A roar unlike thunder echoed across the fractured horizon.
It was not fire. Not wind. Not fury.
It was finality.
The explosion was so vast, so absolute, it erased half the Hellscape in a single breath. Land folded. Stone unraveled. Dust rose not as smoke, but as silence made visible. The sound resonated through bone, blood, and memory.
And then came the void.
A silence that devoured echoes.
Akron jolted upright.
Her vision swam, her chest heaved, her body slick with sweat and memory. She rushed to the window, eyes wide—yet her breath caught before words could form.
The landscape was gone.
What remained was a wound carved across the world.
She had known. They all had. It was part of the plan—one of the darker possibilities they had calculated down to decimal and detonation.
But seeing it...
Seeing it was another thing entirely.
She tried to speak. To curse. To cry.
Nothing came.
Only tears, warm and soundless, rolling down her cheeks like silent apologies.
