When five hundred thousand kilowatts of timed together alternating spark current discharges across a three-mile sky air gap, the air ceases to be an insulator.
The intense electric field slope strips electrons from cold air and oxygen molecules, transforming thirty million cubic feet of surrounding air into a roaring channel of white-hot, current-carrying star-fire.
The air doesn’t merely conduct the charge.
It explodes.
The blinding column of pure cyan lightning erupted from Haven-Hold’s eight Citadel spires, converging in the low overcast clouds into a single, roaring spear of sky energy ten feet in width.
With the bone-shaking, ear-splitting crack of nonstop thunder, the star-fire arc bridged the three-mile distance across the eastern valley. It struck the raised receiving antenna of High Director Harrowgate’s Void-Breaker Core with pinpoint, exact accuracy.
Inside the command barge, High Director Lucian Harrowgate threw his hands over his face. The world turned into blinding, blazing bright white fury.
The Void-Breaker Core, designed to pull surrounding aether from the earth’s fault lines through chaotic capacitive suction, was fully unprepared for five hundred megawatts of timed together sixty-cycle alternating current.
