The shift from the upper crust to the deep mantle was not marked by a gentle gradation of shadows. It was an immediate plunge into total, light-devouring extinction.
At twenty thousand meters below the surface of the Jiuzhou Continent, the air transformed. The air grew thick, stale, and oily, high-pressure to over six crushing deep-sea pressure.
Normal mortals would have been tightly packed into red paste within a fraction of a heartbeat. Even Foundation-stage fighters would have felt their ribcages fold like parchment under the huge underground burden.
Frank, however, merely reached up to the brim of his spun-glass hard hat and flicked a small toggle switch on the side of his mounted headlamp.
Click.
A blinding, twin-beam halogen spotlight sliced through the pitch-black void.
Behind him, five matching clicks echoed through the roaring descent. Five brilliant shafts of cold and exact, cold-white light punched into the swirling mists, lighting up the rough-cut dark rock walls flashing past them at nearly a thousand miles per hour.
“Keep your beams angled at forty-five degrees,” Frank’s voice crackled through their bone-heat flow headsets. “Don’t stare directly into each other’s mirrors. You’ll blind your wingman, lose spatial orientation, and bounce off a rock outcropping like a pinball.”
