The remaining trace was more resistant than the Gold class venom had been at comparable accumulation levels, requiring the modified clearance protocol rather than the standard one.
He ran the full clearance, thorough and slow, every system addressed in the correct sequence, and when the clearance was complete he checked again and then checked a third time before he was satisfied.
He did not have a specific sense of how long the engagement had lasted.
Long.
He stayed crouched in the Diamond territory for a while, breathing and letting the recovery work and looking at the dead Snake and thinking about the four more he needed to find and engage with the same seriousness.
The gene material had gone into inventory automatically.
Along with it, something else had gone into inventory that he felt as an additional weight in the inventory's sense, something beyond the gene material, something that carried the particular density of an object rather than biological material.
