The descent through the cleared chimney brought the squad to the threshold of the deep-mantle fault at thirty-one thousand six hundred meters.
Here, the dark rock walls gave way to giant stone pillars of black fiery glass veined with pulsing purple light. The heat of the water spiked sharply, alternating between freezing hadal salt water and boiling hot-water plumes emerging from deep-crust fissures.
Suddenly, the fiery glass pillars cracked open.
Out from the shattered spires stepped twelve nightmarish titans—the Void-Stitched Trench Abominations.
These were not natural deep-sea beasts. They were horrific, twenty-meter chimeric monstrosities created by unnatural genetic splicing. The torsos of armored deep-sea placoderms had been fused with the tentacled appendages of giant squids and the multi-eyed skulls of deep-sea hunting beasts. Running across their bodies were thick, stringy black seams. Man-made Void Stitches that held the disparate tissues together, pumping mutagenic void ichor through their artificial blood-flow systems.
“Man-made chimeras,” Arthur Vance diagnosed instantly, his Zeiss monocle rapidly cataloging the body-leverage seams. “These aren’t natural mutations. Someone spliced ancient placoderm fossils with modern hadal cephalopods using man-made void silk.”
The twelve abominations surged forward, their squid-like tentacles lashing through the water while their armored placoderm jaws snapped with crushing high-pressure force.
