Arthur and Echo climbed the final fifty meters of the jade ziggurat. Then, the water column above them suddenly inverted.
The four cardinal water gate gates surrounding the summit of the pyramid snapped shut. It was sealed by thick plugs of hardened void resin. With the natural drainage locked, the leftover hundreds of young void tapeworms joined their bodies into a single, writhing spiral, forming a huge underwater whirlpool eighty meters across.
The vortex spun with terrifying speed, drawing tens of thousands of tons of high-pressure water into a downward-pointing funnel that rotated at over one hundred miles per hour.
In the center of that funnel hovered the main core of the parasite. A pulsating, ball-shaped tumor of condensed void aether five meters in width. It was surrounded by thousands of needle-sharp hard shell teeth that chewed through the water like a heavy-duty turbine.
“It’s attempting a water-pressure collapse!” Arthur shouted, his boots sliding back against Titus’s harness. “If that vortex touches the ziggurat platform, the empty pocket shear will implode the Azure Origin Pearl!”
Echo swam to the front of the formation.
The pink axolotl didn’t look at the roaring whirlpool with fear. His small black eyes were wide, fixed on the spinning sphere of void energy with an expression that was seventy percent hungry determination and thirty percent pure, uninhibited amphibious gluttony.
