Iron-Skull Ba Tu ignited his old family bloodline. Then, the frozen ground within ten paces hissed.
The offering wolf-totem ritual, inherited from the ancient shamanic tribes of the Northern Sunder Mountains, was a permanent living waste. By forcing the adrenal glands to flood the cardiovascular system with packed phenylethylamine and raw hunting beast marrow fats, the body burned through six months of cellular longevity in sixty seconds.
Ba Tu’s bronze-black skin turned an oily, shiny black glass.
The superficial veins along his neck and forearms swelled to the thickness of iron rope, bulging against the skin like twisted together roots. His stone-hardened skull shelf—already four inches of dense, horn-heavy bone—thickened further, the bone stitches fusing into a massive stone, seamless dome that removed all skull stretch.
His pupils disappeared, swallowed by a solid film of boiling red white of the eye.
“Great Wolf of the North!” Ba Tu roared, his voice shaking the frost from the timber stone retaining walls like an earthquake.
He swung the sixty-jin meteorite-iron flail.
WHIRRR-SHRIIIEK!
