The roar of the Earth-Shaker Behemoth was not a sound sent merely through the air. It was a deep-rumbling blast that passed straight through the solid mantle, wildly shaking the marrow inside Arthur Vance’s bones. The titan reared back on its hindquarters. Then, its three magnetic ironstone horns scraped against the vault’s arched ceiling, gouging deep trenches into the tightly packed dark rock and bringing down a deluge of multi-ton boulders.
“Executing Phase One!” Arthur shouted, his voice hard and clear through the tactical squad comms. “Titus, advance! Pin the main weight-bearing pillar!”
From the rear of the squad’s staging position, Titus moved with a terrifying, deliberate power that belied his squat, heavy frame. The mud terrapin turned ancient Xuanwu didn’t scurry or rush. He advanced like a moving land-wide shelf. Each step of his massive, diamond-scaled claws drove ten inches into the glass-fused stone. It crushed the cooling melted rock waste beneath him into fine gray dust.
Years ago, in the toxic drainage ditches of Slum Ward 9, Titus had been an unwanted ditch turtle, his shell brittle from malnutrition and his lungs choked by chemical runoff. Arthur had rescued him, carefully setting his fractured belly shell, feeding him calcium supplements and pure aether-rich moss. Now, Titus stood at sixty-five metric tons of living earth-shaking stone. He carried the lineage of the ancient Black Tortoise in every fiber of his cellular being. He possessed none of the flashy speed of Vesper or the blinding radiance of Pip. But his…
