The rusted iron mesh of the underground fighting cage rattled under the echoing blast wave of shattered metal.
In the center of the sawdust ring, eighty pounds of chrome-plated bone and steroid-hardened muscle lay pinned beneath forty-eight pounds of black glass hunting beast. Grimm’s forepaws were planted squarely across the chest of the cyber-enhanced dire-wolf, his black talons biting through heavy rubber into the beast’s chest plate. His jaws were locked around the wolf’s heavy jaw joint. The external high-pressure piston, stripped of its brass housing by twenty-four hundred pounds of focused jaw torque, dangled by a frayed bundle of air-powered lines, wheezing spurts of hot, man-made stone oil.
A crimson pool spread across the sawdust. It steamed in the humid chill of the Under-City sump.
Around the outer edge of the pit, three hundred underworld spectators—dockers from the lower canal drain pits, scrap-smugglers, bio-hackers, and trade ring bookmakers—stood frozen against the wire fencing. The harsh hardened carbon-iron floodlights hummed overhead, casting glare across open mouths and unblinking eyes. The roar that had accompanied the opening bell had evaporated into stunned silence.
Ten to one. The betting board on the iron narrow high walkway still displayed the closing line: Chrome-Jaw Razor-Warg (-900) vs. Slum Stray (+750).
“He... He stopped it,” someone croaked from the work frames. “The stray broke the silver-steel linkage in one bite. Look at the piston metal tube—sliced through the housing.”
Ten paces away in the red corner, Fang dropped to his knees.
The eighteen-year-old underground tamer hit the blood-soaked sawdust with a wet thud, his oil-stained canvas overalls crumpling beneath him. He was trembling wildly, his hands clawing at his shins as breath hitched in his throat. Through their soul link, the wolf’s agony poured into his nervous system—the fire of torn tissue. It dropped blood pressure, the cold terror of failing lungs.
“Iron-Jaw...” Fang cried, his forehead striking the dirt. “Cancel the match! I yield! Please, don’t let him rip the throat out! I owe three seasons of wages on that chassis... He’s all I have left!”
Grimm didn’t tear the throat out.
The jet-black hound kept his muzzle locked around the shattered clockwork hinge, his amber eyes fixed on Arthur. His single upright ear flicked once to track the hiss of the burst line. But his body remained an unmoving stone anchor. There was no feral frenzy in Grimm’s stance, no wild head-shaking to rend flesh. He was an apex hunting beast holding a razor-sharp clamp, waiting for his handler’s command.
Arthur Vance ducked beneath the lower cable of the cage and stepped into the ring.
His charcoal field trench coat flapped against his boots as he walked across the sawdust. His step was measured, unrushed, devoid of gladiator swagger. From the work rig strapped across his chest, Arthur drew a pair of nine-inch serrated locking blood-stopping pliers and a knurled brass shut-off valve.
“Easy, Grimm,” Arthur said softly, his voice carrying through the silent arena. “Ease off the masseter tension by three tiny fractions of an inch. Don’t puncture the neck-artery beneath the mounting bracket.”
Grimm released a low breath through his nostrils. The hound shifted his bite slightly, slackening jaw pressure just enough to relieve the pinch on living flesh beneath the metal plate, while keeping the wolf’s skull pinned flat.
Arthur knelt in the crimson mud beside the thrashing war-beast.
The wolf let out a strangled whine. Its wired modifications were typical of desperate backyard hack-jobs. An heavy-duty air-powered piston bolted into the cheekbone with crude steel tap-screws. It was tied into a backup high-pressure fluid pool on the neck bones. Grimm’s targeted strike had snapped the high-pressure return line. Man-made brake fluid was siphoning directly into the open wound where the living neck-vein met the rusted through silver-steel pipe rim.
If oil entered the bloodstream, chemical embolisms would shut down the heart within two minutes. If Arthur pulled Grimm off without sealing the vessel, the torn neck-artery branch would bleed the wolf dry in sixty seconds.
