The awakening of the Tectonic Root Parasite Queen shook thirty thousand cubic miles of hadal ocean.
Arthur Vance’s command echoed through the squad link. Then, the queen’s central cephalic dome split open. Thirty pairs of milky, clouded eye-covered eyes ignited with sickening violet soft glow. An ear-splitting, sub-heard sound pulse tore through the overload salt water:
SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-ONG!
The sound pressure wave reached an astonishing two hundred and eighty decibels. Under hadal squeezing, that sonic energy was enough to pulverize solid granite into talcum powder.
“Titus, Bastion Aegis!” Arthur shouted, his neural bandwidth spiking to four thousand eight hundred units as he managed the squad’s sense inputs.
Titus didn’t hesitate. The ancient Xuanwu tortoise drove his four massive dark rock pillars ten meters deep into the dense green rock bedrock, unleashing Ancient Basalt Earth-shaking Locking.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
A six-sided barrier of golden-amber earth deep ring flared outward from Titus’s shell. That created a four-hundred-meter dome of unmoving balance. When the queen’s high-pitched blast wave struck the barrier, Titus’s shell absorbed the sound load, routing ninety percent of the destructive shaking straight down into the Earth’s mantle through his grounding spikes. The surrounding water churned into boiling froth. But inside Titus’s defensive safe hall, Arthur and the squad stood firm.
