The heavens snapped.
The brief hesitation, the humiliating flush of rose along the edges of the cloud banks, all of it collapsed into an abyss of absolute, unbridled fury.
The thunderhead contracted until it was blacker than pitch, an ink-dark maw sucking the very light out of the firmament, reducing the world to a suffocating, soundless void just before the slaughter.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The sky no longer tested, it rained absolute annihilation.
Three successive pillars of Carmine-Blood Retribution Lightning hammered into the crater like consecutive blows from a cosmic piledriver.
The bedrock shattered, the vitrified glass crater splintered into boiling slag, and the raw kinetic mass ground Shen Yu down to one knee, driving his joints deep into the molten stone.
His skin split open across his shoulders, charred blood sizzling into crimson steam the microsecond it seeped from his flesh.
Yet he did not bow.
