The air inside the three-hundred-meter sump erupted into bone-shaking chaos as forty-eight bone-tipped pseudopods slammed downward at the same time.
The impacts struck like a barrage of naval artillery shells, each ten-ton frozen tentacle churning the knee-deep stomach bile into geysers of boiling yellow acid. The sound blast waves rattled the rock walls of the volcano bowl, cracking sheets of ancient rime that fell like razor-sharp guillotines into the pit.
Titus didn’t retreat an inch.
The forty-five-ton dark rock tortoise lowered his frontal belly shell. It drove four high-pressure iron-hard metal spurs six feet into the bedrock. His marginal armor scales interlocked with clean, steady care. He formed a solid sixty-foot wall of fiery stone and star-iron that met the dropping avalanche of bone and frozen blubber.
KABOOOOOM.
The impact rang out like a bronze temple bell struck by a falling meteor:
The sheer striking force of twelve thousand metric tons of converging muscle shook Titus’s entire frame. But his earth-shaking foundation was unmoving. The bone-shaking blast waves bypassed his internal organs entirely, routed by his skeletal dark rock pillars down through his high-pressure spurs and faded away safely into the deep land-wide craton of the planet.
Behind Titus’s armored shell, Arthur stood in total, cold and exact calm.
