The ground-shaking alarm blaring in Arthur Vance’s earpiece was an urgent, pulsing screech of high-hum data spikes that drowned out all background noise from the surface command zeppelin.
“Size eight-point-nine shifted weight recorded along the Java trench!” Toby Mallow’s voice was hoarse, shouting over the blaring klaxons of the operations deck. “Arthur, the land-wide shelf is lifting! We’re seeing sea-level drops of three meters along the southern coastline—the classic precursor to a total mega-tsunami! If you don’t stabilize the epicenter within three hours, a thirty-meter wave will hit Jakarta and Singapore!”
The sprint down the giant stone hall was a test of sheer body and mental endurance. The walls of Vault Two, built from multi-ton blocks of stone-hard magnetic iron and metamorphic dark rock, were shaking with such violence that hairline fractures were opening across the ancient stonework.
Every time the Behemoth thrashed in the central arena, a sound blast wave of raw earth-shaking force swept down the hall. It traveled at twelve hundred meters per second.
Titus ran at the front of the column, his massive bulk acting as a moving snowplow. The tortoise didn’t slow down. He leaned into the oncoming blast waves. His black-ice spires glowed with blinding azure mana as he flattened the sound distortion waves with his nearby gravity field.
