The passage beyond the dark rock gorge opened into a vast underground canyon known in ancient earth-shaking charts as the Kermadec Subduction Flank.
Here, forty miles beneath the sea surface, the Pacific Plate ground relentlessly beneath the Indo-Australian Plate, creating a maze of jagged dark rock terraces, yawning fissures, and towering chimneys of cooled fiery glass. The water column was deathly still. But beneath that silence lay a rhythmic, skittering shaking that traveled through the bedrock.
Arthur Vance adjusted the hum of his Zeiss monocle, switching to deep-sound biosonar.
Across the canyon walls, hundreds of thousands of heat signed names flickered into view.
SKR-SKR-SKR.
The sound grew louder, shaking through the boots of Arthur’s dive rig. Out from the jagged dark rock fissures poured a relentless wave of Trench Centipede Burrowers. Armored, five-meter void-annelids with thirty pairs of barbed stone-glass legs and glistening jaws dripping with necrotizing void acid. Over three thousand four hundred burrowers were swarming along the upright cliffs, attempting to execute a wrapping pincer strike around the squad’s flanks.
“Flanking maneuver,” Arthur called out, raising his ARC-7 carbine to his shoulder. “They’re attempting to bypass Titus’s frontal shield by dropping through the upper heat vents.”
Before Grimm could unleash a gravity star-core, a soft, white shadow glided past Arthur’s shoulder.
