The pillar of light didn’t bring fire. It brought silence.
As eight point four gigajoules of stored sky energy vented upward into the upper air, the roaring mountain wind died instantly. The dry thunderclouds, spanning forty leagues across the central continent, were torn apart by the upright beam of violet starlight, their dense, spark-charged textures crumbling into vast, expanding nested rings of clear azure sky.
For the first time in five hours, the natural, golden light of the late afternoon sun broke through the heavens, lighting up the frost-covered crags of Mount Taiyi.
On the central stone base, the Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon was unraveling.
The entity didn’t bleed. It didn’t collapse into a heap of cut metal limbs. With its anchor crystal split along its main sight axis, the deepest map point binding that held its physical avatar together had dissolved.
Starting from the chest cavity where Tie Shan’s iron wedge remained embedded, a network of bright silver hairline fractures spread outward across the mirror-polished silver armor.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
Tiny sharp-angled flakes of silver starlight began to detach from the daemon’s armor, drifting upward into the golden sunshine like rainbow-bright autumn leaves. The eight-foot hard-light blade was the first to dissolve. That turned into a cloud of glowing purple motes that vanished on the alpine breeze.
