The Mother Empress's body was a ruin. Its dozens of once basketball-sized compound eyes and the scores of tentacles dangling from its mandible had all been scorched to charcoal by the nuclear explosion.
Even though it had sensed danger at the last second and taken evasive action, it was still subjected to the searing heat of over ten thousand degrees, which instantly carbonized its surface tissues.
This included its sturdy Outer Armor, hidden beneath layers of fleshy tumors and membranes. The intense heat had deformed its high-strength biomolecular structures and even its metallic atoms.
Stripped of its hydrocarbons, all that remained was brittle, black charcoal.
As it struggled to its feet and crawled out of the crater, the brittle, charred shell on its body sloughed off in great sheets, like an avalanche, revealing the skeleton that supported its massive frame and the still-pulsing, living tissue within.
