The green championship signal flare hung suspended beneath the soaring quartz dome of the Grand Colosseum, trailing a brilliant plume of emerald smoke across the morning sky. In that frozen heartbeat, the collective roar of one hundred and twenty thousand spectators died down to a sharp, collective intake of air. Two worldviews, two genetic doctrines, and the future of the empire’s beast-taming leagues were about to collide upon the golden sands of Ring 1.
Across the eighty meters of open sand separating the two contenders, Scion Aurelius Valerius didn’t waste a single heartbeat on tactical maneuvering.
True to the brutal Decapitation doctrine of House Valerius, he raised his gold-inlaid tactician’s dress sword. He pointed the gleaming blade straight at Arthur Vance’s throat.
“Sol-Invictus! Maximum combat overdrive!” Aurelius screamed, his voice amplified by his collar speakers to a shrill, manic pitch. “Climb to the ceiling and burn up the tamer! Burn the gutter mongrel into ash!”
The Cloned Solar-Claw Griffin shrieked—an unearthly, metal cry of chemically sped up fury that shook the glass panes of the patrician skyboxes.
The man-made veins running along its neck pulsed with blazing bright purple fire as the Prometheus-9 flooded its coronary bed. With a violent thrust of its twelve-meter golden wings, the one-ton beast launched itself vertically into the sky, kicking up a hurricane of blinding golden sand that peppered the ringside barrier plates. It climbed at terrifying speed, speeding up past eight hundred miles an hour toward the quartz dome, its golden claws trailing…
