Grimm fell from the castle walls like a six-hundred-two-pound meteor of solid charcoal and black glass.
He didn’t land on the ground. He used the huge domed back shell of Titus, set fifty meters out in the gatehouse defile, as a moving launchpad.
THUD-BOOM!
Grimm’s heavy paws struck Titus’s dark rock shell. Titus, fully integrated into the earth-shaking bedrock, absorbed the downward driving force without budging a tiny fraction of an inch, flexing his shell armor scales to provide a high-friction spring platform. Grimm used the rebound energy to slingshot his body forty meters through the air, his flight path carrying him straight toward the smoking, fractured spine of the Gorgon-Stitch.
The Splicer warlords in the howdah screamed, wildly firing their hand-held star-fire pistols at the incoming hound.
The star-fire bolts splashed harmlessly across Grimm’s thick black glass breastplate, the heat absorbed by his dense, gravity-latticed fur.
Grimm landed directly across the behemoth’s shattered dorsal ridge.
His four massive paws, tipped with curved silver-steel-composite talons, sank into the warped armor plates on either side of the smoking fissure. He locked his body in place. The Gorgon-Stitch thrash wildly, its twin scorpion tails whipping forward in a desperate try to impale the hound’s ribs.
