The beam arrived before the sound of its birth.
It wasn’t a blast of heat, nor was it a wave of striking force. It was a spear of pure conceptual nullification, composed of linked lines of black, proprietary script that dissolved the light around its outer edge into a pitch-black empty pocket hall.
Where the beam passed, the air didn’t burn. The air molecules simply ceased to be registered in the sect’s local database.
Meng Shan started to lunge forward with his heavy iron shield, his face twisted in desperate resolve.
“Shan! DON’T!” Lin Ke’s broken voice rasped with terrifying urgency. “It doesn’t collide! It deletes!”
If the shield touched that light, the iron, the enchantments. The two hundred pounds of muscle holding it would be uninstalled from reality in half a heartbeat.
*
Lin Ke had thirty split seconds.
