A battlefield on the skull of a living world-serpent obeyed none of the conventional rules of siege warfare.
Underneath Arthur Vance’s combat boots, the jade-black bone of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent was neither level nor inert. It pulsed with a sluggish, four-second diastole, flexing along tiny growth rings that ran from the snout to the back-skull crest. The void parasite, rooted twenty feet into the sagittal fissure, took advantage of every flex. The serpent’s skull swelled with brain pressure. Each time, the parasite’s underground anchor tendrils drove deeper, prying the two halves of the skull apart like wedges driven into green timber.
“We can’t use high-yield ordnance,” Arthur said into his throat microphone, his eyes flicking across the terrain through the Zeiss magnifying glass. “If we shatter the sagittal ridge, the serpent’s meninges will rupture. This isn’t an artillery duel. It’s an excision on a patient fifty thousand times our body mass.”
At his side, Titus remained planted like a massive foundation stone. The terrapin’s four clawed feet had bored three inches into the non-living horn-protein layer of the surrounding scales. It anchored forty-five metric tons of unmoving mass. From that stable platform, Arthur kept the three-way tactical bridge.
His neural nexus hummed behind his brow, dividing his sense feed into three distinct working sectors.
