The heavy iron slide-bolts of the fighting cage slammed shut with an ear-splitting metal clang.
Grimm stood in the blue corner of the circular arena, his paws sunk two inches into the damp, blood-stained sawdust. He didn’t pace restlessly along the outer edge wire like a nervous caged dog. He didn’t bare his teeth or snarl at the shouting spectators. He stood perfectly square, his forty-eight pounds centered over his muscular rear hocks, his single intact ear cocked forward forty-five degrees to track the rhythmic hiss of high-pressure air compressors running behind the opposing blast gate.
Outside the wire, Toby stood with his hands clamped around the iron outer edge railing, his knuckles bloodless.
“Arthur,” Toby whispered, his voice trembling despite his best efforts at composure. “The crowd is chanting for dismemberment. I’ve counted thirty-two trade ring guards along the overhead narrow high walkways. Every one of them is holding an air-powered shock-baton. If Grimm takes that warg down, Sterling might just give the order to clear the ring with buckshot.”
“Sterling won’t give that order,” Arthur replied, his voice calm, flat, and devoid of tremor. “Sterling is a slum bookmaker who survives on gambling liquidity. If his guards open fire on a winning challenger in front of three hundred underworld gamblers, the betting pool collapses and the dockers will tear down his roundhouse brick by brick. Down here, the house rules are sacred because without them, the syndicates have no power.”
Arthur looked down at Grimm. The jet-black hound glanced up, giving Arthur’s boot toe a single, reassuring nudge with his dark nose before resuming his forward stance.
Before the gate was raised, the arena referee entered the cage through a narrow iron turnstile to perform the forced pre-match check.
The referee was a scarred sixty-year-old frontier veteran named Garek, a former penal battalion scout with a glass left eye and a heavy iron truncheon strapped to his belt. Garek walked over to the blue corner, his heavy boots crunching in the sawdust.
“Show me your beast’s claws, doctor,” Garek grunted, kneeling in the dirt.
“Left paw, Grimm,” Arthur said calmly from outside the wire.
Grimm lifted his front left paw without pause, resting his rough black pad in Garek’s leather-gloved palm. Garek inspected the nails with a brass probe, checking for illegal toxic coatings, hidden razors, or electric-shock needles. Finding only clean, natural black horn-protein heavy with dense stone deposits, Garek grunted in mild surprise.
“Clean,” Garek said. He reached for Grimm’s neck, inspecting the meteorite shock-collar Szabo had forged. “Unlisted moving collar... But under-City rules, defensive plating is legal so long as it doesn’t house active firearms. Solid craftsmanship. Szabo’s work?”
“Szabo’s fire,” Arthur replied.
“The old smith knows how to temper iron,” Garek muttered. He stood up and crossed the eighty-foot ring to the red tunnel entrance. There, Fang stood grinning beside his handlers.
“Release the champion for check!” Fang shouted, waving his radio baton.
Two burly trade ring handlers in greasy leather aprons hauled on heavy iron levers beside the tunnel entrance. An air-powered release hissed wildly, venting clouds of hot, oily white steam. The heavy sheet-iron water gate rattled upward into the darkness on greasy steel cables.
From the black tunnel strode Iron-Jaws.
A collective roar erupted from the three hundred spectators. It shook the iron roof beams and glass skylights of the roundhouse. Gamblers pounded their fists against the iron railings, screaming for blood.
The beast was an ugly monstrosity of illegal cyber-splicing and bio-chemical gaining speed. Bred from an Arctic Dire-Wolf base, the creature had been bloated to one hundred and eighty pounds by unregulated man-made myostatin inhibitors and heavy-duty growth steroids. Its shoulders stood five feet high, covered in patchy, matted gray fur scarred by acid burns, shrapnel, and bullet gouges.
Its skull was the true horror.
The entire anterior facial skeleton had been excised and replaced by a riveted silver-steel chassis bolted directly into the cheekbone and frontal bones. Across its jawline were mounted two heavy-duty air-powered rams, connected by braided stainless-steel high-pressure lines to a high-pressure stone-oil pool strapped between its shoulder blades. In place of natural teeth, the beast possessed six-inch serrated shears machined from hardened tool steel, designed to shear through bone, muscle, and plate armor like paper.
Behind its neck, an automatic under-skin infusion pump was lit up with three glowing green LEDs, steadily pumping man-made amphetamines and adrenal extracts into its neck-vein.
To whip the crowd into a frenzy, Fang picked up a fifty-pound metal bar of pig iron from the staging cart and hurled it over the wire fence into the center of the ring.
“Show them your bite, Iron-Jaws!” Fang shrieked.
