The ceiling of the grand entrance raised stone road didn’t merely crack. It blew up.
Under the total bone-shaking force of Ymir-Chimaera’s awakening roar, an eighty-thousand-ton wedge of black iron-hard metal bedrock snapped away from the cave roof three hundred meters above. The huge monolith fell through the twilight gloom like a dropping mountain. It struck the star-iron raised stone road with an impact that shattered earth-shaking plates for twenty miles around.
Arthur Vance was thrown off his feet, his armored body hitting the flat stone slabs and sliding six yards across the slick moss before Titus’s massive front limb slammed down beside him. That created a protective barrier against the falling debris.
Boulders the size of two-story houses rained down around them, crushed into jagged shrapnel by the bone-shaking blast waves.
Grimm reacted with the blinding speed of his newly awakened Proto-Mythic instincts. The hound sprang over Arthur’s prone body, his black glass mass expanding to forty-five metric tons as he planted his four star-iron paws into the stone. He opened his jaws toward the collapsing ceiling, unleashing an upward cone of inverted gravity repulsion.
The falling boulders—each weighing hundreds of tons—struck Grimm’s gravity umbrella and slowed down wildly, their moving driving force bleeding into the air as howling purple static. The deflected rocks crashed harmlessly into the lake on either side of the raised stone road. It sent geysers of boiling azure water sixty meters into the air.
