The air inside the underground cave didn’t merely ionize. It turned into a toxic soup of boiled away ozone and screaming magnetic fury.
Five hundred feet above the newly poured dark rock floor, Commander Lightning-Scourge hovered like a four-armed avatar of electric apocalypse.
His skeletal body was wreathed in writhing tendrils of black nether-star-fire, crackling with fifty million volts of unconstrained static potential. The metal ore veins running through the black glass walls began to glow red-hot. It carried high-voltage currents that turned the entire cave into a massive, live power-coil fire.
“Perish in the sparks of the Void!” Lightning-Scourge shrieked, his voice distorted by magnetic interference. “You stand in a metal trench, clad in steel, holding iron tools! The Nether-Storm shall boil your blood and melt your spirit veins into lead!”
The demon commander extended all four clawed hands downward.
KRA-KRA-BOOOOOOM!
A blinding, branching torrent of black lightning cascaded from the ceiling.
It didn’t strike a single point. It fanned out like the roots of an ancient banyan tree, seeking out every current-carrying metal object in the cave—Shen Shitou’s steel I-beam, Princess Ling’er’s brass gauntlets, Niu Mang’s hard dark metal shovel, and Xiao Yu’s tuning rods.
