Silence. Cold, unforgiving silence.
The alley in the Aether Core Reactor District was a graveyard of ash and ruin.
Collapsed concrete buried the Voidstar Crucible's remnants, its red veins dimmed, null wave spent. Roots; black green, thorned, still pulsing with faint Genesis fury jutted from the rubble like the bones of a slain god.
The air reeked of scorched metal, blood, and something primal, older than the Forgotten Atlanta Expanse itself.
Rhea slumped against a cracked wall, her patched exosuit sparking, one arm limp from shattered bones.
Her visor was fogged, breath ragged, eyes fixed on Joren's body, roots blooming from his chest like a grotesque monument. The third soldier lay nearby, torn apart by Clayton's Spine Bloom, venom-sap pooling beneath him.
She'd seen death, too much, in the Ironblood's endless war against the green. But this was different. They'd walked into a slaughterhouse thinking they hunted a weed. They'd been wrong.
