The cutting of living tissue on a world-size scale was an exercise in pure shape.
Inside the shimmering, ten-meter sphere of Echo’s Temporal Dilation Stasis Bubble, time moved at one-twentieth of its normal speed. Sound waves stretched into deep, sub-heard moans. The violet vapors boiling off the rotting cyst hung in the air like suspended ribbons of spun sugar. The violent tremors of World-serpent’s skull slowed to a barely perceptible drift.
“Tendril One, clean separation,” Arthur murmured. He kept his vocal rhythm low and measured to match the time slope.
Beside him, Vesper was a blur of silver-white grace. The lynx didn’t strike with the wild urgency of a hunting beast in combat. Her movements were deliberate, rhythmic, and devastatingly precise. Her right paw flickered in a five-stroke set, her razor-thin spatial claws slicing through the outer adventitia of the first leech-like root.
The black stringy tendril, four feet thick and tough as braided steel cables, parted with a muted whick. The cut ends recoiled wildly, spurting streams of black, foul-smelling void lymph that slowly curved through the low-gravity air.
Arthur right away stepped in with his left hand, aiming the air-powered nozzle of his dart gauntlet at the cut stump. He squeezed the backup trigger. A blast of high-pressure ice-cold coagulant gel coated the wound, freezing the parasite’s cut blood-vessel channels into brittle, inert frost before the creature could spray its rotting black bile across the serpent’s bone-skin.
