The explosion above was not a sound boom. It was the terrifying, crystal-clear fracture of seventy-five tons of triple-heavy geodesic quartz shattering at the same time.
Sixty feet overhead, the grand ceiling of the plenary hall gave way in a total shower of diamond-sharp shards. The morning sky vanished, wiped out by a swirling vortex of toxic, living-glow violet fog that poured through the yawning sky-slit like liquid ink dumped into clear water.
And dropping through the falling glass came the hunters.
Twenty-four winged monstrosities—horrific chimeras spliced from hungry deep-sea wyverns and mutated fungal mantises—screeched with the sound of rusted circular saws biting into bone. Their bodies were eight meters long, clad in hard-shelled purple back shells covered in pulsing, spore-bearing nodules. Instead of feathers, their leathery bat-wings were woven from stringy fungal hyphae that dripped acid-burning neuro-fungal acid onto the tiered desks below.
Before the first glass shard struck the floor, the emergency spark relays across the seventieth floor shorted out with a cascading series of spark pops.
The chandeliers went black. The light-projected projectors died. The plenary hall was plunged into sudden, choking darkness, lit up only by the sickly purple glow of the falling spore cloud and the crimson targeting reticles of confused security forces.
