Emerald fire lit the brine. Two dozen biological gunships discharged at once, vomiting torrents of bile-colored plasma that hissed like ruptured arteries as they arced across the sky. The air turned rancid with the smell of boiled copper. "Brace!" Nimari's cry cracked against the wind. Her fingers sank white-knuckle deep into the cold, dense ridge of the titan beneath them. Taldin did not flinch. His boots remained planted on the pitch-black hide. He could feel every pulse of the organism beneath him, an extension of his own nervous system, tethered directly to the throbbing knot behind his temples. "Submerge thirty meters," Taldin murmured. The colossal behemoth plunged. It did not merely dive; it dropped like an iron continent. A sheet of black water rose up, taking the brunt of the alien bombardment. Above them, the acidic discharge slammed into the frothing brine, boiling millions of gallons into blistering steam. The heat washed over Taldin’s neck, but the chill radiating from the creature’s hide snuffed out the scalding haze. [Resonance Link: 100%] [Colossus Hull Integrity: Nominal] Underneath the churn, through the murk of Yultar's dying sea, the beast accelerated. It was dead, yet it had never been faster. Taldin felt the rush of power in his blood—a dark, crystalline euphoria that demanded retribution. "Now," Taldin commanded. "Breach." The creature answered. It coiled its tail against the seabed, then threw four hundred thousand tons of muscular mass upward. It broke through the water like a mountain hurled from an abyss. The sheer displacement tore the sea in half. As the behemoth crested into the sky, blotting out the gray clouds and the bio-luminescent fog, its gargantuan jaws opened wide. It did not roar with lungs; it unleashed a concussive shriek of pure necrotic force that rattled Taldin’s ribs. The shockwave caught the first line of Velkiri gunships mid-formation. Chitinous shells designed to withstand naval artillery crumpled like dried autumn leaves. Five vessels imploded into green mist. Then the beast came down. The colossus brought its mountainous flukes down upon the water with the force of an orbital kinetic strike. A catastrophic wall of black energy and displaced seawater surged outward in a concentric ring. Gunships were flipped end over end, their organic thrusters snapping like twigs as they were crushed against the sea wall. Smashed carapaces, twitching tentacles, and shattered hulls rained down across the foaming waves. Nimari’s crew members let out ragged whoops of disbelief, their hands slick with seawater as they pointed at the floating carnage. "Look at them!" yelled Brant, a burly junk-diver with grease smeared across his forehead. "Look at the bastards crack!" Nimari didn't cheer. Her eyes were fixed higher, scanning the towering metal needle of the command spire that rose from the floating ring ahead. "Gavric," she hissed, her voice taut as a drawn wire. On the spire’s upper platform, bathed in amber emergency lights, a private transport was cycling its main thrusters. Even from three hundred yards away, the silhouette of Overseer Gavric was unmistakable—tall, regal, clad in officer’s white that had never seen mud or bile, frantically barking orders to his personal flight crew. He had seen his masters' fleet pulverized in a heartbeat. He was running. "He thinks he gets to fly away," Nimari said, stepping forward onto the edge of the leviathan's head. Her grip tightened on her long-hafted lance, its tip buzzing with an improvised kinetic charge stripped from a blast-door piston. "After what he did to the children. After he locked us in the dark." "He doesn't leave," Taldin said, his voice flat, hollowed out by the cold calculation that now ruled him. The titan ground its flank against the spire’s main loading docks, shearing through three steel mooring towers with an ear-splitting shriek of torn metal. The impact threw up a ramp of twisted girders and collapsed walkways, reaching straight toward the private flight deck eighty feet above. Before Taldin could deploy Sentinel Krynos to clear the path, Nimari was already moving. She bounded up the canted steel plates like an animal raised on rust. Wind whipped her braided hair as she scaled a snapped crane arm. Below her, the boiling ocean churned with shredded alien hulls, but she never looked down. Her boots slammed onto a rusted crossbeam, her body coiling into a tight spring. "Gavric!" she screamed. The Overseer turned on the boarding ramp, his pale face draining of what little color remained. He reached for a sidearm, leveling it toward the scaffolding. Nimari did not give him the chance to pull the trigger. She torqued her entire torso, throwing her weight behind her right shoulder, and launched the heavy lance. The weapon tore through the air with a flat metallic thrum. It punched straight through the port-side repulsor turbine of the transport. The kinetic charge inside the tip detonated a heartbeat later. The engine erupted in a fountain of yellow flame and black oil, the concussive burst tearing the transport's landing strut completely free. The vessel tilted sideways, its heavy hull slamming onto the pad with a deafening screech before skidding hard against the spire's reinforced parapet. Gavric was hurled backward by the blast, tumbling down the boarding ramp into a puddle of burning aviation fuel. He scrambled on his elbows, choking, his white uniform blackened with soot. "You filthy rat!" Gavric shrieked, his voice carrying over the crackling flames as he scrambled to his feet, clutching a bleeding arm. "You broke the seal! You don't know what you've done!" A deep, subterranean groan vibrated through the steel beneath their feet. The sheared metal of the wrecked transport hadn't stopped at the parapet. Its fiery fuselage had crashed straight through the reinforced ventilation intake directly below the pad—the intake feeding cool water to the core. Sirens began to wail, a harsh, mechanical screech that overpowered the wind. [WARNING: Reactor Containment Breached] [Cascade Event Imminent: 58 Seconds to Critical Discharge] A jet of superheated, violet-tinged radiation vented from the torn grating, melting steel railings into slag. The floor of the flight deck began to glow cherry red. Taldin reached the top of the metal ramp just as Nimari landed beside him, her chest heaving. Across the smoldering deck, Gavric crawled toward an emergency elevator shaft, groveling, within arm's reach of retribution. "Take him," Nimari breathed, her teeth bared in feral anticipation. "Taldin, finish it." Taldin took a step forward, his hand raising to summon Krynos from the shadows behind the traitor. His revenge—the retribution for every starved child, every sold-out soul, every drop of blood spilled in the dark—was ten feet away. He could rip Gavric's life away right now and feed it to the tide. Then a shrill scream cut through the sirens from forty feet below. Brant and the wreckers had climbed up the ruined gantry to follow them, but the core's heat flare had burned through the lead support cable. The entire steel platform they were standing on was peeling away from the spire's bulkhead, tilting precariously over the glowing, boiling vent. "Help!" Brant screamed, his fingernails digging into buckling steel as three others slid toward the blue fire. "Taldin!" Fifty seconds left. To the left lay Gavric, scrambling into the shaft, defenseless. To the right, seven scavengers hung suspended over an incinerating hell. His mind calculated the trajectory. If he commanded his summons to pin Gavric, there would be no mass left to anchor the falling gangway before it plunged into the vent. The dead beast's shadow could only cover one area with sufficient density to halt the thermal collapse. "Taldin?" Nimari turned to him, her eyes searching his face, suddenly seeing the horrible arithmetic play out behind his gaze. Across the scorched tarmac, Gavric shoved open the heavy hatch of the reinforced bunker, glancing back over his shoulder with a bloody, mocking grin. "You're still just a soft-hearted medic, Voss!" the traitor spat. "Die with the rest of the trash!" The heavy door began to seal shut. Beneath them, Brant’s fingers slipped from the blistering steel.

Tidal Wave