The muffled roar vibrating through the quartz dome sounded like an angry bull trapped inside a copper boiler.
Outside the diving bell, Trench-Guardian Vulcan’s fourteen-foot frame convulsed against fifty feet of solid, translucent blue ice.
Cracks of violet lightning surged across the frozen block as Sera Thorne thrust her Storm-Pike into the upper frost shelf. The lightning grounded directly into the giant’s iron pauldrons, jolting his meridians with fifty thousand volts of numbing thunder-force.
Vulcan opened his molten jaws, his roar projecting through the deep water like a subterranean earthquake.
“Come out of that pot, little coward!” Vulcan howled, his voice vibrating through the seabed. “You call yourself a commander of armies? Come out and face my hammer like a true Saint!”
On the upper bridge of the flagship, Sera Thorne leaned over the railing, her armor gleaming in the volcanic light.
“Why would he come out?” Sera called back through the underwater amplification horn. “You are already trapped in a fifty-foot ice cube. He does not need to lift a finger to watch you freeze.”
“I am a warden of the Void Lotus Sanctuary!” Vulcan bellowed, his eyes blazing like two furnaces behind his visor. “Where are your battle banners? Where is your martial honor?”
