The midnight quiet of Workshop Bay 12 was thick with the scent of soldering flux, hot heavy dark metal, and the sharp copper tang of chemical reagents. Overhead, the low-voltage standby lamps hummed with their familiar sixty-cycle drone. He cast long amber shadows across the racks of ammunition, water purification canisters, and spare razor-sharp instruments.
Arthur Vance sat at the main steel workbench, his fingers steadily adjusting the hair-width sight on a newly machined batch of ice-cold sabot darts.
To an outside observer, his stance was upright and disciplined, but through his own Monocle Taxonomy Loupe (Mk. IV), his body indicators told a dangerous story. His resting heart rate was raised to eighty-four beats per minute, his time arteries were throbbing with sharp, rhythmic spikes of pain, and faint nested rings of photophobic distortion flickered across his outer vision.
It was the certain body cost of the Decapitation doctrine.
Synchronizing four beasts across active wilderness combat in Sector 8, followed right away by the high-speed twelve-second execution of the Quarter-Finals, had pushed Arthur’s neural capacity to its total threshold. The human brain was not naturally wired to process the concurrent sense inputs of an underground tortoise’s ground-shaking awareness, a jet-black hound’s sound three-point sighting, a falcon’s faster-than-sound heat optic feed. A stygian lynx’s spatial shifted weight vectors. His brain pressure had climbed past twenty-four tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver—the critical danger zone for acute brain fluid swelling.
