The metamorphosis of Titus was not a violent, bloody explosion of flesh like Grimm’s. It was a slow, majestic deep-rock event.
The two hundred pounds of Primordial Ambergris dissolved within Titus’s stomach fire. Then, streams of molten gold and ice-slow azure energy began to circulate through the thick blood-vessel canals of his back shell.
Arthur watched through his magnifying glass as Titus’s bone stone thickness surged past twenty-eight grams per cubic half-inch. The sixty-foot-wide shell, which had once been scarred by acid rot in the heavy-duty drain pits of City 07, began to undergo a total crystal-clear transmutation.
From the outer edge of each marginal scute, towering six-sided pillars of black-ice dark rock erupted into the air like natural deep-rock castle walls.
The pillars rose twelve feet above his back shell, their crystal-clear surfaces smooth, glossy, and cold as total zero. Along the ventral surface, his belly shell thickened into a five-foot-thick solid plate of linked iron-hard metal star-iron, capable of withstanding one hundred and twenty thousand pounds of pressure of crushing pressure without deflecting a single tiny fraction of an inch.
His physical mass swelled from forty-five metric tons to sixty-five metric tons:
Titus opened his eyes.
His heavy reptilian pupils, once a cloudy moss-green, were now twin rings of deep earth-shaking gold surrounding pools of ice-slow azure starlight. He gave a slow, heavy, slow exhale from his nostrils, venting two massive jets of sub-zero steam that coated the ash-covered floor in a thick layer of blue rime.
