Inside the chest crevasse of the Melted rock-Vein Behemoth, the physical environment challenged every standard principle of living surgery. The ledge of glass-fused dark rock beneath Arthur Vance’s boots shook with bone-shaking, high-hum shuddering. Every heartbeat of the titan felt like standing beside the piston of a locomotive engine scaled to world-size proportions.
The heat streaming from the exposed heart-sac was intense enough to ignite dry timber at twenty paces. Through the see-through amber visor of his magnifying glass, Arthur watched the rhythmic surging of the Behemoth’s molten blood-flow fluid. Five-point-two gigapascals of deep water pressure were churning behind forty-two inches of stringy metamorphic muscle tissue.
One wrong cut, one miscalculated fracture along the around the heart seam. That huge internal pressure would release in an explosive blowout of liquid iron that would instantly burn up Arthur and destroy the surrounding cave. In razor-sharp terms, this was the ultimate high-pressure trauma triage: a splitting headache the size of a submarine, pulsating with liquid fire under world-size squeezing.
“Pip, tight outer edge overhead,” Arthur murmured, keeping his vocal chords calm and steady. “Keep the surrounding rising heat currents stopped. I can’t have heat updrafts deflecting the cryo-hollow tube needle.”
Above him, the Three-Legged Golden Crow hovered within the narrow confines of the chest crevasse. Pip spread his wings wide, his golden main feathers glowing with soft, controlled warmth. His nine micro-fusion solar satellites arranged themselves in a static six-sided canopy directly above Arthur. That created a steadied heat pocket that locked…
