The silence in the Cloud-Mist Colosseum stretched until it felt as brittle as sun-baked glass.
Across the four side terraces, fifty thousand fighters watched with bated breath. Frank stepped directly into the kill zone of the fallen apex beast.
He didn’t wear consecrated dragon-scale battle armor.
He wore a faded cotton flannel shirt, indigo denim work jeans stiff with dried mortar. A worn leather tool belt slung low across his hips.
In his right hand, gleamed ten inches of plain, non-magnetic stainless steel.
In his left, rested a small, two-ounce glass bottle of pale stone lubricating oil, its rubber dropper cap pinched lightly between his calloused fingers.
“Senior Master! Beware!” Chief Elder Wu’s wild cry cut through the stillness like a jagged blade.
The elder dragged his blood-streaked robes across the shattered stone of the retaining wall, his hands clawing at the air in pure agony.
“That creature’s skull blood carries ancient dragon venom!” Wu shouted, his voice cracking from spiritual tiredness. “The moment you breach its hearing seal, the acidic foul fog within its inner ear will dissolve mortal steel like sugar in boiling water! It will wake up the demonic frenzy!”
Hall Master Han clutched his bruised ribs, struggling to his feet behind Wu.
“He speaks the total truth, Senior!” Han wailed. “The skull canal of a Rank-2 Peak Draconic entity is a fire of violent solar Qi! Even a 3-Star Spiritual Potion-maker needs a black glass needle hardened in ice-slow spring water to probe that cavity! A mortal implement will trigger an explosive backlash!”
Frank didn’t even glance over his shoulder.
“If you guys spent half as much time cleaning your kennels as you do shouting warnings from the bleachers,” Frank muttered, “this dog wouldn’t have an ear infection the size of a walnut.”
Frank turned back to the huge emerald head resting flat against the arena bedrock.
Up close, the smell of the beast was overwhelming.
It wasn’t the divine fragrance of incense or the metal tang of pure astral energy that the training manuals liked to poetically describe.
It smelled like an unwashed mastiff that had rolled in wet sulfur, mixed with stale animal fat and rotten hay.
Frank popped the rubber stopper of the glass bottle with his thumb.
The dragon-hound’s massive left ear—a thick, serrated flap of leathery jade scales bordered by a ridge of ivory bone—twitched slightly as the bottle opened.
Beneath the scales, in the deep time fissure where the ear canal burrowed into the time bone, a dark purple swelling pulsed with an angry, feverish heat.
Every time the knot pulsed, the dragon’s whiskers quivered with suppressed agony.
“Relax, buddy,” Frank said in the steady, low deep he used on stray site dogs back in Illinois. “You’ve got a squatter in your intake pipe hub. We’re gonna evict him right now.”
Frank rested his left forearm against the beast’s massive brow ridge. He held the ear flap open with two fingers.
He tilted the glass dropper over the inflamed opening.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Three clear, heavy drops of low-thickness stone lubricating oil fell directly into the dark recess of the hearing canal.
The dragon-hound stiffened instantly.
A low, reflex growl rumbled deep in its chest, shaking the flat stone slabs beneath Frank’s boots.
“Steady,” Frank ordered, tapping the beast’s leathery nose with the flat of his palm. “Don’t shake your head. Let it seep down into the spiracles. If you have an insect burrowing into tissue, pouring water just makes it dig deeper. You have to cut off its oxygen supply. Basic physics.”
High above in the eastern gallery, Princess Jiang Ling’er leaned over the carved stone railing, her dark eyes flashing with sharp understanding.
“Suffocation through fluid water’s skin,” Ling’er murmured, her brush flying across the pages of her parchment ledger. “Stone oil forms an impermeable boundary layer over the parasite’s hard-shelled breathing spiracles. Deprived of sky Qi, the pest is forced to release its jaw anchors to seek surrounding air.”
Beside her, Shen Shitou rested his forged sledgehammer against his shoulder, nodding with solemn certainty.
“Master always said: when an auger gets jammed by a tree root, you don’t pull until the chain breaks,” Shitou said to the gaping students around them. “You pour kerosene into the bore-hole until the root rots loose. Master is starving the parasite.”
Niu Mang grinned, chewing the last sweet potato skin. “Old Uncle Liu used to do that to sheep when maggots got into their horns. Three drops of pig lard and five seconds of waiting. Works every time.”
The surrounding inner students stared at Niu Mang, straining to parse his pig-lard wisdom like a foreign dialect of high daoist liturgy.
“To treat an ancient draconic parasite like a sheep maggot...” an elder whimpered. “Such impossible to understand Daoist equanimity!”
Down in the pit, Frank counted quietly in his head.
“Seven... Eight... Nine... Ten.”
Frank reached into the darkened crevice with the ten-inch stainless steel tweezers.
The long, polished arms slipped smoothly past the scaled folds of the outer canal, guided by the glowing aiming cross in his outer vision.
Frank’s thumb and forefinger squeezed the serrated grip of the tweezers.
Deep inside the dark canal, the care tips closed with a soft, metal click.
Gotcha.
