The reciprocal surge didn’t knock Arthur Vance unconscious. A trauma surgeon who lost mind during a body crisis was a dead man. Arthur had trained his mind through hundreds of emergency resuscitations to remain stubbornly, ruthlessly awake.
Instead, his vision went pure white.
He fell to his hands and knees upon the emerald scale, the breath whistling out between his clenched teeth. Every sense channel in his nervous system seemed to detonate at the same time. In conventional beast taming, the psychic contract was a leech-like leash designed to drain tube raw elemental force from the beast to feed the master’s core. But Arthur’s [Neural Synapse Bridge] was built upon deep living empathy, body posture, and total mutual trust.
All five companions crossed the eighty percent threshold into Proto-Mythic Divine status at the exact same instant. Then, the sheer volume of body-energy life-force rushing back through the channel was equivalent to connecting a domestic household circuit directly into the generator turbines of a hydroelectric dam.
Ting.
The sound was not sound. It rang inside his skull like a struck crystal goblet.
Across Arthur’s eye nerve, the living type-list slate didn’t wait for his command. It deployed automatically, flashing with rapid, cascading data columns that chronicled the forced cellular reconstruction of his human body:
