The zinc full-body VR trough in the center of the clinic was packed to the brim with crushed ice, gray stone salt water, and chunks of rock salt.
A pale frost fog clung to the surface of the freezing salt water, spilling over the zinc-coated iron lip to coil across the scrubbed floorboards. Outside the heavy clinic shutters, the cold midnight wind of Slum Ward 9 rattled the iron chimney pipe. He carried the distant clank of factory drop-hammers and the sour reek of coal gas.
Inside, the only sound was the steady, rhythmic hiss of Arthur’s brass alcohol burner.
Arthur stood beside the zinc preparation table, his forearms scrubbed bare and disinfected with pungent phenol. On the heat-resistant baked-clay tile beside the burner sat a heat-proof glass beaker containing fifty drops of Abyssal Well Tar. Under gentle, indirect heat, the pitch-black fluid had loosened from its cold, jelly-like state into a glossy, rainbow-bright slurry that bent the lamplight with a strange, heavy luster. Suspended within the tar were three hundred grams of crushed fiery brimstone, dissolved into micro-fine dust gold that glittered like distant sparks in an oil slick.
Arthur loaded the mid-air into a heavy beast-doctor air-powered infusion syringe fitted with a twelve-gauge heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron drain needle.
“Toby,” Arthur said quietly, checking the pressure seal on the syringe barrel with a thumb tap. “Hold the monitoring slate. Call out his core heat every sixty seconds. If the reading crosses forty-two point five, dump the backup ice bucket directly over his neck-artery triangle.”
Toby stood three paces back, clutching a brass dial heat gauge and an enamel basin of crushed ice. His hands were shaking so hard the ice cubes clicked against the metal rim.
“Arthur, look at that needle,” Toby whimpered, his eyes round behind his glasses. “That isn’t a syringe. That’s a heavy-duty drill bit! Are you sure his thigh bone won’t shatter when the piston fires?”
“Grimm’s bone cortex is already forty percent jet-black bone lattice,” Arthur replied. His voice flat and was cold and exact. “A standard steel hypodermic would bend against his bone-skin like copper wire. We need the drain needle to pierce the outer-brain wall and seat the hollow tube directly into the marrow canal.”
Arthur turned to the zinc trough.
Grimm stood beside the freezing salt water, watching the floating ice blocks. The jet-black hound was forty-eight point five pounds of wiry muscle, his coarse black coat bristling against the draft. He didn’t cower or whine. His single upright ear was cocked forward. His amber eyes were locked onto Arthur’s face with complete, steady focus.
“Into the bath, Grimm,” Arthur murmured, gesturing with a gloved hand. “Hocks down.”
Grimm paused for a split second, his black nose twitching as he caught the stinging tang of sulfur and stone salt water. Then, with a low, resolute grunt, he stepped over the zinc rim.
Four paws broke through the layer of crushed ice. The shock of the near-freezing salt water made the hound’s spine stiffen. His claws scraped hard against the textured rubber matting on the tank floor. He lowered his belly into the slush. He shivered wildly as the ice water closed around his chest and flanks. His breath emerged in rapid puffs of white vapor. But he kept his head held high, resting his dark muzzle against Arthur’s forearm.
“Good boy,” Arthur whispered, resting his right hand behind the dog’s scarred left ear. “Breathe steady. The cold will blunt the outer-brain pain receptors.”
Arthur drew a small glass vial of packed silver-root spirit-extract from his apron. With swift, precise movements, he injected local nerve blocks directly into the under-skin tissue overlying the lateral epicondyles of both hind femurs and front humeri.
Within twenty seconds, Grimm’s shivering slowed as the anesthetic numbed the superficial nerve branches.
“Core heat holding at thirty-eight point two,” Toby reported, his voice tight with tension. “He’s stable, Arthur.”
“Starting left thigh infusion,” Arthur said.
He knelt beside the trough. His left hand checked the muscular groove between the biceps femoris and vastus lateralis, locating the thick shaft of the left thigh bone. His fingertips read the bone structure through the taut skin—the healed fracture from his first surgery in the boiler room was solid. But the marrow cavity was hollow, starved of the heavy-metal thickness needed to anchor higher moving loads.
Arthur set the heavy dark metal drain needle against the mid-shaft of the thigh bone.
Clack.
With a controlled, downward surge of forty pounds of manual pressure, Arthur rotated the drain needle. The hardened heavy dark metal point bored through the dense outer-brain bone with a sharp, crunching shaking that traveled up Arthur’s wrists. Grimm let out a muffled grunt through closed teeth, his claws digging deeper into the rubber mat, but he didn’t thrash. His amber eyes remained locked on Arthur’s shoulder.
“Hollow tube seated,” Arthur murmured. “Injecting main vector.”
He coupled the air-powered syringe to the drain needle fitting. Then he pressed the brass thumb release.
