The False Phoenix leveled its flight five hundred meters above the vault floor, circling the suspended Solar Hearth like a vulture claiming a fresh carcass.
In the blazing bright glare of the chamber, its true, horrifying anatomy was fully revealed.
The creature was an eighty-meter monster of ancient avian biology and bio-spliced void parasites. Its body was lean and snake-like, covered in jagged plates of glass-fused charcoal that mimicked the plumage of an immortal phoenix. But between the plates, dozens of pale, stringy void tentacles writhed and pulsed with sickening violet soft glow.
Its head was an ugly caricature of a bird of prey. A curved, serrated beak of blackened silver-steel flanked by four pairs of dead, milky-white eyes that lacked pupils entirely. Rising from its crown were three elongated crest feathers formed from twisted bone needles, venting plumes of high-pressure black sulfur gas.
“Look at the wing roots,” Arthur said, his magnifying glass stripping away the creature’s outer plumage to expose the under-skin musculature. “The chimeric grafts are held together by artificial man-made stitches—the trademark methodology of Father Genesis. It’s an artificial parasite, created to drain tube the Jinwu first-born node and convert solar fire into dark matter.”
The False Phoenix banked hard, turning its milky white gaze downward toward the squad.
