The human central nervous system was never engineered by natural selection to carry the weight of five ancient gods.
Standing on the smoking skull rim of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent, six thousand three hundred and seventy miles beneath the surface of the earth, Arthur Vance adjusted his grip on the high-pressure crossbars of the Ancient Suture Lance.
The lance was a masterwork of careful field building, assembled from scavenged military-grade silver-steel, heavy brass channels, and high-pressure high-pressure cylinders. It weighed forty-five pounds, balanced along a central recoil-dampening spar. Inside its thick, armored heat-proof glass metal tube, three liters of liquid gold swirled under three hundred and fifty bars of air-powered pressure.
This was not a simple disinfectant. It was the Primordial Reversion Neutralizer. An acid-burn solvent brewed from distilled sky marrow, native sulfur catalysts from the deep mantle vaults, and high-order proteases designed to break the peptide bonds of ancient void connective tissue. Injected into the anchoring screen between the parasite and the dragon’s skull. Then, it would dissolve the connective muscle tissue in less than five seconds. That turned stone-hard root-hard shell into soft, melted gel.
Beneath Arthur’s boots, the thirty-meter crater yawned like an open body cutting-open pit.
