The tactical window opened from the most unexpected quarter.
Inside Arthur’s chest harness, Echo woke up.
The axolotl had not been knocked unconscious by his void swallow. He had simply been processing thirty-eight tons of tightly packed moving pressure. The digestion of that vast amount of aether had acted as an explosive bio-potion-made spark, igniting the dormant Qinglong-Kunpeng Temporal Introns sleeping in his lower brain.
Echo poked his pink head out of the harness, blinking his button eyes at the roaring, nine-headed hydra spitting acid against Titus’s shell.
His small nostrils flared. He saw his squadmate Titus groaning under chemical stress. He saw Grimm pinned behind the barrier. He saw Arthur’s hands preparing emergency razor-sharp trocars.
Echo let out a sound that was unlike anything he had ever produced before.
It wasn’t a soft, wet bloop.
It was a deep, ringing, bell-like chime that carried the ancient, ancient power of the Spatiotemporal Sovereign.
