The eye warning in Arthur Vance’s left eye pulsed with violent crimson light: SYNAPTIC Bleeding DETECTED. NEURAL BRIDGE CRITICAL. FORCED UNCOUPLING IN 00:00:41.
Hot, iron-scented blood trickled down his philtrum. It pooled at the seam of his lips before dripping onto the black glass breastplate of his tactical harness. The sense recoil from maintaining a ninety percent neural exact timing across five Disaster-grade nervous systems felt like five rusted spikes driven through his temples at the same time. Every time Grimm bent his mass or Titus braced against earth-shaking shear, the blast waves rattled Arthur’s neck spine.
“Arthur!” Toby Mallow’s voice crackled through the short-range radio collar, choked by static and underground quartz interference. “The bio-monitor says your skull pressure is past two hundred! Lie down! You’re going to blow a brain vessel!”
“Shut up, Toby,” Arthur muttered. His speech was slurred by numbness in his tongue, but his fingers didn’t shake.
He reached down to his right thigh holster. He pulled an air-powered auto-injector filled with packed neuro-coagulant. Then he slammed the steel needle straight through the heavy high-speed weave into his thigh muscle. The cold chemical fire rushed through his veins. That forced his uneven heart rate down from one hundred and eighty beats per minute to a brittle, controlled eighty. The crimson countdown on his optic lens flickered, steadied, and reset to a fragile yellow amber: NEURAL OVERLOAD SUPPRESSED. STABILIZATION: 18 MINUTES.
