In standard human senses, thirty seconds was the time it took to tie a pair of bootlaces or pour a cup of water from a field canteen.
In Level 5 Pentagonal Convergence Overdrive, thirty seconds was an expansive, painful epoch.
Across Arthur Vance’s blood-misted eye, the red digital counter clicked down from sixty with clean, steady care:
[00:58.4]
[00:57.1]
Inside Arthur’s skull, synaptic firing was no longer bound by the slow chemical diffusion of neurotransmitters across living synapses. Through the C7-T1 soul channel, the ancient nervous systems of five divine beasts were running as a single, distributed bio-supercomputer. Nerve heat flow speed, normally capped at one hundred meters per second in a human arm, had sped up into relativistic territory.
The surrounding physical world ground to a near-complete crawl.
Every plume of sulfur smoke rising from the World-serpent’s fractured skull plates froze in mid-air, its swirling vortices solidifying into fine, detailed, static glass sculptures. A single droplet of sweat, dislodged from Arthur’s soot-streaked brow, hung suspended between his eyelashes, refracting the brilliant amber light of the crystal ceiling like a tiny prism. The sound of Titus’s heartbeat didn’t thump in his ears. It rolled through the marrow of his shins once every five subjective seconds, a deep, earth-shaking bass note that rang with the hum of world-size bedrock.
