The Aethelgard dropped from its stable parking orbit, diving nose-first into the huge gravity deep pit of the sun.
On the command bridge, the inertial dampeners screamed with high-hum ringing whine as the ship’s speed gauges climbed at a terrifying rate. Two hundred miles per second... Four hundred miles per second... Six hundred and forty miles per second. Outside the triple-aligned quartz viewports, the black void of space was swallowed by a roaring, blazing bright ocean of golden fusion fire that stretched to infinity in every direction.
“Perihelion threshold in thirty seconds!” Kira shouted, her hands locked to the flight yoke, her flight suit soaked with sweat despite the cooling vents. “Height: forty-two thousand miles above the chromosphere! Gravity slope is ninety-four Gs and rising!”
“Titus! Ground the cabin!” Arthur commanded, his boots locked to the command rail, his magnifying glass tracking the huge crushing weight curves of the silver-steel keel.
Down in the lower building hold, Titus stood like an unmoving mountain. The ancient Northern Xuanwu drove his four massive dark rock pillars deep into the ship’s load-bearing keel brackets. From his ventral belly shell, the [Tectonic World-Anchor] flared with blinding emerald mana. He locked the ship’s internal reference frame to his own twenty-two-ton mass. Inside the high-pressure cabin, the crushing ninety-four Gs of gravity gaining speed was instantly stopped, reduced to a comfortable, stable one-point-two Gs.
