The high-hum shaking blade shrieked through the desert air like a heavy-duty circular saw, its spark-charged blue edge blurring into a lethal haze that kicked up clouds of crushed salt dust. Corporate Bounty Hunter Logan Sterling charged down the quarry slope with the driving force of an armored freight train, his high-pressure wired arm whining under maximum torque as he drove the six-foot blade directly toward Arthur Vance’s throat.
“Die in the dirt, trench mongrel!” Sterling roared, his crimson optic implant tracking Arthur’s main neck blood vessel.
Arthur stood motionless on the salt flats, his combat boots planted firmly in the bitter salt crust. In his right hand, he held his nine-inch razor-sharp stiletto, forged from hardened heavy dark metal alloy. To an outside observer, matching a nine-inch medical knife against a six-foot mechanized shaking blade was pure suicidal madness.
But Arthur Vance was not an ordinary duelist. He was a comparative trauma corpse-judge who understood the moving load limits of prosthetic joints.
Through his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe (Mk. IV), Sterling’s mechanized arm was stripped of its intimidating armor plates. Arthur saw the micro-high-pressure fluid lines, the silver-steel guide rods. The central baked-clay pivot pin that bore the spinning stress of the blade swing.