The parasite, choking in the dense coat of stone oil, had loosened its barbed rear legs from the bone-skin membrane.
Its main mouthparts, however, were still hooked stubbornly into the beast’s main skull nerve bundle.
If an amateur simply yanked backward, the barbed jaws would tear the nerve sheath. It sent the dragon into a burst of blinding agony that would turn its brain into mush.
Frank didn’t yank.
He applied an exact, tuned turning force of one point four Newton-meters. That turned the tweezers fifteen degrees clockwise.
It was the exact technique used to back a snapped drywall screw out of a metal stud without stripping the pilot hole.
Snick.
The barbed hooks disengaged cleanly from the joint padding.
With a smooth, nonstop upward pull, Frank drew the tweezers out of the dragon’s ear canal.
A collective gasp ripped through the fifty thousand spectators like a gale-force wind.
Clamped tightly between the stainless steel jaws of the tweezers was a writhing, squirming nightmare.
It was an arthropod the size of a man’s thumb, covered in segmented, rainbow-bright purple hard shell that glistened with sickly violet venom.
Eight jointed, barbed legs flailed uselessly against the empty air.
At the front of its hideous, bulbous head, two black glass jaws curved like tiny scythes. It snapped wildly with high-pitched, metal clicks that made the teeth of nearby fighters ache with phantom pain.
Chief Elder Wu’s knees gave out fully, sending him crashing onto the broken stone.
“The... The Nether-Void Soul-Biting Parasite!” Wu shrieked, his voice climbing to a frantic pitch. “By the Ancestral Gods of the North! That’s the lost demonic pest of the Asura Realm!”
“It consumes spiritual awareness from within the lower brain!” Hall Master Han choked, clutching his throat in total horror. “In the history of our Beast Guild, nineteen 2-Star War-Beasts have gone berserk and perished from this exact affliction! It needs twelve Grandmaster Doctors, three cooking pots of Soul-Purifying Salve, and forty-nine days of nonstop spirit vein cleansing to dislodge even a larval nymph!”
“He... He drew it out with two strips of common iron in five seconds?!” Grand Elder Yan cried from the royal platform, his eyes bulging so severely the blood vessels were clearly visible. “Without an altar! Without a single drop of cleansing elixir! Without even invoking the sacred beast-taming seals!”
The entire colosseum erupted into a chaotic storm of confused whispers, scared gasps, and wild prayers.
Frank lifted the tweezers to eye level, squinting at the squirming purple monster with pure disgust.
“Ugly little bastard,” Frank muttered. “Six months of living rent-free in a dog’s ear and chewing on nerve endings. Fully out of code.”
He lowered his hand toward the crushed granite floor.
With a casual flick of his wrist, Frank shook the writhing parasite off the tweezers onto the flat stone slab.
Splat.
The parasite hissed, its black glass jaws flaring as it prepared to burrow into the rock to escape.
Before it could move a single tiny fraction of an inch, the thick, heavy sole of Frank’s steel-toed work boot dropped from above.
CRUNCH.
Frank ground his heel against the stone in a deliberate, half-twist motion, the kind used to put out a lit cigarette butt on a poured concrete sidewalk.
A foul-smelling puff of dark purple smoke and black ooze hissed out from beneath the rubber tread. It dissolved harmlessly into the hot dust.
Frank lifted his boot, inspected the sole with mild annoyance. Then he wiped it against a clean edge of the granite crater.
“Gross,” Frank grunted. “That’s gonna leave a stain.”
He wiped the tips of the stainless steel tweezers with a clean cotton rag from his pocket, stowed them neatly into his leather tool pouch. Then he capped the stone oil bottle.
Beside him, the Viridian Dragon-Hound lay fully still for three long seconds.
Then, the beast’s massive head lifted off the ground.
Its four-ton skull rose slowly. It tested the air with painful caution, bracing against the blinding screech that had drilled into its skull for half a year.
It tilted its head to the left.
Silence.
No high-hum high-pitched drilling. No burning fire gnawing at its skull plates. No screaming fever throbbing behind its eyes.
The dragon-hound blinked its massive, liquid jade pupils once, twice.
Then, from the depths of its huge, armored chest. That sound emerged no living fighter in the Bounded Cloud Prefecture had ever heard a Rank-2 Peak apex war-beast utter.
It was a reflex, high-pitched, thrilled canine whine.
Whhhhiiiiinnnnnne—!
The forty-foot dragon-hound leaped up onto all four paws with sudden, violent joy. It shook the entire stone colosseum like a dropped foundation slab.
It shook its massive head from side to side in a wild, joyful blur, its thick neck scales rattling like a thousand brass cymbals.
FLAP-FLAP!
The wind generated by its floppy ear flaps blew clouds of dust thirty feet into the air.
It let out a booming, playful WOOF! that shattered the leftover intact glass windows in the upper VIP suites.
Fifty thousand fighters watched in stunned, numbed disbelief as the terrifying monster that had nearly destroyed the royal capital turned in a tight circle, dropped its front paws flat against the earth. He raised its hindquarters into the air. Then he looked at Frank with the adoring, tail-wagging respect of a golden retriever that had just been handed a prime rib steak.