The shadow of the falling marble archway blanketed the crater, cutting through the bleeding crimson light from above. To General Duwall, watching from the shattered edge of the walkway, the kids were dead. Ten tons of ancient stone were plummeting with terminal velocity, a weight no human could dodge or survive.Chris looked up. His natural eyes, bloodshot and exhausted, tracked the massive block of stone. He felt the cold, terrifying reservoir of the negation of magic churning beneath his ribs, still trying to drag him back into the blind, unthinking fury that had nearly unraveled the sky.But as he looked down at Angie, her arms still wrapped tightly around his neck, her frozen tears pressing against his skin, something shifted. The vacuum inside his soul didn't swell with rage; it locked into place with a freezing, razor-sharp focus.He didn't scream. He didn't lose his sight to the blinding white light.Chris pushed Angie gently behind him with his left arm, stepping directly into the path of the falling debris. He raised his right hand toward the descending shadow, his palm open, his fingers splayed. For the first time in seventeen years, he wasn't tapping into the power out of panic or instinct. He was commanding it."Stop," he muttered.The baritone resonance of his voice didn't rattle the stones; it froze the air.A transparent, localized ripple of void magic—not a chaotic explosion, but a dense, perfectly controlled barrier of negative energy—extended three inches from his open palm. The moment the massive marble archway collided with the boundary, the rules of kinetic force were instantly canceled. The screaming acceleration of ten tons of plummeting stone ceased.The archway stopped dead in mid-air, hovering perfectly balanced a mere foot above Chris's fingertips.Then, the negation began its work. The dark, oily vapor of Chris's power crawled across the ancient marble, eating away at the density of the stone. There was no sound of shattering rock or crushing debris. The marble simply dissolved, its molecular bonds unweaving into a harmless, gentle cascade of grey dust that drifted into the bottom of the crater like winter snow.