Diving past the colossal, needle-sharp obsidian teeth of Jormungandr-Null was like descending into the burning caldera of an active volcano.
The suction was terrifying, a howling vortex of compressed dark-matter and sulfuric wind that threatened to strip the flesh from their bones.
Seraphina and Kaelen tightened their grip on each other’s hands, their intertwined auras forming an incandescent aerodynamic teardrop—half blinding white-gold dawn, half impenetrable midnight void.
The leviathan’s throat was a nightmare cavern of biomechanical antiquity.
Ribbed arches of weeping black bone stretched miles wide, dripping with thick, caustic rivers of glowing green anti-matter acid that hissed violently against their protective containment field.
Clinging to the fleshy, mountainous walls were thousands of Abyssal Parasites—centipede-like horrors the size of galleons, their segmented carapaces writhing with barbed scythe-legs.
Sensing the foreign heat of the Sunblood, the swarm screeched in deafening psychic unison, launching themselves from the walls to engulf the intruders.
"Keep your wings tucked!" Kaelen roared over the howling gale.
The High Sovereign didn't attempt to parry the swarm with conventional strikes.
With a brutal flick of his wrist, he unleashed a continuous, spinning sphere of localized repulsor gravity around them.
Every parasite that collided with the field was instantly pulverized under the immense tidal forces, their chitinous shells imploding into showers of smoking black gore that was swept away by the downward draft.
They fell three leagues in thirty seconds, plunging deeper into the beast's chest cavity.
Suddenly, the throat widened into a gargantuan, cavernous chamber: the Primordial Cardiac Chasm.
Suspended in the center of the bio-organic abyss, anchored by hundreds of pulsing, mile-thick vascular conduits, was the Heart of Jormungandr.
It was a terrifying, awe-inspiring organ—a colossal sphere of weeping black crystal, five miles in diameter, burning from within with an unholy, bilious green nuclear fusion.
Each agonizingly slow contraction of the heart released a wave of dark-matter radiation that set Seraphina’s teeth chattering despite the protective heat of her Sunblood.
At the apex of the crystalline heart sat the primary Atrial Valve—a circular iris of interlocking bone-plates, currently open to siphon nebular plasma into the circulatory stream.
"There!" Seraphina shouted, pointing her Scepter toward the pulsing valve. "The central arterial chamber! That is where the Dynamo must be planted!"
"We have company, little sun!" Kaelen warned, his silver eyes narrowing.
Coiling around the five-mile heart like an armored guardian was the beast's immune vanguard: the Prime Core-Wurm.
Spanning half a mile in length, its body was armored in impenetrable, interlocking plates of dead star-metal, its blind, lamprey-like maw bristling with rows of spinning titanium fangs.
The wurm lunged, its massive jaws opening to swallow them whole before they could reach the valve.
"I’ll take the guardian!" Kaelen growled, his eighty-foot shadow-wings bursting open to arrest their free-fall.
He caught Seraphina by the nape of her neck, pulling her into a brief, hard, breathless kiss that tasted of ozone and absolute certainty.
"Plant the seed, my Queen! I will hold its teeth!"
With a savage roar, Kaelen threw himself directly into the path of the oncoming leviathan-wurm.
Gloom-Weaver flared with blinding violet lightning as he drove the massive blade straight into the roof of the monster's mouth, his dark-matter aura expanding to lock the creature’s jaws open with raw, sovereign muscle.
Seraphina didn't waste a heartbeat.
Using the kinetic boost from his release, she engaged her twenty-foot starlight wings, rocketing toward the open atrial valve like a golden spearhead.
She dove through the bone iris just as it began to clamp shut, landing on the slippery, crystalline floor of the heart's inner sanctum.
The air here was suffocatingly hot, thick with the scent of burning copper and dying stars.
At the center of the chamber rose the core nexus—a swirling vortex of green anti-matter fusion.
Seraphina unslung the Solar Dynamo of Ra from her dimensional belt.
The ancient Egyptian relic hummed eagerly in her hands, sensing the corrupted stellar engine surrounding it.
She drove the glowing golden artifact straight into the center of the anti-matter nexus.
"Burn, you parasite," she whispered fiercely.
Her golden crescent mark flared at her throat, sending a five-thousand-degree surge of pure, unfiltered thermonuclear dawn fire straight into the Dynamo’s ignition matrix.
The relic ignited.
A blinding pillar of white-gold solar fire erupted from the core, spider-webbing across the five-mile black crystal heart in a chain reaction of catastrophic fusion overload.
Outside the valve, Kaelen heard the heart begin to fracture.
Severing the Prime Core-Wurm's head with a savage twist of his broadsword, he reached into the closing valve, roaring her name:
"SERAPHINA!"