Eighteen remaining barrels of Red-Thunder powder detonated in a violent chain reaction deep inside the mountain.
Down in the sixth gallery, the sound wasn’t a roar—it was a physical wall of pressurized air that ripped the stalactites from the ceiling like snapping teeth. Thirty thousand tons of solid granite, sandstone, and raw cinnabar bedrock caved inward, collapsing the central struts and sealing the gallery in a roaring avalanche of falling earth.
Sera Thorne threw her arms over her head as the ceiling fell.
Beneath the leather lining of her cuirass, the six Iron-Skin Talisman Plates Kaelen had inscribed flared into blinding golden radiance.
CRACK.
CRACK.
The copper plates absorbed the initial crushing momentum of a ten-ton boulder falling directly onto her back. One by one, the inscribed talisman matrices overloaded under the catastrophic weight, fracturing into white-hot shards of copper.
The heat scorched through her linen undershirt, searing her skin with the smell of burned bronze.