The massive cyber-warg lunged forward. Its high-pressure jaws opened with a high-pitched air-powered whine, clamped down across the fifty-pound iron block, and engaged full squeezing.
SKRRRR-CRUNCH.
With an ear-splitting shriek of snapped metal, the six-inch tool-steel teeth cut through the cast iron like cold lard, biting the fifty-pound bar clean in half and spitting jagged iron fragments into the sawdust.
The crowd went wild, screaming, stamping, and throwing empty whiskey bottles against the wire.
Arthur didn’t flinch. Standing outside the wire fence, his left hand resting on the heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron rotary gauntlet strapped to his wrist, Arthur raised his right hand to his eye, rotating the zoom ring on his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe with a crisp snick-click.
The quartz prisms condensed the flickering hardened carbon-iron glare, laying semi-clear amber taxonomical schematics across Arthur’s vision:
Arthur’s cold and exact mind dismantled the beast’s threat matrix in three seconds.
“Amateur backyard butchery,” Arthur murmured to himself, his fingers adjusting the focus dial.
The wired installation was crude, unstable, and mechanically illiterate. The silver-steel jaw plates had been attached with standard steel sheet-screws driven directly into the porous frontal bone. When the warg had bitten the iron bar, Arthur’s magnifying glass had detected the tiny rebound blast wave traveling backward through the chassis, widening two pre-existing stress micro-fractures across the supraorbital ridge that leaked clear brain fluid.
To achieve four thousand pounds of jaw pressure, Fang had overloaded the high-pressure pump to twenty tons of pressure. Far beyond the load-bearing limit of the cheap commercial brass return coupling set beneath the left jaw joint.
Worse, the beast’s massive muscular bulk had drastically outgrown its connective tissue.
Through the monocle’s thickness filters, Arthur saw that the skull cruciate joint cords in both rear stifles were severely frayed. It was surrounded by jagged calcium spurs from chronic joint effusion. Under maximum gaining speed, the warg could only charge in a straight, linear vector. It was physically incapable of lateral slowdown or sharp aimed changes without tearing its joint sockets apart.
“Arthur,” Toby whispered from behind the fence. His face was pale as he watched the shattered iron metal bar smoking in the dirt. “Look at the power of those shears! If that thing gets a grip, Grimm’s neck will be cut clean off!”
“He won’t get a grip,” Arthur replied calmly, never taking his eyes off the warg. “The beast is already dead. Its nervous system just hasn’t realized it yet. The adrenal pump is pumping eighty milligrams of stimulant per minute. Its heart output is running at two hundred and forty beats, and its body heat is forty-one degrees. Its liver and kidneys will liquefy in four months. When you bolt rigid metal to living bone, the bone recedes under clockwork stress. Fang didn’t build an apex hunting beast. He built an exploding bomb wrapped in fur.”
Arthur closed his eyes for a split second, opening the soul-sync channel to Grimm’s mind.
The mental screen between them was not a mystical blur of emotion. It was a high-speed data stream of tactical shape and living tracking data.
Arthur sent the blueprint directly into Grimm’s sense cortex. The glowing yellow highlight on the rusted through brass coupling beneath the warg’s left ear, the thirty-split-second latency cycle between the high-pressure pump strokes, the breathing timing of the warg’s deep pre-charge breath in, and the blind spot beneath the silver-steel jaw shield where the warg’s shaking sensors couldn’t penetrate.
Don’t contest the frontal charge, Arthur commanded through the silent link. His driving force is one hundred and eighty pounds. Vector four. Shadow-slip at two paces. Enter beneath the jaw hinge. Clamp the brass pipe rim. Disarticulate.
Grimm’s intact ear gave a single, barely noticeable twitch.
The jet-black hound understood every parameter. His muscles relaxed into an elastic, coiled readiness, his paws digging into the sawdust to calibrate the ground friction. Grimm’s mass was centered, his breathing slow and deep, fully untroubled by the shrieking spectators or the beast thrashing fifty feet away.
Across the arena, Fang raised his radio baton and pressed the starting trigger.
A sharp spark pulse buzzed into Iron-Jaws’s neck spine. The warg let out an ear-splitting, metal screech as the fight-or-flight rush pump dumped a fresh mouthful of stimulants into its main neck blood vessel.
Its pupils dilated until the milky white of the eye vanished entirely. The high-pressure rams along its jaw hissed. It locked into full squeezing with a screeching metal CLANG.
Garek pulled back through the barrier gate, bolting the iron latch behind him.
The arena referee struck a brass gong with an iron hammer.
GONNNG!
“KILL HIM, IRON-JAWS!” Fang shrieked, spit flying from his lips. “RIP HIS HEAD OFF!”