The blue dilatant capsule drifted closer to the huge blocked path, gliding smoothly over ripples of glowing orange melted rock waste. The distance narrowed to less than a hundred yards. Then, the true, mind-boggling scale of the creature dominated their entire vision, blotting out the dark rock cliffs behind a wall of fiery stone and pulsing heat.
It was an ancient Earth-Core Magma Giant beast (Dixing Chiyan Shou), a disaster-class sovereign of the deep world-size mantle that had walked the molten roots of the continent long before mortal empires had even learned to spark flint.
Spanning over four hundred meters from the tip of its blunt, armored snout to the heavy club of its crested tail, the beast looked like an ancient cross between an armored snapping turtle and a titanic dragon. Its huge back shell was not composed of living scales. But of dense, linked plates of black fiery dark rock and jagged black glass spines that jutted upward like jagged church spires. Beneath the outer armor plates, blinding veins of molten gold coursed through deep fissures in its hide, pulsing in time with an uneven, underground heartbeat that shook the cave floor.
Four giant limbs, each thick as the hull of a seaworthy galleon and tipped with claws of hardened star-fallen iron, were driven deep into the bedrock of the water gate channel. The titan’s horned head, easily sixty feet across, lay wedged squarely against the emerald jade doorstep of the pre-diluvian archway. With every painful breath it…
