The snapped steel pins of the northern freight blast doors gave way with the ear-splitting shriek of tearing iron, raining white-hot rivets across the polished parquet floor of the plenary antechamber.
Through the widening gap between the buckled six-inch armored plates, a huge dark shape emerged from the underground steam.
It wasn’t a combat vehicle. It wasn’t an armored personnel carrier.
It was Titus.
The newly climbed World-Anchor Xuanwu Sovereign stepped over the threshold with the deliberate, inexorable majesty of an ancient land-wide mountain. His massive front foot, armored in linked plates of deep fiery dark rock and terminating in three-foot black glass claws, dropped onto the heavy load-bearing concrete of the seventieth floor. The load-bearing floor plates groaned under the forty-five-ton impact. But Titus’s innate gravity domain instantly spread across the subfloor, anchoring the load-bearing steel heavy beams and distributing his huge weight so smoothly that not even a teacup rattled on the delegates’ desks.
Around the tortoise’s towering shell, natural six-sided dark rock columns rose twenty feet into the vaulted dome, venting faint curls of sweet stone steam that scattered the artificial lavender perfume of the hall. Perched majestically on the highest dorsal spire, Pip fanned his three-meter wings of blazing bright solar gold, his amber eyes scanning the frozen chamber with royal, razor-sharp disdain.
