Blood Face drew in a breath that did not feel like air at all. It sounded like lungs emptying, like a bellows pulled hard in a forge.
The gilded core combatants broke as one. Men who had held their line through steel and fire now scrambled, their qi skidding on air.
No one waited to see what came next. They ran.
The pull hit them a heartbeat later.
A vast suction clawed at everything in reach, gulping from every direction.
It drank in everything in its path, stones and banners and screaming bodies. Even the churning sky above began to buckle toward it.
Cloaks snapped. Sand and grit lifted. Helmets tore free.
The slow ones, the stunned ones, the brave fools who thought they could brace and endure, vanished first.
They were dragged across the air and into the bloody core's crimson maw.
Their faces twisted in indignation and defiance, mouths open in roars that turned to choking grunts as the pull stole their breath.
Hands scrabbled for purchase. Fingers dug furrows. Boots left black streaks. It did not matter.
Crunching and chewing began, a hideous, steady sound that would not stop.
Bone cracked. Wet teeth worked. Men were devoured alive, their screams swallowed between bites.
Some did live. A few broke free and continue to sprint away, coughing, eyes wide, voices raw.
"Retreat!" one shouted.
They looked around and found only one another. The field was emptied.
The gilded core, once a wall of gold and discipline, was a handful of survivors from both camps.
They did not argue. They did not pray. They ran harder, because staying was madness.
They reached the ships and clambered aboard, hands slipping on rails, boots clanging on deck.
Flight arrays charged fast. Sails snapped open.
The vessels pulled away in a frantic retreat, the men already clinging to the next plan like a lifeline.
They would return. They would bring extreme force. They would erase the anomaly or die trying.
Only the sword grandmaster did not flee.
He remained in the distance, a lone figure set against the gore-stained ground, the massive sword braced at in front of him.
He watched the ships withdraw without turning his head, letting them go.
His feet were planted. His shoulders were square. His posture spoke of one thing only.
Waiting. Ready to strike at the one moment that mattered.
The orb, already huge, swelled with every man it swallowed until it loomed as big as a hill.
It looked up at that roiling thunders with naked greed. Its many eyes narrowed, one after another, as if it could savor the taste before it fed.
Grins split open across all its faces, wide and eager, delighted by what still remained to take.
Radeon watched it all with his cheek pressed into leaf litter and damp soil.
The earth tasted of rot and iron. He could not lift his head, not fully, but his eyes rolled upward all the same.
The sky that had been provoked answered.
Clouds brewed and tightened, turning on themselves until they became vortexes hanging over the trapped men.
The air grew thin and sharp. Hair lifted on necks. Teeth ached.
Within the twisting bellies of those clouds, lightning began to knit itself together, bright threads drawn into a spear.
Then it fell.
Beams of electricity descended in an instant, too fast to flinch from.
The first contact was the shield and silk above Radeon.
Steel did not ring or resist. It softened and ran, melting almost at once.
The silk webbing flashed white, then black, singed through in the blink of an eye, yet it did its work.
It spread the strike. It let the other trees take a share of the burden as the bolt jumped and forked, searching for ground.
The second shield went liquid.
The third. The fourth.
It was a cascade, eleven layers of desperate craft eaten like tinder.
All of it, gone in what felt like the space between one breath and the next.
Radeon reached anyway.
He thrust his arms toward the falling light, hands shaking, bones crackling under a pressure that wanted to fold him in half.
His forearms fractured with sharp, bright pain as the charge found him.
He could not let it take the straight path. Not through his heart. Not through his brain.
If it hit clean, there would be nothing left of him but a smoking outline in the dirt.
Lightning swallowed him.
He had wrapped himself in silk from throat to ankle, tight as a burial shroud.
Needles had been driven into the ground around him, crude anchors and conductors.
When the silk finally burned through, the bolt did not stop. It crawled over him instead, a living net of white fire.
His skin sizzled. Then it boiled. Then it charred. He endured.
Qi was not an ocean today. It was a cup with cracks in it, and he could only pour what remained into two places.
His heart. The nerves that would still let him stand and move, if there was an after to this.
Everything else was just perishable organs. His body convulsed, fingers clawing at nothing.
His mind winked in and out. Darkness came, then a flash of blue-white pain, then darkness again, like a door slamming in a storm.
The world around him went white in that moment.
Light did not stop at the battlefield. It spilled outward, reaching a hundred miles in every direction where anything still lived to see it.
Thunder stacked on thunder, and the sky exploded into boom after boom.
There were still men within its reach. Still lungs to crush. Still hearts to stop.
Ships that had been too slow, too laden, too proud to turn in time, lay within the range of the tribulation.
The first bolt found one mast, and the whole vessel answered like dry straw.
Wood flashed into flame. Tar screamed. Sails lit and vanished. Hulls burst open.
They went up in plumes of roaring fire, bright blossoms on black water.
The air filled with splinters and ash, thin cries of men who had a heartbeat to understand they were already dead.