Arthur flipped the zoom dial on his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe.
The internal quartz prisms rotated with a soft snick-click. Across his left eye, pale amber monospace tracking data condensed over the spraying fluid:
“Hold still,” Arthur muttered, not to the crowd or the handler, but to the dying wolf.
His left hand slipped beneath the shredded silver-steel plate, fingertips finding the warm, pulsing bundle of the neck-artery sheath amidst motor oil. With the practiced economy of a surgeon who had repaired torn main thigh blood vessels in trauma tents, Arthur guided the serrated beak of the blood-stopping pliers into the gap.
Click-clamp.
The blood bleeder stopped with a clean, metal snap.
Arthur didn’t pause. His right hand brought the knurled brass shut-off valve to the cut line. He jammed the narrowed barb of the valve directly into the burst hose, crimped the steel collar with his thumb using forty pounds of lateral force. Then he twisted the petcock ninety degrees clockwise.
The hiss of escaping stone oil choked off instantly.
The wolf’s shallow gasps slowed. Its dilated pupils began to contract as the lethal drop in skull blood pressure halted. The animal let out a shuddering sigh, its tongue lolling into the sawdust, exhausted but alive.
Arthur tapped Grimm’s shoulder with the flat of his knuckle. “Release.”
Grimm stepped back smoothly. The jet-black hound didn’t look at the fallen opponent. He trotted two paces to Arthur’s left flank. He turned his back to the cage wall. Then he sat on his haunches, his dark tail resting across his paws in total discipline.
Arthur stood up. His hands were coated in dark blood, foul-smelling high-pressure fluid, and sawdust. He wiped his fingers on a sterile gauze pad, walked across the ring, and stopped before the trembling boy.
He dropped the crimped high-pressure valve and a spare blood-stopping clamp into Fang’s lap.
“The high-pressure return is isolated,” Arthur said in a flat, cold and exact rhythm. “The neck-artery branch is clamped with locking metal tongs. Don’t remove that clamp until you have flushed the wound bed with three liters of warm boiled saline to clear the man-made oil. If you take the clamp off before the vessel is stitched, he will bleed out on your workbench.”
Fang looked up, stunned. He stared at the shining brass valve in his hands, then at his breathing wolf, and finally up at Arthur.
“You... You didn’t kill him?” Fang whispered, his voice cracking. “This is an underground blood match. The victor takes salvage rights on the cybernetics.”
“I’m a physician, not a scrap merchant,” Arthur replied, returning the gauze to his pack. “That wolf has two cracked neck bones from the weight of your second-hand piston. If you want him to walk without a permanent limp, strip the iron off his jaw, feed him boiled bone marrow with three grams of ground sulfur twice a day, and keep him off cold concrete for a fortnight. If you put that steel plate back on him, his neck will collapse before the winter solstice.”
Fang swallowed hard, clutching the bloody clamp against his chest. “I’ll. I swear it on my tamer sigil. Thank you, master.”
A collective murmur rippled through the spectators on the narrow high walkways.
Underground pit duels in the drain pits of Mega-City 07 ended in one of two ways. A crushed carcass hauled out by sanitation hooks, or a maimed beast sold to the renderers to cover medical debt. Nobody stepped into the sawdust to perform emergency blood-vessel surgery on an opponent’s war-dog. Nobody used razor-sharp hemostats to save a broken gladiator from high-pressure toxicity.
“Look at his coat,” an old bettor muttered, pointing down at Arthur. “He broke through that cyber-rig like a butcher shop hook. Then stitched the veins back together before the blood could even pool.”
“Cold hands,” whispered a chem-refinery worker. “He broke the beast’s engine with one strike, then repaired the leak with pliers. That isn’t a tamer. That’s a butcher.”
“No,” another voice called out from the darkness near the bookmaker’s cage. “A medic. A butcher medic.”
