The countdown timer in Arthur Vance’s bleeding eyes plunged into the final twenty seconds.
20.00... 19.12... 18.04...
The air in front of the Chimeric Hydra-Drake’s nine merged jaws collapsed into a howling gravity star-core. The ten-foot sphere of packed void fire and rotting decay blew up forward, a world-ending lance of total non-existence tearing across the sixty meters of churned mud directly toward the breach.
The sheer destructive empty pocket of the beam ripped twenty-ton slabs of concrete from the courtyard deck, crumbling them into tiny dust before they even touched the beam’s core. The air pressure dropped so fast that the moisture in the air flash-froze into needle-sharp ice crystals that slashed across the barricades.
Behind the backup sandbags, commoner soldiers threw their arms over their faces. They wept as the blinding purple-black glare burned up the courtyard.
Arthur didn’t move. He couldn’t. His boots were rooted to the center of the glowing sharp-angled pentagram, his human body acting as the living grounding wire for five divine old family currents.
“Echo,” Arthur whispered, the blood from his lips dripping onto the front of his coat. “Inversion.”
Inside his glass full-body VR cradle atop Titus’s dark rock shell, the tiny, semi-clear pink axolotl kicked his pale hind feet.
