Second 01.
The sixty-second body overdrive window opened with the sharp, crystal-clear snap of breaking glass inside Arthur Vance’s mind.
The physical world slowed to a crawl. The blinding violet strobe from Osric Malveaux’s chest, the hissing plumes of boiled away cold air coolant. The falling fragments of dark rock dust froze into a suspended tableau of static specks. Arthur’s neuromuscular signal latency plummeted to 0.08 split seconds. His synaptic clock speed sped up fifty-fold, transforming the chaotic battlefield into an exactly mapped grid of vectors, pressure nodes, and chemical reaction thresholds.
Every living enhancement Arthur had cultivated across twelve hard arcs timed together into perfect body harmony: Titus’s dense carbon-dark rock bone thickness, Grimm’s moving shock absorption, Pip’s True Yang blood-vessel heat, Vesper’s zero-drag map point balance, and Echo’s spatiotemporal fluid dynamics. Within his chest cavity, his augmented lungs drew in the high-pressure sky aether of Zone 4, filtering out the acrid smoke and delivering pure, hyper-oxygenated fuel to his brain cortex. His blood-flow channels flared with a steady, rhythmic pulse, fully immune to the body-energy fatigue that had plagued his earlier trials.
Second 08.
Osric Malveaux realized Arthur was moving. With his neck nerve knot cut by Vesper’s razor-thin claws, the Patriarch couldn’t map point his limbs. But his wired cold-fusion reactor was hardwired directly to his dying lower brain.
