The massive fiery tiered arena echoed with the clockwork shriek of grinding bone and stressed metal.
He stood beneath the heavy shelter of Titus’s dark rock shell. Arthur Vance operated not as a gladiator seeking an honorable duel, but as a chief trauma surgeon orchestrating a high-risk body cutting out under active fire. His ARC-7 Mag-Carbine rested firmly against his shoulder plate, its heavy metal dart rounds chambered in battery. At the same time, his wrist-mounted tactical slate streamed live body tracking data from the monster’s thrashing bulk.
Beside him, Toby Mallow’s voice crackled through the radio earpiece from the forward command station at Factory Gamma. “Arthur, we have locked onto the creature’s internal blood-vessel deep ring! The dorsal cordyceps feed is pulsing at twelve liters per minute under six sea-weights of deep water pressure. If that shunt remains intact for another two minutes, the immunosuppressive saturation will fully override the host rejection reflexes, locking those ape limbs in permanent tetanus!”
“Understood, Toby,” Arthur replied. His voice dropped into the icy, hypnotic calm of a surgeon entering deep operative focus. “Maintaining baseline vitals. Stitch line map points checked on sight channel three.”
Arthur tapped the side of his helmet, routing the target tracking data directly into the squad’s shared mental bond. “Phase one engaged. Vesper, target the dorsal immunosuppression shunt between upper-back bones three and four. Sever the cordyceps feed.”