The phrase caught like fire in dry grass. Within seconds, the whispers coalesced into a rhythmic rumble:
The Butcher Medic. The Butcher Medic of Slum Ward 9.
Arthur didn’t acknowledge the chanting. He turned toward the cage exit where Toby Mallow stood clutching the rusted wire mesh.
Toby looked as though he had aged five full years in three minutes. His pudgy face was the color of unbaked dough, sweat plastering his limp brown hair to his forehead. His fingers were clamped around the brass frame of his pocket counting frame so tightly that his knuckles were stark white. Behind him, resting his heavy chin on Toby’s shoulder, Barnaby the spotted burrow-hog gave a deep snort that blew sawdust across Toby’s trouser cuffs.
“Arthur...” Toby squeaked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched wheeze as Arthur pushed open the cage gate. “Arthur, by the Seven Spires, my main heart artery almost burst! When that wolf charged with forty thousand foot-pounds of high-pressure ram force, I thought we were going to be buried in the sump ditch!”
“The high-pressure piston had a posture wobble on its forward stroke,” Arthur said calmly. He drew a clean rag from his coat to wipe the dark residue from Grimm’s ears. “A lateral bending of forty degrees was guaranteed to expose the pressure return line. Where is the payout?”
Toby swallowed, his eyes darting toward the heavy iron counter beneath the narrow high walkway where the bookmaker stood scowling behind bulletproof glass.
“Two thousand credits,” Toby whispered. His hands shook as he pulled out their stamped betting tickets. “Twenty to one on the round-two submission without mortality. The bookmaker looks ready to murder us.”
“He will pay,” Arthur said, resting his hand on the handle of his heavy dark metal stiletto. “The Under-City trade ring respects two things: ledger contracts and clean violence. Grimm, heel.”
Grimm rose without a sound, pressing his broad, jet-black shoulder against Arthur’s knee. The hound’s tail gave a single, firm thump against Arthur’s calf—a quiet gesture of total trust.
They walked to the bookmaker’s booth.
The bookmaker, a hulking man whose neck was scarred by old chemical burns, stared through the glass slit at Arthur. His gaze dropped from Arthur’s pale face down to the dried blood spray on his handling bracers, and finally to Grimm’s gleaming, dark teeth. The black hound met the man’s stare with unblinking, hungry calm.
Without a single word, the bookmaker reached beneath the counter. He dragged out a heavy burlap sack that clinked with the dense ring of two hundred solid silver ten-credit metal bars. It slid it through the iron transaction trough.
Toby grabbed the sack with both hands, hugging the rough burlap to his belly as if it were a newborn child. Tears of pure relief leaked from the corners of his eyes, rolling down his cheeks.
“Two thousand...” Toby blubbered softly, his knees knocking together beneath his coat. “Two thousand clear Vanguard credits. Arthur, do you know what this means? We can pay the clinic’s winter coal heavy tax! We can buy thirty bushels of clean oats for Barnaby! Barnaby doesn’t have to chew turnip skins until spring!”
Barnaby let out a ringing grunt of test, nudging Toby’s hip with his flat, rubbery snout.
“Put the sack inside your inner coat pocket, Toby,” Arthur said. He turned toward the dim hall that led toward the surface vents. “We aren’t spending it on coal just yet.”
“We aren’t?” Toby gasped, scurrying to keep pace with Arthur’s long strides as Grimm trotted silently at their heels. “Then what are we buying? That’s a fortune in the slums!”
Arthur adjusted his monocle, his eyes narrowing as he looked toward the stairwell leading into the deeper black-market test chemical quarter.
“Raw minerals,” Arthur said. “Grimm’s bone thickness has reached the limit of common iron melted rock waste. If we want him to break through to Bronze D-Rank before the academy test trial convenes, his marrow needs high-thickness potion-made reagents. We’re going to find Deep-sea Well Tar.”