When the main pulse let loose from the Crystal Genesis Throne, it didn’t travel with the sluggish crawl of molten magma. It moved with the terrifying, clean speed of a relativistic particle beam.
Across the tracking data display of Arthur’s monocle magnifying glass, a blinding golden vector exploded upward through the mantle-crust boundary at thirty thousand miles per second. It took less than a quarter of a second for the front of the wave to cross the three thousand miles of dense stone-glass rock separating the outer core from the land-wide crust.
“Sense exact timing at twenty percent,” Arthur commanded, touching his temple where the neural bridge link hummed against his skin. “Grimm, Titus, damp the sound shock. Don’t let the ringing rebound tear through your central nervous systems.”
Grimm lowered his belly to the crystal-clear deck, tucking his paws beneath his chest. His matte-black bristles stood rigid, acting as living channels that absorbed the violent moving shaking propagating through the bedrock. His single notched ear twitched backward, filtering out the ear-splitting roar of earth-shaking squeezing.
Beside him, Titus closed his eyes entirely. The ancient terrapin’s dark rock shell rang like a huge church bell. It took in the shear waves that bounced between the crystal-clear pillars. Instead of cracking under the strain, the linked stone plates across Titus’s back drank in the golden deep ring, their jagged fiery edges smoothing into polished black glass.
