[Caden POV]
The psychic scream was not a sound. It was a violation.
It bypassed my ears entirely, punching directly into the deepest, most primal part of my brain.
It was the sound of a star dying, of a billion shards of glass grinding together in my soul. It was pure, undiluted malice, a wave of raw psychic power so immense that the physical world seemed to bend around it.
The chaotic battle at the entrance to the alien facility stopped. It didn't wind down; it ceased to exist in the space of a single heartbeat.
The roar of Sunstone's solar flares sputtered into nothingness.
The blur of Velocity's movement became a clumsy, stumbling trip as he fell to the ground, clutching his head. The very air crackled with a palpable dread.
I saw Praetor, the S-Rank paragon, the Strongest Man in the World, stagger. His silver armour, which had been an impenetrable fortress, seemed to dim, and for a fraction of a second, his posture broke.
He was a god brought to his knees by a whisper.
