The silence in Factory Gamma lasted less than two minutes.
From the heavy blast bunker at the southern end of the tiered arena, a heavy air-powered airlock hissed open. Heavy iron footsteps echoed across the steel grates as Chief Geneticist Dr. Malakor stepped onto the floor. He was flanked by four Splicer Council elders clad in crimson biosafety hazmat suits.
Malakor was a rail-thin man whose gaunt face was partially obscured by a fine, detailed brass breathing rig. His left arm had been replaced by a heavy potion-made arc-rifle. Its glass chamber glowed with a swirling, unstable green isotope that hummed with destructive heat wave.
“Insolent butcher!” Malakor spat, his voice trembling with manic fury behind his breathing mask. “You dare touch the Master Array?! You think you understand biology because you patch broken farm dogs and scrape shell-rot off turtles?! What we forge here is the apex evolution of life itself!”
Behind Malakor, three heavy steel cages clattered open.
Leaping from the darkness were three monstrous beasts unlike anything Arthur had met in the upper wings. They were nine feet long from snout to tail, their sleek, muscular bodies combining the hungry agility of a shadow panther with the leathery, armored wings and serrated tail-stinger of a Saber Wyvern. Their scales were glass black, their fangs dripping with a clear, neurotoxic venom that sizzled as it dripped onto the floor plates.
