The air inside the chest fissure of the Melted rock-Vein Behemoth ignited with screeching living fury. The Abyssal Heart-Leech unfurled its segmented body from the heart-artery arch. Then, twelve barbed tentacles whipped through the white-hot air like scythes of blackened bone. Each tentacle was thick as a tree trunk, dripping with acid-burning purple slime that hissed and pitted the dark rock ledge beneath Arthur Vance’s boots.
The high-pitched shriek emitted by the parasite shattered the crystal-clear veins in the surrounding rib armor scales. It sent sharp shards of quartz raining down into the around the heart crevasse. The sound struck Arthur’s hearing implants with the force of a physical hammer, threatening to rupture his ears. The beast was not merely defending its meal. It was an apex void entity that had fed on the living mantle of the earth for hundreds of years, possessing a brutal, hungry cunning. Its segmented body rippled with clusters of blind, heat-sensitive pit organs. It locked onto the cold, foreign signed name of Arthur’s razor-sharp equipment. Arthur stood on the shaking ledge forty-eight meters in the air. He felt the subtle shift in map point shape beneath his boots. The glass-fused stone was slick with condensed stone bile, threatening to send him tumbling into the boiling magma currents below. But from the spatial fold beside him, Vesper flashed into position. The silver lynx planted her velvet paws against the dark rock, channeling a thin membrane of spatial friction that anchored Arthur’s boot treads directly into…
