Then she fired a wave. A breath. Whatever she did with her chest and her open hands sent a forward-rolling tide of furnace heat across the Cavern at the lead boss in a wall that was not meant to stop the beast, because nothing she could shape was going to stop a creature that big. It was meant to cook it as it came.
The boss's lowered shoulder met the wall of heat at full charge.
The Cavern lit white.
Red-gold flash flooded the chokehold and washed every face on the line out into pure overexposure.
The beast's plated shoulder seared on contact, gray hide blackening and curling backward in a meter-wide crater that ate through plate and into mountain-bone underneath, four eyes squinting shut against the heat, the front rank of low-tier behind it cooking to ash in the splash, the abyssal floor under both Scarlet's feet and the beast's path now a long ribbon of slowly cooling magma where dry rock had been a heartbeat earlier.
