The blast of Container Alpha was not a conventional chemical explosion.
It was a directed bio-sound inward collapse. A packed discharge of forty kilotons of void-spark energy channeled along a tiny sound hum designed to resonate with the crystal lattice of land-wide dark rock.
The blast wave didn’t tear outward into the open cave air. It drove straight down into the bedrock with the force of an asteroid impact.
CRACK-BOOM.
The sound was so violent, so deep, and so total that it bypassed the human eardrum entirely. It shook through the teeth, skull bones, and ribcages of every living creature in the cave. The three-hundred-yard dark rock keystone groaned, a sound like an entire mountain range being twisted on an anvil.
Along the eastern flank of the pillar, a massive, jagged fissure three feet wide tore open from the cave floor to the vaulted ceiling sixty yards above. Chunks of shattered granite the size of cargo trucks tumbled from the ceiling, crashing into the magma trenches and throwing showers of molten rock across the metal gantries.
The leftover four Chimeric Magma-Gorgons were wiped out by the blast wave, their heavy bodies crushed by falling stone or blown into the lava chimney pipes by the expanding gas. The four Chimera bio-engineers were instantly boiled away. That left only smoking rags where they had stood.
