The construct came off the frame at a speed nothing that size has any business reaching. It crossed eleven metres of arena floor in the time Vell took to close his hand around the rail, which was the last unhurried movement anybody made for six minutes.
Analyze opened, ran, and failed to keep pace with what it was reading. Six trait sets cycled through the body on an interval short enough that the panel wrote each one after the construct had already stopped using it.
[Trait cycle: dermal plate.]
[Trait cycle: burrow limb.]
[Analysis rate: insufficient.]
Vell read the third line rather than the first two, because the first two were history by the time they appeared. He had never fought a thing the Forge could not describe, and he discovered that the panel becomes a liability the moment it falls behind.
"Do not read it," Yenna called from the north post, "tell us what it costs the thing, since that is the part that does not change."
