The detonation of the nursery was not a singular event; it was a continuous, agonizing expansion. The white fire that had consumed the laboratory was no longer just energy—it was a sentient, screaming sea of souls. Ten thousand "Gwens," ten thousand echoes of stolen sunlight and laboratory-grown darkness, were pouring through Gwen's physical form as if she were a narrow doorway between two worlds.
The facility groaned, the reinforced steel walls buckling and melting like wax. Outside, the frozen tundra of the Silent Valley was being scorched into a wasteland of blackened glass. The sky above was no longer bruised purple; it was a terrifying, incandescent white, visible for hundreds of miles.
