The air inside the central smelter hall of Refinery 04 was colder than the rotten-egg wastes outside.
Water dripped from rusted through steel beams thirty meters overhead. It struck empty casting beds with sharp, irregular clicks that echoed through the gloom. The hall was a vast heavy-duty cave, long stripped of copper cabling and instrumentation panels. That left behind only the titanic shells of four dormant blast furnaces. Rust covered every surface in thick, flaky scabs the color of dried liver. Along the northern wall, cracked pipes vented pockets of stale steam that mingled with the freezing drafts. It wrapped the lower floor in a swirling waist-high shroud of white fog.
Grimm moved through the vapor without a sound.
The hound’s belly cleared the rusted floor grating by barely three inches. His head was thrust forward, his notched ear swiveling toward the raised pouring platform at the center of the hall. Every few paces, Grimm paused beneath the shadow of a massive melted rock waste ladle, his black flank brushing against Arthur’s knee. When Arthur signaled a flat palm, Grimm stopped instantly. His tail tucked was tight, his amber eyes unblinking as he scanned the narrow high walkways above.
Back at the clinic in Slum Ward 9, Grimm had plenty of domestic habits. He insisted on sleeping with his heavy chin resting squarely across the toe of Arthur’s left boot, twitching his paws in dreams of underground rabbit burrows. He once knocked over a glass vial of saline while turning around in the cramped medicine room. Then, he had right away dropped his muzzle to the floorboards, crawling beneath the check table with his tail between his legs in an agony of invisible corner-shame until Arthur called him out with a scrap of dried beef. But here in the ruins, the awkward domestic hound was entirely underwater beneath the lethal instincts of an apex hunting beast. He was silent, watchful, and coiled like a loaded spring.
Through their soul-sync connection, Arthur felt the pulse of Grimm’s heightened awareness. The hound was tracking two distinct heartbeats: one rapid and uneven. He pounded with the wild rhythm of fight-or-flight rush. The other deep, heavy, and artificially sped up by chemical fury.
Arthur adjusted the brass focus ring of his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe. The crosshairs swept past hanging iron chains and shattered glass enclosures, finally resolving upon the raised pouring platform suspended fifteen meters above the central melted rock waste trough.
A cold voice cut through the dripping water drops:
“You actually walked in. I told my uncle you were too arrogant to run, even without a radio.”
Arthur stopped beside a rusted support post, resting the handguard of his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine against the cold iron.
Twenty meters ahead, perched on the heavy steel narrow high walkway that overlooked the central melted rock waste pit, stood Julian Vance.
The golden scion of House Vance bore little resemblance to the polished prodigy who had strutted through the academy courtyards three weeks ago. His tailored white uniform was stained with dark graphite grease at the cuffs and collar. His blond hair, usually immaculately parted, hung in limp strands across his forehead, plastered against his skin with cold sweat. But it was his face that revealed the true damage. Julian’s cheeks were hollow, his skin an unhealthy gray. His blue eyes were bloodshot, twitching with a manic, sleepless fixation.
In his right hand, Julian held his ritual Vanguard dress sword. Its tip shook against the iron railing with a dull rattle.
“Julian,” Arthur said, his voice flat and steady. “Skipping your assigned sector patrol is an automatic failure on the graduation board. Though I suppose Gregory already arranged an alibi for you.”
Julian let out a ragged, barking laugh that bounced off the corrugated steel ceiling.
“An alibi? For whom? For a corpse?” Julian stepped closer to the railing, his knuckles whitening on the dress sword’s grip. “Do you have any idea what happened after the Crucible, Arthur? Do you know what my father said when he saw the tracking data footage of that slum mongrel snapping my beast’s leg?”
Julian’s voice rose, cracking with frantic rage. “He didn’t speak to me for two weeks! He reassigned my private training pay to my second cousin! The elders laughed at me in the clan gallery! They whispered that the main branch heir was humiliated by an orphan who lives in a converted boiler vault! They said I lacked the spine to manage a true Vanguard bloodline!”
“Your drake suffered a severe ankle fracture because you commanded an unbalanced upright plunge without checking ground clearance,” Arthur replied clinically. “The fault was entirely yours, Julian. Your beast bore the physical cost of your tactical ignorance.”
“My beast is an asset of House Vance!” Julian screamed, his composure shattering fully. “And an asset doesn’t accept humiliation from gutter trash! Glacies! Come forth and claim your payback!”
A heavy, metal thud shook the pouring platform.
From the shadows behind the dormant heat-exchanger tower, a massive shape stepped into the dim light.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed as his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe automatically zoomed, its lenses whirring softly as they tuned the target’s physical dimensions.
It was Glacies. The Frost Drake’s four-meter frame was familiar, its pale, icy scales gleaming with the faint soft glow of cold-element aether. But the beast’s stance was ugly. Along its left hind leg. There, Grimm had shattered the joint during the arena duel, House Vance had bolted a massive, external cyber-prosthetic knee brace.
