With the field court-martial finished and Baron Rask locked in iron chains, Arthur Vance returned to the bottom of the ravine where the ruined Chimera Juggernaut lay silent in the mud.
Arthur stood atop the crumpled chassis. He knelt beside the open clockwork bay, lighting up the inside with the beam of his sight monocle.
Mounted within the heavy brass holding cradle were the three enslaved High-Bronze Earth Drake cores.
Without the seventy-thousand-volt torture current coursing through their power-coil coils, the cores had steadied. But their condition remained critical. The living outer membranes were coated in a thick, greasy film of blackened rotting mutagens. The toxic potion-made residue injected by Chief Splicer Krause to force unnatural mana discharge. The crystal-clear cores were weeping dark, cloudy fluids. Their intrinsic elemental hum faded into a weak, dying flicker.
“If we leave these cores exposed to sky oxygen, cellular lysis will complete within two hours,” Arthur said to Toby Mallow, who had brought down two enameled razor-sharp basins and a carboy of hyper-saline solution. “The man-made mutagens are eating the crystal-clear lattice from the outside in.”
“Can they be saved, Arthur?” Toby asked softly, gazing at the suffering ancient organs.
“The host drakes perished when Krause pulled out the cores four years ago,” Arthur explained, his fingers gently palpating the warm, pulsing surface of the main core. “The living bodies can’t be restored. But the old family earth-mana locked within these cores is pure, ancient, and divine. We’re going to cleanse them of…
