The countdown timer in Arthur Vance’s burning eyes dropped through forty-five seconds.
45.00... 44.18... 43.02...
The air in the courtyard tasted of pure copper, burning sulfur, and spark-charged ozone. Arthur stood motionless at the center of the glowing sharp-angled pentagram, his boots frozen to the cracked asphalt, his right arm extended toward the sky like an iron lightning rod.
Every heartbeat felt like a sledgehammer slamming against the inside of his skull. The brain pressure had reached two hundred and thirty-eight tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver. Behind his ears, blood was trickling from the hearing canals, tracing thin red lines down the sides of his neck to stain the wool collar of his coat.
Arthur’s trained beast-doctor corpse-judge’s mind clinically registered the symptoms of acute neurovascular shock. The narrowing of his visual field, the phantom smell of scorched almonds from brain hypoxia, the rapid, shallow hammering of his heart at one hundred and eighty-five beats per minute. He knew with exact certainty that he had less than forty seconds before permanent, permanent tissue death claimed his brain cortex.
Yet his mind was a crystal-clear diamond of pure analytical math.
Through the multi-spectral Soul-Sync connection, Arthur saw the body layout of the Chimeric Hydra-Drake laid bare. He didn’t see an unbeatable mythical monster. He saw a poorly integrated, chemically overclocked living machine waiting to be dismantled.
