With Node Alpha crushed and Node Beta blazing beneath Pip’s nonstop solar bombardment, the Corpse-Mother went into an end-post, thrashing panic.
The central feeding maw—a cavernous sphincter lined with stone-hard teeth and human jawbones—dilated to seven meters in width. It regurgitated a huge tidal wave of packed, pale-green hydrochloric bile, aiming a five-hundred-ton jet of acid-burning acid straight toward Arthur’s firing position.
“Titus, shield formation!” Arthur shouted, diving behind the tortoise’s front right pillar.
Titus lowered his head between his front limbs, his dark rock shell angling sixty degrees forward to deflect the acid-burning wave. The boiling acid washed over the stone back shell with a furious, sizzling roar. But Titus’s deep-mantle stone matrix was impervious to chemical dissolving. The acid cascaded harmlessly into the drainage channels. That left the tortoise’s black armor scales fully unscratched.
As the acid spray cleared, Grimm made his move.
The Glacial World-Eater bounded through the boiling mist, his black glass fur drinking the heat and moving residue. In two huge leaps, Grimm cleared the seventy-meter expanse of the sump, landing directly atop the Corpse-Mother’s central crest.
He drove his four star-iron paws deep into the pulsating blubber. He anchored his forty-five-ton mass with a pulse of packed gravity. He lowered his massive skull toward the main feeding sphincter, his jaws parting to expose two rows of iron-hard metal canines.
