The fracture across the black glass sphere widened with a noise like tearing sheet metal.
Arthur Vance leaned into his stance on the jade ridge of World-serpent’s skull, shielding his face with his forearm as the heavy gravity zone began to collapse. The air pressure within ten paces of the cocoon dropped toward a total empty pocket. Loose quartz crystals and silver-steel staple clippings skittered across the serpent’s scales, drawn toward the black chrysalis like iron filings to a supermagnet.
Then, the cocoon didn’t shatter outward. It imploded.
The five-meter shell of solid dark matter collapsed into a pinprick star-core, vanishing from physical space for half a second. A empty pocket blast followed—a silent, bone-shaking pressure wave that pushed Arthur’s hair straight back and rattled the baked-clay trauma plates on his chest harness.
From the heart of the void strange flaw, Grimm stepped forward.
The Ashen Stray that Arthur had pulled from the unsafe wire cage of Ironfang Academy was gone. In his place stood an apex titan of ancient myth. Grimm stood two full meters at the withers, his musculoskeletal frame packed with dense, hyper-compacted bone and carbon-weave muscle fibers. His coat was a carpet of coarse, matte-black event-horizon bristles that drank in the light of the hollow core without reflecting a single photon. Around his heavy paws, the stone floor depressed under a resting combat mass of twelve hundred pounds.
