He felt Vex's heavy, calloused hands clamp down hard on his shoulders, pinning him to the earth as he convulsed. Her voice was distant, heavily distorted, like she was screaming at him from the bottom of an ocean. "Breathe, Cross! The primer is stripping the walls! Your System is trying to adapt! Do not fight the current! You have survived worse than this! HOLD ON!"
Nathan's vision fractured into blinding white static. The internal mana surge reached critical mass, erupting outward from his pores in a blinding, concussive wave of green-gold light that washed the apocalyptic red from the sky. His System interface violently glitched, shrieking with fatal errors he could no longer read. The voices of his party and his summons dissolved into white noise.
And then, there was nothing but the consuming, transcendent fire.
