The golden law of the Rift Era battlefield was written in the blood of dead tamers:
Sever the Link, Drop the Beast.
A tamer is knocked unconscious or killed. Then, the psychic neural bridge connecting their mind to their tightened beasts ruptures instantly. That triggered three to eight seconds of total, paralyzing synaptic dizziness in every beast under their command. In faster-than-sound combat, three seconds of total numbness is an eternity—the difference between victory and butchery.
The Sovereign Chimera Order understood this doctrine better than anyone.
They didn’t send their elite shadow infiltrators to duel with a six-hundred-two-pound dire-hound or a spatial white tiger. They waited until the beasts were five paces away, their focus relaxing after a successful breach defense.
Two Chameleon-Mantis Shadow killers dropped from the rusted iron bridge heavy beams twelve meters above Arthur’s head.
They made no sound. Their bodies were wrapped in living skin grafts harvested from deep-sea cloaking octopuses. They bent the surrounding light around their frames so that they appeared as nothing more than two shimmering, see-through heat mirages falling through the purple fog. Their forearms ended in three-foot serrated mantis scythes, coated in a glistening layer of packed man-made batrachotoxin. A single scratch would arrest a human heart in less than four seconds.
