The seventy-two-pound Frost Drake struck the concrete floor with the bone-shaking force of an artillery shell.
The heavy slab buckled on impact. Concrete fractured into jagged slabs, hurling crushed stone and rusted iron rods outward like shrapnel. A blast wave of high-pressure air and sub-zero frost swept through the hall, blowing the waist-high steam away in ragged, tumbling plumes.
Arthur was already moving before the beast landed.
Guided by the pre-impact tracking data flashing across his monocle, Arthur had kicked off the flat stone slabs, diving behind the curved flank of an eight-ton cast-iron pouring ladle. The shrapnel from the floor struck the outer iron wall with a furious clatter. Beside him, Grimm didn’t dive. The hound carried out a high-G [Shadow-Slip Stride], his body dissolving into a black glass blur that reappeared four paces to the right, sliding low beneath a tangled nest of channel pipes.
The drake didn’t hesitate. Driven by the Hexa-Adrenal cocktail burning through its neural pathways, Glacies whipped its horned head around. Its violet-veined eyes locked onto Arthur’s cover.
With a high-pitched air-powered shriek, the wired knee brace on its left hind leg engaged.
The dual chrome pistons fired at maximum squeezing, venting a jet of boiled away cooling-oil coolant that hissed against the cold floor. Glacies launched itself forward, its three-meter tail sweeping in a vicious level arc. The heavy club of ice-crusted bone smashed into the iron pouring ladle with an ear-splitting clang, denting the two-inch-thick metal plate and shoving the eight-ton mass three feet across the floor.
Sparks cascaded through the darkness like falling embers.
Above them, the bone-shaking shakes tore free an overhead frame crane. A twelve-meter steel I-beam groaned, snapped its rusted through mounting bolts, and plummeted thirty meters straight down. The beam crashed through the raised narrow high walkway. It smashed into an inactive fuel line before embedding itself upright in the floor grating like a shattered spear.
The rupture breached a deep heat pocket. Beneath the rusted floor grates, leftover molten melted rock waste from an ancient aetheric hearth began to bubble upward. Sluggish rivers of glowing orange liquid, streaming twelve hundred degrees of dry heat, seeped into the drainage troughs.
The clash of heat levels was instant and violent.
The blistering heat wave from the melted rock waste pools slammed against the sub-zero frost aura streaming from Glacies’s scales. The moisture in the air flash-boiled, filling the center of the hall with an ear-splitting roar of venting steam and thick, churning clouds of white vapor that blinded sight sensors.
“Glacies! Freeze the outer edge!” Julian’s shriek pierced the roar from the upper narrow high walkways. “Don’t let them flank you! Blast the floor!”
The Frost Drake opened its jaws wide.
Its jaw plates unhinged, revealing a throat glowing with an eerie cyan radiance. An instant later, Glacies let loose its main elemental breath. A packed stream of sub-zero freezing liquid. The ice-cold jet roared across the central aisle, washing over the floor grating. Anything the frost touched froze solid in split seconds. Rusted pipes cracked like dry glass. The creeping melted rock waste pools crusted over into black, brittle black glass crusts.
Then, as its internal aether core counter-cycled to purge the massive internal heat generated by the stimulant overdrive, the drake’s throat flushed dull crimson.
Glacies exhaled a second, counter-cycling cone of white-hot, scalding steam.
The rapid heat shock was total. The concrete floor, already frozen to negative eighty degrees, exploded under the sudden introduction of five-hundred-degree vapor. Slabs of stone shattered into gravel. The sound pressure wave tore through the hall, rattling Arthur’s teeth in his jaw.
Arthur rolled out from behind the scarred ladle, coming up on one knee.
He didn’t flinch from the heat or the blinding fog. In the trauma theater, panic was merely an inefficient body-energy tax. His hands were rock-steady as he raised the ARC-7 Mag-Carbine to his shoulder. With a smooth flick of his thumb, he toggled the firing selector to semi-automatic and chambered his specialized ammunition. Aether-cooling heavy metal darts jacketed in cold-iron alloy.
“Grimm,” Arthur spoke through the soul-sync link, keeping his throat cords silent. “Flank vector thirty degrees left. Draw its visual tracking. Maintain high-G slips until the crushing pressure drops.”
A silent surge of understanding echoed through the link.
Grimm was already in motion. The jet-black hound sprinted along the edge of the bubbling melted rock waste trough, his claws finding traction on the hot iron grates. To an untrained observer. It ran a canine across heated iron seemed suicidal. But Grimm’s paws were no longer ordinary flesh. The jet-black bone honeycomb lattice that had stone-hardened his footpads absorbed the surrounding heat energy, giving him flawless grip on the blistering metal.
Grimm vaulted onto the slanted flank of the fallen I-beam.
From the high perch, Grimm let out a sharp, ringing bark. Not a wild yap, but a deep, territorial challenge that echoed off the fire walls.
