The world wasn't sound and fury. It was a current, a physical tide of screaming, shoving bodies that ripped Kael from Lina's grasp. One moment her grip was the only anchor in the universe; the next, it was gone, swallowed by a surge of pure, animal panic. He cried out her name, a useless sound lost in the greater din of a dying enclave. He was a stone in a river, tumbled and thrown, his feet barely touching the ground.
His shoulder slammed into a support pillar. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs and spun him out of the main stampede, leaving him gasping in a small eddy of relative calm. For a half-second, the world came into focus, and what he saw would be etched into his memory with acid.
This wasn't a battle. It was a slaughter.
The Defense Force, the stoic, armored figures he'd seen his whole life as an unbreakable line, were being systematically dismantled. The Shard Hounds were the architects of the chaos, a tide of living glass that flowed through the hab-blocks. They moved with a horrifying, alien beauty, their crystalline bodies catching the frantic strobing of the emergency lights. They didn't just kill; they disassembled, their claws and jaws striking with the percussive, shattering sound of breaking geodes. A Frame User, his shield flaring, was overwhelmed by three of them at once. They swarmed him, a flurry of blue-white limbs, and his energy shield popped like a soap bubble before he was dragged down, his screams abruptly silenced.
Kael's mind, the analytical technician's mind, couldn't process it. He saw the physics of it, the terrible geometry of the attack, but his soul couldn't accept the reality. These weren't just monsters. They were efficient. They were coordinated.
And above them all, the Obsidian Ravager held court. It wasn't fighting like the hounds. It was razing. It moved with a terrifying, deliberate purpose, each step a tremor that cracked the ferrocrete. Kael watched it grab a chunk of a collapsed hab-unit—a piece of wall the size of a transport—and hurl it into a knot of defenders. The crunch of armor and bone was sickeningly loud. The Ravager wasn't just a beast; it was a siege engine. It was contemptuously, effortlessly, unmaking his world.
The smell of ozone from sundered power lines mingled with something hot and metallic that his brain refused to name. He was frozen, a spectator at his own apocalypse.
Lina.
The name cut through the paralysis. It was a single, sharp point of light in the overwhelming darkness. She wasn't with him. She was somewhere in that. The thought was a physical blow. He had to move. Not away. Against the current.
He pushed off the pillar, his body clumsy and uncooperative. Every instinct screamed at him to follow the herd, to flee toward the inner sectors, toward safety. But his feet, guided by a force stronger than fear, turned him back toward the breach. He moved through the debris-strewn street, a ghost slipping through his own nightmare. The scenes of carnage were no longer a distant spectacle. They were intimate. A child's toy lying next to a spreading dark stain. The shattered helmet of a guard, its visor reflecting the screaming red lights. These weren't just images; they were shards, embedding themselves in his mind.
He ducked behind a toppled food vendor's cart as the Ravager took another step, its massive, obsidian foot crushing the very spot he'd been standing a moment before. The ground shook, and Kael felt the vibration in his teeth. He could see the energy crackling across its dark hide, the stolen power from the defenders' futile shots. It fed on their efforts. It grew stronger from their resistance. How do you fight something like that? How do you even survive it?
He scanned the chaos, his eyes stinging from the dust, desperately searching for Lina's practical jumpsuit, for her dark hair. He saw only strangers, their faces masks of terror. He saw monsters, their forms crystalline and perfect.
Then he saw it. A flash of familiar red—the emergency release lever on a standard-issue maintenance lift, the kind they used a dozen times a day. It was half-buried under a massive ferrocrete support beam that had fallen from a collapsed overpass. And beneath the beam, a single, outstretched hand.
Kael's world, which had been a wide-angle shot of chaos, snapped into a terrifyingly narrow focus. He scrambled over the rubble, his breath catching in his throat. "Lina!"
It was her. Her leg was trapped, pinned at a sickening angle beneath the impossible weight of the beam. Her face was pale, streaked with grime and tears, but her eyes were wide with a mixture of agony and sheer, animal terror. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking past him.
He followed her gaze.
A Shard Hound had detached from the main fray. It was stalking toward them, its movements low and predatory. It wasn't a mindless beast caught in a frenzy. It was a hunter that had found isolated, wounded prey. Its multifaceted eyes, like a thousand chips of ice, were fixed on Lina. Its jaw, lined with crystalline teeth, dripped with a faint, blue Aethel energy.
"Kael… run," Lina choked out, her voice a raw whisper.
He didn't run. He couldn't. He grabbed the edge of the beam, his hands raw, and pulled. It didn't budge. It was like trying to move a mountain. Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his shock. He pulled again, a guttural sob tearing from his throat. Nothing.
The Hound was closer now. Ten meters. He could hear the faint, musical chime of its crystal claws clicking on the broken ferrocrete. It was the most beautiful, terrifying sound he had ever heard.
He looked around wildly, searching for a weapon, for a defender, for anyone. There was no one. The battle had moved on. They were alone. Alone with the monster.
Five meters.
He could see the intricate, fractal patterns of its crystalline hide. He could see the hunger in its soulless eyes. He could see Lina's life, his life, their whole world, about to be extinguished by this impossible, beautiful thing.
In that moment, something inside Kael broke.
It wasn't a thought. It wasn't a decision. It was a fundamental rejection of reality. A denial screamed from the very core of his being. No.
The world didn't slow down. It shattered.
An unimaginable pain erupted in his chest, a searing, white-hot agony as if his soul was being torn in two. It wasn't a wound. It was a birth. A torrent of raw, untamed energy flooded every cell in his body, a thousand volts down a wire meant for ten. He let out a scream, but it was drowned out by the roar of the furnace that had just ignited within him. A faint, shimmering outline of light, a blueprint of impossible energy, flickered into existence around his body, visible for a half-second against the dust-choked air. His Aethel Frame, dormant for a lifetime, had been violently, traumatically, awakened.