T-MINUS 38 SECONDS.
The digital pocket watch burned crimson in Arthur Vance’s sight field as the four-way neural exact timing operated at maximum mental bandwidth. Brain pressure spiked to twenty-six tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver. Time arteries throbbed with white-hot needles of pain against his skull. A backup trickle of blood dripped from his right nostril. But Arthur’s razor-sharp focus was a rock-steady monolith forged in the fires of frontline trauma.
In the sky above Ring 1, the four-beast convergence operated with the tiny fraction of an inch care of a master surgeon’s razor knife.
T-MINUS 32 SECONDS.
Titus moved first.
The giant tortoise drove all four of his columnar claws two feet deep into the solid mountain stone, activating his ultimate old family trait: [Earth-shaking Gravitational Well].
A bone-shaking, low-hum shook through the earth. The heavy gravity zone beneath the dying griffin warped wildly, multiplying the downward gravity pull by four hundred percent. The expanding sphere of five-thousand-degree star-fire was suddenly dragged downward, its outward explosive spreading suppressed and focused into a narrow upright column that spared the lower spectator tiers from incineration.
T-MINUS 24 SECONDS.
