And Vance, huddled in the ruins of what was once his home, understood this on a primal level. This was the cold, unforgiving truth of the universe, seared into him not through a lecture or a warning, but through firsthand experience. He was living it. He was breathing it in the air thick with vaporized permacrete and incinerated lives.
He watched, paralyzed, as a lance of energy from the heavens precisely targeted a sector miles away, not a military installation, but a dense residential block. There was no strategic value, only population density. The fireball that bloomed was a second sun, silent from this distance, a terrifyingly beautiful flower of death.
This was what it meant to be on the losing side. Not to be defeated, but to be deemed irrelevant. An inconvenience. A problem to be solved with overwhelming, dispassionate force.
