The sound that followed the chewing of the Nether-Mole Fiends was not the crunch of stone.
It was the terrifying, gut-wrenching roar of a world-size pressure vessel breaching its main holding envelope under total over-pressurization.
Beneath the sterile white quartz floor that Princess Ling’er had just flash-dried, the bedrock gave way entirely. An underground fissure over three miles long ripped open like an unzipped seam across the cave floor. It exposed the churning, blazing bright belly of the lower world-size mantle.
A boundless sea of ancient nether-magma surged upward, glowing with a poisonous, violet-orange heat.
The heat in the cave jumped from twelve percent moisture in the air to over three thousand four hundred degrees in less than two heartbeats.
The surrounding air pressure spiked to forty-five thousand pounds of pressure. Across the cave ceiling, ancient black glass stalactites melted like wax candles into glowing melted rock waste, raining down in heavy, fiery droplets upon the retreating ranks of the void horde.
“The mantle has burst!” the surviving void-fiends screamed in total panic. He clawed wildly at each other to climb the high castle walls. “The Primordial Purgatory Core is let loose! During the First Epoch, thirty-six Divine Emperors and ninety Great Sages were boiled into formless grease when this holy fire broke forth!”
