The high-pressure storage tank on Glacies’s left knee screamed as it dumped its leftover reserve pressure in one desperate, violent purge.
The Frost Drake surged forward. It didn’t run with the balanced, snake-like grace of a healthy saurian hunting beast. It moved like a runaway freight locomotive, seventy pounds of steroid-bloated muscle and silver-steel plating tearing across the broken floor grating. Every stride gouged deep furrows through the rusted metal. Concrete crushed under its talons, hurling clouds of gray dust and jagged gravel into the swirling steam.
Its violet-veined eyes were locked on the overturned ore cart where Grimm stood.
On the upper narrow high walkway, Julian shrieked in triumph, leaning so far over the rail that his knuckles scraped the rust-scabbed iron. “Flatten him! Break every bone in his body!”
Arthur didn’t shout an order.
In the high-speed sense domain of their soul-sync link, spoken words were too slow, hindered by the physical heavy rush of throat cords and sound airwaves. Instead, Arthur sent a single, complex tactical set directly into Grimm’s motor cortex. An oblique upright feint, a raised staging point. A dropping jaw strike aimed at the clockwork pivot.
Grimm reacted before the drake had crossed half the distance.
The jet-black hound didn’t retreat. With an explosive extension of his hindquarters, Grimm vaulted off the rusted lip of the ore cart, his charcoal body arcing six meters through the rotten-egg air. His front paws caught the lower pipe rim of an overhead crane overhead frame suspended above the melted rock waste pit. The carbon-honeycomb pads of his paws gripped the cold steel without slipping. He swung his mass smoothly onto the beam.
Glacies rammed the ore cart at full sprint.
BOOM!
The bone-shaking impact folded the two-ton cast-iron cart like a crushed tin can. Iron rivets snapped off with the crack of rifle shots, whistling through the steam. The sheer driving force carried the drake forward, its horned snout plowing through the wreckage and into the concrete foundation of the blast fire.
The impact jarred Glacies’s entire skeletal frame. For three tenths of a second, the drake’s forward speed stalled as its brain rattled inside its thick skull.
That split second was the window Arthur had engineered.
“Execute,” Arthur murmured.
From the crane overhead frame six meters above, Grimm leaped into the open air.
Gravity pulled the hound downward. But midway through the descent, the space around his body wavered. Grimm triggered a dropping [Shadow-Slip]. He folded through the nearby spatial curve to erase four meters of end-post drop.
He materialized silently, directly atop Glacies’s nape.
The drake felt the sudden weight on its neck and let out an enraged, wet hiss, attempting to whip its horned head around. But Grimm had already secured his grip. His black glass claws sank into the thick connective tissue beneath the saurian scale plates. He anchored his forty-five-two-pound mass against the thrashing neck like an iron vice.
Grimm swung his head down and back.
Guided by the amber aiming cross projected through their soul-sync link, Grimm’s jaws opened wide. It stretched to an angle that stretched his facial joint cords to their total body-leverage threshold. Rows of three-sided, black glass-carbon canines lined up with tiny care over the main target. The chrome-cobalt load-bearing bracket and the high-pressure brass high-pressure control valve bolted into the drake’s left thigh bone.
Arthur’s optic magnifying glass flashed crimson text:
CRUNCH!
Grimm’s jaws snapped shut with the explosive force of an air-powered high-pressure shear.
Thirty-two hundred pounds of pressure of crushing torque drove the razor-sharp black glass fangs through the chrome plating, through the brass control valve housing, and straight into the core of the silver-steel anchoring bolts. The hardened alloy bracket, designed to withstand four hundred tons of pressure of stress, buckled like warm wax under the ancient bite force.
An ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal split the air.
The high-pressure control valve burst catastrophically. White-hot cooling-oil fluid exploded outward in a blinding, oily spray that hissed wildly against the cold scales. The two-inch-thick chrome piston rod snapped in half with a ringing crack, its jagged end whipping around to sever the collateral joint cords of the drake’s already ruined knee joint.
Glacies’s thigh bone, robbed of all clockwork support while carrying the full moving load of the thrashing beast, snapped mid-shaft with a heard pop.
A high, keening wail tore from the drake’s throat.
Without its left hind limb, the seventy-two-pound saurian lost all balance. Its front claws scraped helplessly across the blood-slicked grating as its massive bulk tipped sideways. Glacies rolled across the floor, skidding ten meters through pools of cold runoff water before crashing headlong into a huge heap of rusted iron metal bars and dormant melted rock waste at the base of the fire.
The impact scattered iron metal bars across the hall, sending up a choking cloud of black soot.
The Frost Drake lay on its right side, its limbs twitching spastically. The violet veins along its neck were darkening to a bruised, rotting purple. The Hexa-Adrenal stimulant burned through the last reserves of its heart muscle. Its breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps that barely stirred the soot around its nostrils.
