The forest didn't burn.
It didn't break.
It ceased.
Kael's breath tore across the earth like a blade dragging reality behind it. For a single impossible moment, there was no sound—only a line of pure, horrifying brightness carving through the world.
Where the beam touched down, the forest floor rippled.
Literally rippled.
The soil bulged upward like a wave struggling to flee before the inevitable—roots snapping, stone bending, earth convulsing as though trying to escape its own surface.
Then—
KRRRRRRSHHHHHH—
A silent implosion.
The beam sank into the land before erupting outward in a widening helix of annihilation.
Trees vanished as glittering ash caught in the spiral of force. Rocks disintegrated. Even the shadows screamed, then vanished.
Assassins—those who had spent their lives mastering stealth, surviving battlefields, crawling out of hell itself—
Never even had the chance to scream.
One moment, they were running.
The next—
