The sixty-second body overdrive window opened with an electric crack that echoed within Arthur Vance’s skull.
Second 01.
Arthur’s senses of physical reality swelled into multi-spectral test clarity. The boiling hot 210-degree heat of the cathedral nave, the hiss of boiling high-pressure fluid, and the blinding violet strobe of the cold-fusion reactor slowed into a frozen tableau. His neuromuscular latency dropped to 0.08 split seconds. Faster than the synaptic signal speed of any living organism on Earth.
Beside him, Vesper’s white-gold frame coiled. Her razor-thin claws extended six inches from her paw pads. It glowed with the terrifying map point shear of true Disaster-Apex Gengjin slaughter law.
Second 08.
Arthur launched himself from the shattered flat stone slabs. With body leg strength three times denser than baseline human capacity, he cleared twenty meters in a single upright bound. It caught the protruding dark rock spine of Titus’s raised castle wall. Arthur used the tortoise’s stone shell as a spring-board. He propelled himself forty meters straight up toward the ceiling overhead frame.
At the same time, Vesper blurred through folded map points of space. She didn’t jump. She stepped across spatial nodes, appearing at Arthur’s right flank in a streak of silver afterimages that traced a flawless helix up through the vaulted nave.
