No one cheered when Viktor Kane died.
No one even seemed sure when the moment had happened.
There was no final blast. No triumphant speech. No crowd rising up to celebrate the fall of a man who had tried to put the world in a cage. The alarms stopped. The pressure in the air eased. The lights steadied.
And the city just kept going.
That was the strangest part.
Aria stood outside the command center as dawn slowly thinned the sky. The water near the pier was gray-blue, moving in small, ordinary waves. Trucks rolled in the distance. Somewhere farther down the street, a traffic light changed from red to green without glitching. A gull landed on a railing, screamed once into the cold morning, and flew away.
The world had not been saved.
It had simply refused to stop.
