The Contemptor Dreadnought froze within the space created by the grenade's explosion. The continuity of space and time had been ruptured by the detonation.
But time itself was a concept created to facilitate the development and measurement of civilization.
A living creature's lifespan depended on the decline and death of its cellular functions, while the collapse and decay of matter depended on the constant movement of molecules and atoms on a microscopic level.
When that movement and decay were greatly slowed, the amount of time an object possessed was, relatively speaking, greatly extended.
A liquid that would originally evaporate within a second, once the movement of its molecules and atoms was restricted, would take ten seconds or even longer to vanish.
That was precisely the effect created by this grenade. It did not create additional time out of nothing, nor did it erase time out of nothing.
Instead, through a complex and subtle technology, it drastically slowed the rate at which everything around the Contemptor Dreadnought moved. The electrical signals entering the arc reactor slowed so greatly that even mortal eyes could follow the movement of the flashing currents.
The reactor's dissolution and collapse also slowed, delaying the moment of explosion by several minutes.
Perturabo approached from the far end of the passageway, swinging his arms. In that urgent moment, he had been the one to throw the Time-Slow Grenade.
Lin Fan, meanwhile, carried a huge, heavy iron coffin on his back. The coffin had been fashioned in the shape of a human, resembling the iron maiden torture device used in the Middle Ages.
But Perturabo had made its appearance somewhat peculiar. No matter how Lin Fan looked at it, the nose and eyes resembled Rogal Dorn's wooden face.
Perturabo's Terminator armor caused a stir among the Carcharodons. They had