The battlefield at thirty-two thousand meters had reached its critical working threshold.
Deprived of two main root anchors, the Tectonic Root Parasite Queen entered a state of world-ending frenzy. Her leftover twelve tentacles lashed out in all directions, slamming into the cave walls and triggering total rockfalls of fractured dark rock and molten dense green rock. From the gaping pores of her mantle, she began venting thousands of gallons of black, mutagenic void bile, threatening to flood the entire sub-mantle fault with lethal neurotoxin.
Arthur Vance stood tall behind Titus’s protective aegis, his neural bandwidth pushed to its total limit. Four thousand nine hundred and fifty units.
His eyes glowed with fierce, cold and exact intensity. Through the squad link, he could feel every heartbeat, every breath, and every muscle contraction of his five beasts. They were no longer running as separate entities. They were five razor-sharp fingers executing a single, perfect procedure.
“Initiate Five-Vector Resonance Array,” Arthur commanded, his voice ringing with total power. “Lock the elements!”
The response was instant and majestic.
Titus took the Northern Earth-Water anchor. The huge tortoise channeled the ancient power of the Black Tortoise Xuanwu. It drove a wave of golden-amber earth mana deep into the lithosphere. The fracturing dense green rock bedrock locked into place, the falling rock slabs freezing in mid-descent as Titus seized control of the local earth-shaking heavy rush.
