The thirty-foot bronze portal swung inward. The sonic fury of Sector Zero tore into the Obsidian Row of pillars like a physical hammer.
It wasn’t mere noise. It was a sound whirlpool that tightly packed the air in the throat, rattling the marrow inside the miners’ teeth and making their vision blur with ringing shaking.
Ren Vale stepped across the bronze threshold. Every bone in his body right away began to sing.
With his skeletal lattice hardened to Mohs 7.0 quartz thickness, his bones no longer acted as organic, shock-absorbing calcium struts. They were crystal-clear sound resonators. The surrounding shaking of the chamber coursed up through the soles of his boots, through his hardened ankles, up the shafts of his brittle tibias, and into his splintered collar bone.
Under his wool wraps, the four broken fragments of his collarbone buzzed like dry cicada wings. It sent a wash of cold, sickening nausea through his stomach.
Brother Ren lunged forward, throwing his heavy wool cowl over Ren’s head while planting both bare palms firmly against Ren’s shoulder blades. The monk’s face twisted in sympathetic torment as he drew forty percent of the surrounding sound shaking out of Ren’s spine, grounding it into his own tough flesh with a low, painful grunt.
