This is?—
The light comes first.
She opens her mouth to scream a warning, but the light detonates. It doesn’t explode the way she expects. Iterases.
For a single, blinding instant, the world turns white—so bright it feels like it has weight, like it presses into her skull and behind her eyes, forcing everything else out.
Then the sound hits.
It is not merely a crack or the simplicity of a boom.It is rupture.
It tears through the air and through her, a violent, shuddering force that collapses thought into nothing but impact.
She throws up a Nullveil on instinct, forming a protective dome around herself.
But it’s not enough.
Jax doesn’t feel herself move. One moment she is standing. Next, the ground is gone.
Something slams into her from behind, or beneath, or everywhere at once, and her body lifts, weightless and wrong, before it is hurled through space with a force that wrenches the air from her lungs.
She hits something.Hard.
Wood splinters beneath her back, the impact ripping through her spine and knocking whatever breath she had left from her chest in a silent, useless gasp.
She can’t hear.
There is a high, piercing whine in her ears, sharp enough to feel like it’s carving through her skull, drowning out everything else.
For a moment, she doesn’t know where she is. Or what just happened.
Heat rolls over her next. Not the kind that warms—the kind that devours. It licks across her skin, searing, relentless, carrying with it the scent of burning wood, burning cloth… burning flesh.
Jax drags in a breath that doesn’t come properly, her lungs stuttering against the shock of it as her vision struggles to return. The world flickers in and out, shapes half-formed, shadows where buildings used to stand.
Where the street had been… there is nothing.
No units. No Venomshades. No Runewrights. Just absence. A hollowed-out stretch of ruin where everything that had been there a heartbeat ago has been wiped clean from existence.
Her ears ring louder, the sound rising and falling in waves that make it hard to tell if anyone is screaming or if the noise lives entirely inside her own skull.
Jax tries to push herself up. Her arms shake. Her body doesn’t respond the way it should. Dust and ash rain down around her, thick in the air, choking, blinding, turning the world into something distant and unreal.
She turns her head too fast. Pain spikes behind her eyes, sharp and disorienting, and for a moment the world tilts, sliding sideways as her vision swims.
Where Calira had been, there is only fire.
Where the Runewrights had stood, there is nothing left standing.
Jax’s stomach drops.
Something cold takes root there. Something that understands, in a single, brutal instant—this was not a weapon.This was annihilation.
Her fingers tighten weakly around the hilt of her blade, grounding herself in the only thing that still feels solid.
The plan is gone. The formation is gone. And their strategy means fucking nothing.
Jax doesn’t remember hitting the ground a second time.