Glacies snapped its jaws toward the sound. The drake pivoted wildly on its hindquarters, relying on the cyber-prosthetic to absorb the turning torque. The chrome pistons groaned under the strain, high-pressure high-pressure fluid whining through the external pipe hub.
That micro-second of clockwork exposure was all Arthur needed.
Through the sight aiming cross of the Zeiss-Vanguard Loupe, the unsafe high-pressure solenoid valve on Glacies’s left knee glowed with a bright amber target box.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Arthur squeezed the trigger three times in rapid row.
The ARC-7’s magnetic rails barked with sharp, whip-like cracks. Three heavy metal darts crossed the twenty-meter gap at extreme speed, cutting through the swirling steam clouds. The first round struck the drake’s thick tibial scale plate, ricocheting away in a shower of cyan sparks. But the second and third rounds hit with clean, steady care.
The cold-iron slugs punched straight through the external brass pipe hub of the wired brace.
A high-pressure jet of amber high-pressure fluid geysered from the shattered solenoid valve, spraying across the hot floor grates where it ignited in a brief, fiery flare of oily orange flame. The drake’s clockwork knee collapsed two inches as the crushing pressure bled away. That forced Glacies to stumble sideways with a deep-throated roar of pain.
On the upper narrow high walkway, Julian fired his dress sword wildly.
“Die! You gutter rat!” Julian screamed, thrusting his blade toward Arthur’s position.
Three jagged bolts of condensed blue aether lanced downward from the dress sword’s tip. He struck the concrete two paces from Arthur’s boots. The strikes blasted craters into the floor, showering Arthur’s tactical duster with burning sparks and sharp fragments of glass-fused dark rock. Arthur didn’t even look up at Julian. An high-born marksman firing from a raised, unstable platform without shoulder bracing had an accuracy limit worse than thirty percent. Julian was not the main threat. The seventy-two-pound saurian berserker was.
A system tracking data slate flashed into Arthur’s mind, refreshing with crisp monospace data:
Glacies swung its bulk around, its violet-veined eyes bulging with homicidal fury.
The loss of high-pressure fluid had not stopped the drake. With its outer pain receptors fully cut by the Hexa-Adrenal stimulant, the beast didn’t feel the silver-steel bone screws ripping through the outer bone layer of its thigh bone. Instead, the drug pushed its cardiovascular engine past all living safety margins. The drake’s heart pounded against its ribs like a heavy-duty trip-hammer, pumping boiling, stimulant-soaked blood through its tearing muscles.
Glacies lowered its horned snout. Its throat flared with blinding crimson heat as it prepared to unleash a point-blank blast of white-hot steam.
Grimm didn’t wait for the blast.
The jet-black hound launched off the I-beam, dropping four meters through the steam in a sheer upright descent. Mid-air, Grimm carried out another rapid [Shadow-Slip]. It folded through the nearby spatial eddies to reappear directly above Glacies’s right flank.
Grimm landed with all four paws on the drake’s dorsal ridge. His black glass claws dug deep into the narrow gaps between the saurian scales. He locked him onto the thrashing beast like an iron clamp.
Glacies thrashed wildly, slamming its back against the rusted fire wall to dislodge the hound. The impact tore away sheets of corrugated iron. But Grimm remained glued to the scales, his head driving forward.
Snap!
Grimm’s jaws clamped down on the soft joint padding at the base of the drake’s left wing-stub. The twenty-four-hundred-pound bite force crushed through scales and dense connective tissue, severing the upper-arm nerve cluster. Glacies shrieked, its left foreleg giving way as partial total numbness flashed down the limb.
“Shake him off!” Julian shrieked from above, pounding his fists against the shaking rail. “Crush him against the fire! Glacies, use the ram!”
Glacies threw itself backward with suicidal frenzy.
The drake deliberately collapsed its hindquarters, planning to crush Grimm between its seventy-two-pound armored bulk and the massive steel foundation of Blast Fire 04.
“Slip, Grimm! Now!” Arthur commanded.
Grimm released his grip a micro-second before the impact.
A shifted weight ripple wavered across the drake’s back. Grimm vanished into thin air, reappearing six meters away atop an overturned ore cart. Glacies slammed into the solid steel foundation with a bone-jarring crash that buckled the iron plating and sent clouds of black soot raining down from the chimney pipes.
The drake scrambled back onto its feet, but its left hind leg was trembling wildly.
Without crushing pressure to regulate the piston stroke, the external cyber-brace was binding up, metal grinding against metal with a harsh, shrieking whine. The silver-steel anchor screws were pulling free from the thigh bone, leaving bloody gaps in the living tissue. Yet the berserk stimulant refused to let the drake collapse.
Glacies lowered its head, its breathing a wet, rattling hiss. It locked its bloodshot, violet eyes on Grimm, who stood poised atop the ore cart with his black coat bristling.
The drake dug its front talons into the cracked melted rock waste, coiling its wounded body for a final, total charge that would level everything in its path.