The descent past thirty thousand four hundred meters brought a change in the physical behavior of water itself.
At these hadal depths, the salt water existed in a state of hyper-squeezing, its atom-deep lattice strained so tightly that sound blast waves traveled through the fluid column at nearly twice their normal sky speed. Every micro-fissure in the trench wall didn’t merely crumble. It blew up with the sharp, explosive crack of fracturing crystal.
Suddenly, the sensor cluster on Arthur Vance’s wrist console flashed amber, then screamed into emergency crimson.
Ahead in the dark, three hundred meters down a narrow dark rock gorge, the retreating swarm blew up a cluster of bio-explosive deep-sea cysts. These were specialized void-organelles cultivated within the bellies of deep-sea deep-sea jellies. Sacs of hyper-high-pressure methane and void enzymes engineered to trigger runaway bubbling blast.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
A wall of water traveling at four thousand meters per second slammed up through the narrow trench throat. The sudden water-pressure shock spiked surrounding pressure from three mountain-crushing pressure to a sky-high four thousand two crushing deep-sea pressure in less than fifteen split seconds. The surrounding dark rock cliffs fractured into thousands of razor-sharp shrapnel slabs, the water shrieking. Bubbling blast bubbles collapsed in blinding flashes of sonoluminescent light.
