The iron ring fell silent as the referee raised his iron hammer above the brass gong.
Outside the blue corner wire, Toby Mallow checked his brass pocket watch. His hands shook as he noted the second hand. Behind him, three hundred underworld gamblers stood poised on their toes, their faces lit up by the harsh white glare of the hardened carbon-iron floodlights. The air smelled of burnt grease, stale tobacco, and the sharp, metal tang of high-pressure high-pressure oil leaking from the opposing gate.
“Hold your footing, Grimm,” Arthur whispered through their soul-sync link. “The sawdust is loose over the center turntable plate. Calibrate for three inches of lateral slide.”
Grimm gave a barely noticeable shift of his rear hocks, his black claws digging through the red shavings until they found purchase against the solid dark rock bedrock below. His forty-eight pounds settled into an unmoving, centered low crouch. His single upright ear swiveled forward, tracking the clockwork whine of the warg’s high-pressure storage tank pump as it reached twenty tons of pressure.
The referee slammed the iron hammer against the rim of the heavy brass gong.
GONNNG!
The deep, ringing chime shook through the foundation piers of the roundhouse.
“TEAR HIM APART, IRON-JAWS!” Fang shrieked from the red corner, thrusting his radio baton forward. “BITE THE HEAD OFF THE STRAY!”
The ground shook as Iron-Jaws launched his charge.
One hundred and eighty pounds of steroid-bloated muscle, scar tissue, and hardened silver-steel tore into the sawdust, kicking up violent clouds of red dirt as the cyber-warg sped up to forty-five miles an hour. The high-pressure rams along its jawline whined under maximum squeezing, generating four thousand pounds of pressure of crushing torque. The air whistled through its six-inch serrated steel fangs. A high-pitched, screaming sound like a circular saw tearing through green oak.
The crowd of three hundred gamblers erupted into an ear-splitting, bloodthirsty roar, surging against the iron outer edge fence until the heavy chain-links groaned under the pressure.
“DEAD IN ONE BITE!” someone screamed from the overhead narrow high walkways.
“CRUSH HIM! RIP THE GUTS OUT!”
Grimm didn’t flinch.
The jet-black hound stood in his low, level stalk, forty-eight pounds of tightly packed crushing weight perfectly balanced over his rear hocks. His molten amber eyes remained fixed on the center of the charging beast’s chest. He watched the distance collapse with cold exact calm distance: twenty yards, fifteen yards, ten yards.
Arthur’s mental clock tracked the split seconds through the soul-sync link:
Seventy meters per second closing speed. Impact vector locked. Cruciate joint cords overextended. Pre-charge breath in started. Five yards.
At five yards, Iron-Jaws opened his jaws wide, the silver-steel shears gleaming beneath the harsh hardened carbon-iron floodlights, preparing to snap Grimm’s spine in two. The sheer moving shifted weight generated a nearby blast wave that ruffled Grimm’s neck ruff. The beast’s nostrils flared, venting white-hot man-made lubricant and scorched fight-or-flight rush into the cold air.
The entire roundhouse seemed to freeze in time. Gamblers held their breath. Their eyes were wide, expecting the black hound to be wiped out into blood-splattered scrap in the next split second.
At two yards—the exact threshold of moving commitment where the warg’s massive forward driving force made evasion or slowdown physically impossible—Arthur spoke a single, quiet word through the soul-sync:
“Now.”
Grimm vanished.
There was no leap, no wild scramble to the side.
A sharp ripple of spatial refraction distorted the air across the sawdust. A four-point-five-meter [Shadow-Slip Stride] that collapsed the metric between two points in sixty split seconds. The air heat dropped ten degrees in an instant. That created a nearby sky empty pocket that drew the airborne red sawdust inward. That left an oily violet after-image lingering in the cold air.
The bone-shaking crack of displaced air—a sharp sound bubbling blast pop—echoed off the brick walls like a pistol shot.
Iron-Jaws’s massive jaws snapped shut on empty air.
CLANG!
The high-pressure shears collided with an ear-splitting metal impact that sent a bone-shaking blast wave through the dirt ring, the blast throwing red sawdust ten feet into the air. But there was no flesh between the teeth. The moving driving force of one hundred and eighty pounds carried the cyber-warg forward, its frayed cruciate joint cords screaming under the sudden slowdown.
Before the beast’s silver-steel brow could dip, Grimm rematerialized.
He wasn’t in front. He wasn’t behind.
Grimm had emerged directly beneath the warg’s left jaw hinge, his low, wind-cutting frame slipping smoothly inside the reach of the silver-steel cheek plates.
Grimm drove his skull upward. His jaws opened wide, exposing dense rows of carbon-black canines. Then he clamped down with razor-sharp, unerring care directly across the rusted through brass high-pressure coupling beneath Iron-Jaws’s left ear.
CRUNCH.
Twenty-four hundred pounds of pressure of high-pressure bite force met cheap commercial brass.
The brass fitting crushed instantly.