The gearwork was a monstrosity of black-market building. Thick chrome-cobalt struts were anchored directly into the drake’s thigh bone and shin bone with heavy silver-steel razor-sharp screws, piercing the living scales in raw, weeping puncture wounds. Dual air-powered pistons ran parallel to the bone, hissing plumes of boiled away cooling-oil coolant with every step. A crude brass high-pressure pipe hub sat clamped above the hock. It shook wildly as it forced the dead joint to articulate under motorized load. The surrounding flesh was inflamed, crusted with dried lymph and dark, clotted saurian blood where the metal collars had ground down to the bone surface.
Worse than the metal was the beast’s nervous system.
Glacies’s eyes were not their natural icy blue. They were fully dilated. It glowed with a poisonous violet sheen that spilled from its tear ducts in thick, sticky streaks. Violet veins bulged like thick rope across the drake’s neck and temples, pulsing erratically against the scales. From its jaws dripped a nonstop froth of yellow chemical bile that hissed and bubbled as it dissolved the rusted iron grating beneath its claws. The beast’s breathing sounded like a cracked bellows, rattling with lung fluid.
A pale monospace slate flickered into Arthur’s eye nerve:
Arthur inhaled slowly through his nose. His surgeon’s mind analyzed the chemical and clockwork tragedy standing on the platform.
“Hexa-Adrenal stimulants,” Arthur said, his tone dropping into icy contempt. “You flooded its blood-flow system with Grade-6 military battle cocktail. It numbs the pain receptors by frying the outer nerves, while forcing the heart output to triple. Uncle Gregory bought that from the black-market brokers in the lower undercity, didn’t he?”
Julian sneered down from the walkway, his chest heaving with shallow breaths. “It made him faster. It made him unbeatable. He doesn’t feel your mongrel’s bites anymore, Arthur. He doesn’t feel anything except the urge to rip. Twelve thousand credits for the brace and four thousand for the chemical ampoules. A small price to wash away the stain on my record.”
“It’s destroying his heart muscle,” Arthur said. He stepped away from the iron support post to keep his sightlines clear. “Look at the heart arrhythmia in his neck artery. The body-energy burn is three hundred percent above baseline. That man-made brace is exerting four hundred tons of pressure of shearing force on a healing fracture. Every time those pistons fire, the anchor pins tear further into the marrow cavity. Even if you win this fight, Glacies will suffer massive myocardial collapse within fifteen minutes. You aren’t curing him. You’re executing him to soothe your bruised pride.”
“Shut up!” Julian roared, slamming his dress sword against the iron rail with a shower of orange sparks. “Shut your arrogant mouth! You’re a poor parasite who scavenges scraps from my family’s bins! You don’t get to lecture me on beast-doctor science or clan honor!”
Julian leaned over the narrow high walkway. He pointed the gleaming tip of his dress sword straight at Arthur’s chest.
“Uncle Gregory locked down the entire sector outer edge,” Julian sneered. His voice dropped into a manic, poisonous whisper. “There are no surveillance drones out here. No inspectors. No emergency extract teams. When Glacies crushes your skull into that melted rock waste pit, we’ll dismantle the cyber-brace, toss your mongrel’s carcass into the sulfur vents, and report that you were ambushed by a pack of feral rift stalkers. A tragic rookie accident. House Vance will offer fifty credits for your funeral wreath. The clan council will praise my valor for clearing the sector.”
Beside Arthur’s boots, Grimm lowered his balance point until his chest brushed the cold iron grating.
The jet-black hound’s back arched slightly, every tendon in his hind legs coiling like hardened carbon springs. The fur along his spine stood erect. He showed the dense, armored horn-protein ridges that had ossified beneath the skin during his recent stone infusions. Grimm’s black lips pulled back, exposing rows of three-sided black glass teeth. He didn’t growl aloud but through their soul-sync channel, Arthur felt Grimm’s cold, total focus. He knew better than to surrender sound position in an enclosed space.
The hound understood the threat. He had dismantled this saurian before, and he was prepared to do it again.
“Grimm,” Arthur whispered, his voice barely carrying three inches in the damp fog. “Standard engagement protocol. Target the clockwork pipe hub on the left hock. Don’t engage the chest. Let the stimulants cook its stamina.”
A low, sub-heard shaking hummed in Grimm’s throat: confirmation. The hound’s tail flicked once, acknowledging the fire vector.
On the narrow high walkway above, Glacies threw its head back toward the ceiling.
An ear-splitting, unnatural shriek tore from the drake’s throat. A sound warped and strained by the chemical frenzy burning through its throat cords. Frost aether erupted from its nostrils in billowing plumes of sub-zero fog, instantly freezing the moisture on the nearby iron railings into jagged, needle-sharp hoarfrost. The drake’s wired brace let out a high-pitched air-powered whine as its high-pressure storage tank charged to maximum running pressure, the coolant venting in a sharp white hiss.
Julian’s face twisted in savage triumph as he slashed his sword downward.
“Glacies! Tear them apart! Leave nothing for the worms!”
The Frost Drake coiled its muscular hindquarters. The chrome pistons hissed, spraying a cloud of cooling-oil gas, and seventy pounds of silver-steel-heavy hunting beast launched off the raised overhead frame.
The drake plummeted twenty meters through the rotten-egg air, its talons outstretched like frozen iron hooks. He plunged directly toward Arthur and Grimm.