-running water gates shrieked as their high-pressure pistons buckled under overwhelming underground pressure, releasing thousands of gallons of churning, brown drainage water into the lower fields.
Through the gaping underground breach, the vanguard of Apostle Vespera Nyx’s headsman brood surged into the light.
They were Mycelial Centipedes. Monstrous, thirty-foot chimeric horrors cultivated in the deep-vault flesh-vats of the Sovereign Chimera Order. Their segmented bodies were armor-plated in rainbow-bright black-purple hard shell that had been heavy with man-made silver-steel-osteoclast marrow. That made each curved segment as tough as naval hull plating. Along their flanks, sixty pairs of serrated, sickle-like walking limbs churned through the mud at forty miles per hour, while from their flattened, armored heads, twin three-foot jaws dripped with thick, sticky, emerald neuro-rot venom that hissed and smoked as it touched the irrigation water.