Twelve drops of the warmed Abyssal Well Tar and brimstone mid-air surged under tightly packed air into the inside marrow canal of the bone.
The reaction was instant and violent.
Deep within Grimm’s thigh bone, the dormant Fenrir homeobox gene clusters collided with the high-thickness ancient dark rock. A muffled, low-hum rang through the zinc tank. It shook the water like the surface of a struck drum.
The ice surrounding Grimm’s hindquarters began to melt with astonishing speed. Bubbles of steam rose from the salt water, hissing as they broke the surface.
“Core heat spiking!” Toby shouted, staring wide-eyed at the heat gauge dial. “Thirty-nine point five! Forty point one! Arthur, the water is boiling around his flanks!”
“Second injection. Right thigh bone,” Arthur commanded, moving to the other side of the tank with razor focus.
He didn’t hesitate. The drain needle bit into the right thigh bone with a second crisp crunch. The air-powered piston hissed, driving another twelve drops of black tar into the marrow.
Grimm threw his head back, his jaws parting in a silent, painful gasp. The metamorphic heat surged through his skeleton. The jet-black hound’s eyes flared with a radiant, molten gold bright glare that lit up the clinic rafters.
Through their soul-sync link, Arthur felt the gut-deep blast wave slam into his own neck spine. A searing, metal heat pulsed behind his chest bone, the phantom taste of molten brimstone coating his tongue. Arthur planted his boots firmly on the wet floorboards, breathing through his teeth, anchoring his own mind against the atavistic tide.
Hold the line, Arthur thought. He projected his cold and exact calm directly through the neural bridge. Absorb the thickness. Rebuild the matrix.
Grimm’s body responded.
Under the surface of the steaming water, a series of rapid, rhythmic cracks echoed from Grimm’s limbs—the sound of dense bone webs shattering and instantly re-knitting into an iron-hard jet-black bone honeycomb. His thigh bone shafts thickened by twenty percent, the bone stone thickness surging under the catalytic heat of the fiery sulfur.
Arthur moved with blinding razor-sharp economy, delivering the final two doses into the front humeri.
“Forty-one point eight!” Toby screamed, dumping the backup bucket of crushed ice over Grimm’s neck and chest. “He’s at the threshold!”
The fresh ice hissed and vanished into vapor the instant it touched Grimm’s shoulders.
Then, the violent boiling ceased.
The wild bubbling in the zinc trough smoothed into a steady, deep-throated hum. The water turned pitch-black, stained by the excess stone ash shedding from Grimm’s pores. The hound’s entire dark shape seemed to expand before their eyes, his shoulder blades broadening, his chest deepening into a massive, barrel-shaped vault of striated muscle.
His fur, once coarse and patchy from slum malnutrition, erupted into a dense, thick coat of black glass dread-fur. Coarse, linked black guard hairs that looked like overlapping scales of fiery glass. The muscles around his skull and jaw swelled, the masseter and temporalis tendons thickening until his head carried the terrifying, wedge-shaped shape of an ancient dire hunting beast.
A soft click chimed behind Arthur’s left eye.
Monospace glyphs condensed across his eye nerve, pulsing with brilliant bronze-gold radiance:
Sixty-five pounds.
Arthur exhaled a long breath of steam. He felt the heavy, sympathetic heat drain from his own spine.
In the trough, Grimm stood up.
The black hound rose from the black salt water with slow, majestic power. The water cascaded off his jet-black coat in heavy sheets. It showed a physique that bore zero resemblance to the mangled stray Arthur had pulled from the cull pens three weeks ago. He was massive, his shoulder standing nearly thirty inches high, his frame streaming the quiet, crushing gravity of an apex hunting beast.
Grimm stepped over the zinc edge and landed on the floorboards with a heavy, muted thud that shook the medicine bottles on the shelves.
He shook himself vigorously, sending droplets of black stone salt water spraying across the walls and ceiling. Toby yelped, throwing his apron over his face.
Once dried, Grimm turned his massive head toward Arthur. The hound’s golden amber eyes were clear, intelligent, and brimming with boundless vigor. He walked forward two paces, lowered his heavy snout. Then he pressed the top of his skull firmly into Arthur’s chest. That let out a rumbling, underground chuff of pure contentment.
Arthur wrapped both arms around Grimm’s thick neck, burying his hands into the dense, coarse dread-fur. The heat streaming from the dog’s skin was steady now—a comfortable, fire-like thirty-eight point five degrees.
“Surgery complete,” Arthur said softly, his voice trembling slightly with quiet triumph. “You did it, Grimm. Bronze D-Rank.”
Grimm responded with a heavy wag of his tail, the thick appendage thumping against the zinc tank with the dull ring of an iron mallet.
In the doorway, Toby lowered his apron. He stared in open-mouthed terror and wonder at the beast before him.
“By the Ancestors...” Toby whispered, his knuckles white against his chest. “Arthur, that isn’t a dog anymore. That’s a siege engine with teeth.”