The battle was over. Elapsed combat time: forty-two seconds.
Grimm stepped down from the melted rock waste heap.
His charcoal coat was dusted with gray concrete powder and flecks of dried high-pressure fluid. But his stride was steady and unrushed. He trotted across the cracked floor to where Arthur stood. Grimm dropped his head. He gave a soft, deep-throated chuff, his wet nose bumping gently against the toe of Arthur’s left combat boot.
Arthur knelt on one knee in the grit. He didn’t care about the soot or the high-pressure grime. His gloved hands moved over Grimm’s skull, checking the jaw hinges, the neck bones, and the hocks. There were minor abrasions along the hound’s flank where scale edges had scraped him. But the jet-black bone lattice beneath had absorbed every impact without a single micro-fracture.
“Clean strike, little brother,” Arthur murmured, scratching the sweet spot behind Grimm’s notched left ear. “Perfect moving transfer.”
Grimm leaned his full weight against Arthur’s shoulder for three quiet seconds, his tail giving two slow, contented thuds against the concrete. Back at the clinic in Slum Ward 9, Grimm loved this exact stance. Leaning into Arthur’s knee after a long evening of boiling bone broths or cleaning scalpels, eyes half-closed in deep canine satisfaction. But here in the ruins, remembering his dignity as an apex hunting beast, the hound pulled back, sat upright on his haunches. Then he turned his amber gaze toward the narrow high walkway above.
On the iron walkway, Julian Vance stood frozen.
His mouth was open, his face as white as bleached bone. His hands shook with such violent tremors that the Vanguard dress sword slipped from his numbed fingers. The blade bounced off the iron railing, plunged through the narrow high walkway grating. Then it struck the stone floor fifteen meters below with a dull clatter.
“No...” Julian whimpered, his voice thin and hollow in the vast hall. “No, no, no... That’s impossible. That’s a pureblood drake. He has three ages of registered pedigree... My father spent fifty thousand credits on his egg...”
Julian dropped to his knees on the shaking iron walkway, clutching his head with both hands. His manic bravado had evaporated. That left behind only the naked, sniveling terror of a spoiled patrician who had staked everything on an illegal gamble and lost.
Arthur rose to his feet. He unclipped a heavy pair of nylon field restraints from his tactical belt and walked toward the iron access stairs leading to the overhead frame. Grimm followed two paces behind, his claws clicking on the metal steps.
Arthur reached the top of the walkway. Then, Julian scrambled backward on his hands and knees until his spine hit the safety rail.
“Stay back!” Julian sobbed, curling into a ball. “Don’t touch me! I’m the main branch heir! If you touch me, my father will have you flayed in the public square! I order you to stay back!”
Arthur didn’t raise his voice. He stepped forward, grabbed Julian by the collar of his grease-stained white tunic. Then he hauled the trembling scion up until their eyes were level.
“Your father isn’t here, Julian,” Arthur said. His voice as were cold as the frost clinging to the rafters. “And neither is your pedigree.”
Arthur forced Julian’s hands behind his back. Then he locked the nylon restraints around his wrists with a sharp, cranking zip. Then he pushed Julian down onto an iron bench.
“You gave your beast Hexa-Adrenal stimulants,” Arthur said. He took out his air-powered needle glove and checking the glass ampoules. “His heart rate is exceeding two hundred and eighty beats per minute. Look down at him. The pin-site screws in his thigh bone ripped through the outer-brain wall. The osteonecrosis from the infection is already spreading into his thigh canal. If I don’t administer a beta-blocker and a neural sedative within four minutes, his main heart artery will dissect and he will die right there in that melted rock waste pile.”
Julian stared up at Arthur with wide, blank eyes, snot and tears smearing across his soot-streaked cheeks. “You... You’re going to treat him? Why? Uncle Gregory said... Gregory told me you were an arrogant monster who wanted to butcher our bloodline! He gave me the ampoules! He brought the back-alley technician who bolted the brace to Glacies’s leg!”
“Your uncle gave you tools to commit suicide while keeping his own hands clean,” Arthur replied coldly. “A beast isn’t guilty of its master’s cowardice or his ignorance.”
Arthur turned toward the stairs, ready to go down and stabilize the dying drake before heart arrest occurred.
Before his boot could touch the first metal step, the sound of slow, heavy clapping echoed from the arched entryway of the smelting hall.
The applause was deliberate, rhythmic, and utterly devoid of amusement.
Arthur froze on the top landing. Beside him, Grimm’s head whipped toward the entrance, a deep, rumbling growl shaking through the hound’s chest. The hair along Grimm’s spine rose into a razor-sharp ridge of black wire.
From the rotten-egg fog that choked the refinery entrance, five figures emerged into the amber gloom of the fire.