The chemical reality of feeding ten thousand tons of micro-milled white lime-chalk to a fifty-mile underground beast arrived with the force of an uncontained fiery explosion.
Inside the forward building bunker ten minutes before the eruption, Master Borin Bronze-Lung and Lady Millicent Croft were studying the drop-testing logs with grave intensity.
Borin tapped the glass face of a liquid silver pressure gauge, his copper-braided beard twitching as the column danced.
“The chemical curves are climbing off the chart, Giles,” Borin muttered, his voice thick with dwarven caution. “Forty thousand tons of white lime-chalk reacting with sulfuric acid doesn’t just release a gentle puff of steam.
That reaction generates eighteen million cubic yards of gas in less than two minutes. That’s enough gas volume to fill seventy cathedral vaults.”
Millicent Croft turned a page in her bound office register, her quill pen scratching crisp entries into the margin.
“The financial exposure is severe, brother,” Millicent warned, her tone cool and measured. “If that gas bubble triggers an uncontrolled tail-end whip, the northern aqueduct will take the brunt of the moving impact.
Rebuilding those fourteen stonework arches would cost six hundred thousand gold sovereigns and delay our grain shipments to the southern provinces by four months.”
