The strike didn’t look like an attack. It looked like an eclipse.
Vesper’s right front paw completed its downward arc. Then, the fabric of three-space-folding space within the Great Mantle Deep gap separated along a single, infinitely thin fault line. A ten-mile crescent of blinding, snow-white Gengjin energy erupted from her five-inch razor-thin claws, slicing horizontally through the empty pocket.
There was no sound in the airless void. There was only the visual horror of total, exact severance.
The white crescent intersected the Brood-Mother’s three-hundred-meter frame at the junction where her towering chest mountain-back shell met her main ground-shaking anchor-struts.
The Brood-Mother’s ten-meter-thick dorsal plates—embrittled by Vesper’s Aura of Gengjin Execution—didn’t deflect the strike. They didn’t even slow it down. The crushing force passed fully through the titan’s body, slicing through forged alien alloys, glass-fused dark rock armor, and dense bio-man-made muscle fibers as smoothly as a laser parting smoke.
The white arc continued straight through the cave, biting into the solid dark rock wall two miles away, carving a hairline fissure that ran for eight miles into the uninhabited lunar mantle before harmlessly draining away into the stone.
For one suspended second, the Brood-Mother remained intact.
Her hundreds of compound optics flickered with uneven violet static. Her grinding jaws clicked once, attempting to complete a command that her central nervous system could no longer transmit.
