The metamorphosis of the White Tiger was a spectacle of cold, terrifying exact perfection.
Vesper hovered three meters above the arena floor, suspended inside a cocoon of blinding white-gold light. The silver energy didn’t radiate outward like heat. It folded space around her. It bent the light from the sky stars into sharp, sharp-angled planes that looked like a huge, spinning diamond.
Within the light, her physical anatomy remodeled with lightning speed.
Her body lengthened, expanding from the size of a lean mountain cougar into a majestic, four-meter-long apex hunting beast weighing over half a ton. Her shoulder height rose to nearly two meters, broad and heavily muscled, her forelimbs thick with dense, carbon-dense bone plates that could withstand the recoil of a naval siege cannon.
Her coat transmuted. The patchy, trap-scarred fur of her slum-runt youth vanished entirely, replaced by a dense, velvet pelt of purest snow-white-gold that gleamed with cold lunar luster. Across her back and flanks, pitch-black stripes emerged. Not pigmentation, but permanent two-space-folding spatial fissures that absorbed all surrounding magnetic heat wave.
From her upper maxillary bones, twin saber-canines erupted with the sound of drawn steel. They curved downward thirty-five inches, carved from flawless white Gengjin crystal, their edges humming with razor-thin crushing force.
