The total severance of the four wired umbilicals didn’t instantly fell Grand Flesh-Architect Osric Malveaux. It drove him into the cornered, homicidal frenzy of a dying giant beast.
Deprived of freezing liquid coolant, his internal core heat spiked past three hundred and fifty degrees. The Asura Drake heart inside his brass chest cage pounded with uneven, bone-shaking spasms, pumping boiling, dark aether through his blood-vessel network. From his cut spinal channels, thick black smoke and burning transformer oil poured across the altar, smelling of burned up man-made myelin and boiling formalins.
The sky empty pocket inside the Inner Genesis Cathedral was choking. As Osric’s twelfth organ—the Void-Devourer Singularity Core—ignited within his lower-back spine, the surrounding air pressure dropped from four sea-weights down to zero in less than a second. The air-pressure collapse tore at Arthur’s ears. But his restructured body physiology responded with instant cellular defense. His eustachian tubes sealed with dense, stringy tissue. At the same time, his carbon-dark rock marrow absorbed the crushing downward shear without allowing his ribs to compress.
Around the altar dais, the fifty-meter void rift began pulling the very fabric of physical matter toward its event horizon. Heavy silver-steel overhead frame columns, snapped in earlier skirmishes, were dragged across the flat stone slabs like toothpicks, their metal warping and groaning as the gravity slope stretched them into elongated filaments before crumbling them into grey sub-core dust.
