The dorsal shell of the Archaic Void Leecher was twelve inches of tightly packed hard shell-stone-glass lattice, weathered by ten million years of deep-mantle earth-shaking friction into something harder than forged heavy dark metal.
Through the rotating quartz prisms of his Zeiss magnifying glass, Arthur Vance could see the six-sided crystal-clear grain of the armor plates. Standard armor-piercing moving rounds from his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine would simply flatten against that surface like lead pellets fired into an anvil. Even high-explosive ordnance would scatter its energy outward into the hollow cave, doing nothing more than rattling the delicate skull stitches of the World-serpent resting beneath.
“Brute force won’t shatter a lattice like that,” Arthur said. He tracked the beast’s breathing rate through his tactical link. He adjusted the knurled focus ring on his monocle, zooming in on the micro-fractures running along the parasite’s sagittal ridge. “You can’t pound diamond with iron. You must induce a phase collapse. Grimm, take the center point. Compress its lattice.”
Beside Arthur, Titus shifted his weight, grinding his front right claws into a natural depression in the serpent’s skull. The movement was small. But it provided a solid, shaking-free platform for Arthur to brace his rifle. The old terrapin let out a low, gravelly rumble from deep within his chest, steadying Arthur’s pulse through their shared bond.
