The intense physical and neural hard effort of the deep-sea descent, combined with four hours of nonstop high-bandwidth exact timing with five Disaster-grade divine companions, had pushed Arthur Vance’s human physiology to the total edge of living limit. Yet he climbed down from the overhead frame of Carousel Seven. Then, he felt no tiredness. Instead, a strange, electric warmth was spreading outward from the center of his chest, streaming through his blood-vessel tree like liquid sunlight.
He stopped beside Titus’s massive leg, his hand resting upon the tortoise’s frozen dark rock armor scales. Suddenly, his vision flared with brilliant golden light.
His heart gave a single, huge thud that rang through his ribs like the toll of a cathedral bell. A wave of deep cellular heat rushed up his main neck blood vessels, flooding his lower brain with pure, packed ancient aether. His test type-list monocle spun wildly, its gears clicking at triple speed as it registered a never seen before internal living event within Arthur’s own body:
“Arthur?” Valerie’s voice sounded distant, muffled as if traveling through fifty feet of water. She stepped forward, reaching out a hand toward his shoulder. “Arthur, what’s happening to your skin?”
Arthur looked down at his bare hands. Beneath the pale skin of his forearms, his veins were glowing with a clear rainbow-bright soft glow—a harmonious blend of Grimm’s black glass gravity, Pip’s golden solar fire, Titus’s deep dark rock deep ring, Vesper’s silver slaughter light, and Echo’s azure spatial fluidity.
