The blast door of the Sunken Butcher shop didn’t open. It crumbled inward under four metric tons of moving driving force.
Titus didn’t sprint—he sped up with the unstoppable, crushing weight of a falling earth-shaking shelf. His black dark rock armor scales glowed with faint veins of deep underground iron as he lowered his horn-beaked snout and struck the heavy steel gate. The steel buckled, the four-inch locking pins snapped with the sound of snapping artillery shells. The entire two-ton security frame crashed into the arena pit. It crushed the concrete rim into powdery gravel. The impact sent a bone-shaking blast wave through the water below, rocking the narrow high walkways and tossing several drunken spectators over the railings into the murky drainage sludge.
Before the trade ring guards could recover their footing or raise their automatic slug-throwers, an ear-splitting screech tore through the ceiling rafters.
Pip dropped from the gloom like a falling incendiary warhead. The Ash-Plumed Falcon pulled his wings into a tight, knife-like dive. He crossed Mach-1 with a thunderous sonic crack that shattered every halogen floodlight in the depot at the same time. A shower of blinding white sparks and razor-sharp glass rained down into the fighting pit. As Pip pulled up. He pulled twenty Gs of upright climb, he fanned his tail feathers, spraying a thick cloud of glowing fire-powder dust directly into the intake turbine of the main spark generator on the narrow high walkway.