High-pressure man-made stone oil erupted from the cut line in a violent, aerosolized red spray, coating Grimm’s black coat and hissing as it hit the hot exhaust vents of the fight-or-flight rush pump.
Deprived of high-pressure squeezing, the four-thousand-pound air-powered rams along the warg’s jaw lost all pressure in forty split seconds. The silver-steel shears fell slack, swinging loosely on their hinge pins like broken shutters.
Iron-Jaws let out a confused, muffled shriek. The beast thrashed its massive head to throw the smaller hound off. But Grimm was already executing the second phase of the razor-sharp set.
Grimm didn’t fight the thrash. He rode the driving force.
Planting his rear paws against the damp earth, Grimm clamped his jaws tighter around the broken silver-steel bracket, threw his muscular hips sideways. Then he carried out a ruthless moving pivot.
CRACK.
The turning force was devastating. Grimm used Iron-Jaws’s own forward speed against his rigid neck. He twisted the warg’s head forty-five degrees beyond its neck limit.
The massive beast’s left hind leg buckled. With an earth-shaking thud that shook through the foundation piers of the roundhouse, one hundred and eighty pounds of wired warg slammed horizontally into the iron chain-link fence, caving the steel mesh outward by three feet. Two rusted railway tie supports snapped with the sound of cannon shots.
Iron-Jaws hit the sawdust on his side with a wet, bone-jarring impact.
Before the beast could roll, Grimm was on top of him.
The jet-black hound drove forty-eight pounds of packed crushing weight squarely into the warg’s ribs, his front paws pinning the beast’s forequarters to the dirt. Grimm’s jaws released the cut coupling, shifted down to the main neck blood vessel beneath the silver-steel plate. Then he hovered one tiny fraction of an inch from the living skin. Teeth bared, molten amber eyes blazing with lethal, cold power.
If Iron-Jaws twitched a single muscle fiber, his throat was gone.
Iron-Jaws didn’t twitch. The massive cyber-beast lay numbed in the sawdust, whimpering through slack silver-steel jaws, fully broken. The high-pressure fluid hissed as it pooled in the mud, extinguishing the last leftovers of combat frenzy. The warg’s milky eyes cleared slightly as the fight-or-flight rush shock subsided. It looked up at Grimm with the plain submission of a beat animal recognizing its superior.
Total elapsed time: two point one seconds.
Silence fell over the Scrap Ring Cauldron.
It wasn’t a quiet lull. It was a choking, total empty pocket of sound.
Three hundred spectators stood frozen against the railings, their mouths agape, half-burned cigars dropping onto the narrow high walkways. The bookmaker held his chalk suspended in mid-air, staring at the betting board. In his raised velvet box, Syndicate Boss Sterling’s cigar tumbled from his fingers, landing on his silk waistcoat, burning a smoking black hole through the fabric without him even noticing.
Along the narrow high walkways, the trade ring guards lowered their shock-batons. They stared in disbelief at the black hound who had dismantled the arena champion without suffering a single scratch.
In the red corner, Debt Enforcer Fang’s control baton slipped from his numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the iron floor grating.
Fang fell to his knees in the mud. She stared at his twenty-two-fight champion pinned like a dead hog beneath an alley hound.
“No...” Fang gasped, his voice cracking into a ragged, childlike sob. “No... My warg... That’s impossible...”
Outside the cage, Toby lowered his brass watch, his mouth open in pure shock. “Two point one seconds... Arthur, he broke the champion in two point one seconds!”
Toby didn’t wait for the bookmaker to recover. He slammed his iron ledger down against the brass betting grille with a bone-shaking bang that jolted the bookmaker out of his trance.
“The wager is settled!” Toby shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing across the silent roundhouse. “Two point one seconds! Official victory by total disarticulation! Hand over the two thousand credits house purse and unlock the trolley with our Western Rail bone meal. Or I’ll cite every license in this pit under Article Twelve of the Town Gaming Code!”
The bookmaker swallowed hard, trembling as he reached into the iron safe beneath the counter, hauling out a heavy canvas sack clinking with two thousand Vanguard credits.
Across the narrow high walkways, the stunned silence began to fracture into hushed, scared whispers.
“He didn’t just fight,” a seasoned bio-hacker muttered, staring down through the wire. “He targeted the high-pressure return line. He knew the pressure rating of the brass pipe rim before the bell even rang.”
“He’s a surgeon,” another scrap dealer whispered in awe. “A cold and exact butcher from the Academy.”
In the blue corner, Arthur Vance calmly unlatched the chain-link gate and stepped into the ring. His trench coat flapped against his boots as he walked across the sawdust. He unhooked a pair of locking razor-sharp pliers and a knurled brass shut-off valve from his belt work harness.
Grimm remained anchored over the warg’s chest, his amber eyes calm. His black talons held the beast’s forequarters pinned to the earth. He waited for his handler’s next order.
The duel was over. The surgery had just begun.