The five neural pathways locked into Arthur Vance’s lower brain. Then, the universe ceased to exist as a collection of physical objects.
It became a roaring, churning sea of pure, pure sense data that threatened to drown his mortal mind in a single, total wave.
In his right visual cortex, Arthur was looking down from four hundred meters in the sky through Pip’s multi-spectrum raptor eyes. He saw the infrared heat signed names of sixty thousand advancing war-beasts like blazing bright coals burning in the snow, the heat currents of rising boiler exhaust from the Chimeric Cathedral, and the delicate air-pressure boundaries of the freezing badlands gale.
In his left hearing cortex, he was hearing the low-hum sound shakes of the earth through Titus’s heavy bedrock claws. He felt the grinding of earth-shaking plates, the groaning sideways tearing force on Gate Seven’s underground concrete wooden support posts, and the hollow echoes of pre-Cataclysm drainage pipes two miles beneath the city.
Across his smell bulbs, the world exploded into scents of copper, sulfuric acid, and scared hunting beast fight-or-flight rush through Grimm’s flared black nostrils. He could taste the spark ozone lingering on theDire-hound’s tongue and feel the huge, high-pressure potential of Grimm’s jaw muscles. Twenty-four hundred pounds of pressure of bone-crushing pressure humming in Arthur’s own phantom jawline.
