The main elevator shaft of Sector 2 was a huge upright channel dropping through eight hundred meters of solid Atlantic dark rock. The heavy steel cage, suspended by six heavy silver-steel cables, dropped smoothly into the total darkness of the lower crust. The air grew steadily warmer as they sank deeper, heated by the earth-heat fires of the underlying mantle faults.
Inside the car, the only light came from the amber glow of Arthur Vance’s wrist end-post and the faint violet soft glow streaming from Echo’s outer gills. The walls of the rock shaft flashed past the mesh gates in a blur of wet, polished dark rock, dripping with stone-rich seep water.
Arthur stood by the front mesh gate, his eyes closed, his mind linked with the five distinct consciousnesses of his companions through the Five-Pillar Soul-Sync Network. In his mental field, the five beasts appeared not as physical hunting beasts. But as brilliant, interconnected star-patterns: Grimm as an unmoving black glass gravity well. Pip as a blazing bright solar flare. Titus as an unbending land-wide bedrock. Vesper as a razor-sharp silver blade. And Echo as a boundless ocean of clear, calm water.
The exact timing was smooth, running at sixty-five percent neural bandwidth with negligible brain pressure. Arthur felt no headache, no eye photophobia. His months of physical conditioning and trauma surgery under active fire had forged his mind into a hardened razor knife, capable of orchestrating five divine lineages without mental strain.
