The sound of the parasite retracting its main trunk was the sound of a deep-sea drilled shaft drill grinding into solid bedrock.
Freed from its thirty-two blood-vessel moorings, the forty-meter pillar of black, hard-shelled muscle didn’t wither. Instead, its surface hardened into overlapping plates of segmented, black glass-like armor. Tiny drills of high-pressure void acid sprayed from its lower outer rim, liquefying the margins of World-serpent’s skull bone plate at thirty inches per second.
Through the magnifying glass over his left eye, Arthur watched the horror unfold in high-resolution wireframe tracking data.
The black trunk was barely six feet away from the serpent’s skull foramen. If those acid-tipped burrowing spines breached the dura mater and touched the ancient main spine nerve, the shock would induce instant, fatal encephalic shock. World-serpent would die before the parasite could even be peeled from the wound. The core balance of the entire planet would collapse with it.
“Cell Alpha, execute clamp protocol!” Arthur roared, throwing himself forward across the shaking dark rock plate. “Grimm, pin the trunk! Don’t let it reach the lower brain!”
Grimm didn’t need the command repeated.
The stray hound from the Ironfang kennels—the scrapper who had survived rat-bites, slum frost, and academy cullings—exploded into motion with the raw, instinctual fury of an ancient apex hunting beast.
