Alexander Voss watched the battlefield move.
A loose fragment of concrete drifted upward from the shattered remains of Willow Street.
A bent steel street sign groaned, the heavy bolts anchoring it to the asphalt shearing apart and popping one after another under an impossible, localized gravitational pull.
Steel screamed.
Glass trembled.
Voss braced his boots against the asphalt as an overturned transport vehicle slowly lifted into the air.
Its heavy tires spun uselessly in the dead zone before the multi-ton chassis began to drift, lazily circling the ruined framework of a collapsed flower shop.
The rotation quickened.
Whole sections of shattered buildings tore free from their foundations, rising into the sky to join a massive, growing vortex of floating debris.
The roar spread through Sector 135 like localized thunder.
Even the thick smoke from the burning ruins bent sharply toward Willow Street, dragged helplessly into the eye of the physical anomaly.
Across the trembling battlefield, Voss’s expression locked in grim, cold calculation as he watched a whole city block rise into the stratosphere.
Right in front of him, the colossal Mawqueen had stopped attacking.
Her multi-segmented form froze, her countless eyes remaining fixed upon the epicenter at Willow Street.
Around the monarch, thousands of chittering Mawbacks stood dead still.
Their predatory bloodlust was replaced by a rigid, chilling silence.
Even the ash-heavy rain seemed quieter now.
Then, the true vibration began.
The shattered road rumbled beneath Voss’s boots.
A deep, sub-atomic resonance rolled through the bedrock of the city.
To Voss, it felt exactly like something impossibly large drawing its first breath deep beneath the earth.
The vortex expanded.
Concrete struck concrete as massive slabs collided, orbiting faster and faster around an unseen, hyper-dense center.
A Hunter a few yards away looked upward, his voice swallowed by the gale.
“…What the hell is that?” A chunk of reinforced concrete the size of a truck broke free from the churning ring.
The slab shot across the boulevard like a railgun slug.
Voss didn’t even have time to shout a warning.
The sheer displacement of the pressure wave alone folded the staring Hunter backward, shattering his armor metrics.
The concrete projectile continued for another hundreds of meters, punching cleanly through three skyscrapers before disappearing into the burning skyline.
The battlefield finally understood.
Standing anywhere near Willow Street had just become fatal.
Through the rising ash, Voss’s augmented vision pierced the heart of the vortex.
A small figure was slowly rising from the broken street, surrounded by the pure white light.
It was just a boy.
His bare feet left the ground, floating weightlessly within the absolute center of the debris storm.
Strands of blood drifted upward from the deep wounds covering the kid’s chest and face, dissolving into a pressurized mist before they could drop.
Voss zoomed his optics, his blood running cold.
Pitch-black veins pulsed violently beneath the boy’s skin.
They spread across his pale neck in branching, perfect geometric patterns, resembling synthetic circuitry etched directly beneath human flesh.
Then, something pushed aggressively through the skin just above the boy’s left temple.
Blood ran down his cheek.
A jagged, seamless horn slowly emerged from his skull, curving backward before rising sharply toward the sky like a broken, obsidian crown.
Its surface pulsed with the exact same rhythmic, white light as the markings beneath his skin.
Below the boy, at the very edge of the crater, another unconscious body being dragged by the shifting earth.
The sheer gravitational pressure of the vortex crushed the helpless victim against the pavement, sliding them down the edge of the asphalt before a rain of dead Mawbacks buried them beneath the rubble.
High above the crater, the horn’s crimson glow suddenly bled out, settling into a quiet, terrifying violet.
The boy’s fingers twitched.
His head slowly lifted.
The boy’s eyelids snap open.
The human blue of his irises remained, but a thin, predatory ring of violet slowly swallowed them from the outside in.
His pupils narrowed into razor-thin, vertical slits.
The boy looked down across the battlefield.
The colossal Mawqueen took one agonizing step backward.
Her countless eyes never left the floating silhouette of the boy, and her massive body was actually trembling.
In all his years of brutal war, Voss had never seen an apex predator back down.
But her body language screamed a single truth: “She was terrified.” She shifted her weight, slowly angling her massive frame toward the Rift at the far end of the boulevard.
“She’s trying to run,” Voss realized.
A shrill, panicked shriek erupted from the Queen’s throat, sounding less like a battle cry and more like a desperate command.
Thousands of Mawbacks turned at once, abandoning the human defense lines.
Their mandibles clicked in sheer terror as they surged aggressively back toward Willow Street.
The Disaster-Class Riftborn moved first.
They abandoned the civilian shelters they were about to tear open, the ground collapsing beneath their massive frames as they charged wildly.
The endless swarm followed, an ocean of black chitin and claws surging through the ruined streets.
Voss frowned, looking through the rising ash.
“…They’re abandoning the objective?” His tactical communicator crackled with static.
“Moscove to Voss!
Satellites are showing a massive spatial spike!
We have another Rift opening on our hands!” Voss never took his eyes off the floating boy.
His pulse remained steady, his voice a flat, authoritative rasp.
“Negative” “That’s not a Rift.
And they aren’t retreating.” He watched the chaotic tide of monsters.
Not one looked at him anymore.
Not one looked toward the helpless civilians in the bunkers.
Every single one of them was running blindly toward the same fragile boy.
“They’re hunting,” Voss analyzed coldly.
“Trying to kill the one thing they’re afraid of.
That’s a raw survival instinct of monsters.” The heavy words settled over the military communicator, met with absolute, chilling silence on the other end.
In the center of the storm, the boy simply watched them come.
Thousands of them.
His glowing violet gaze casually followed the advancing, monstrous tide.
Suddenly, the roaring vortex of concrete and steel spinning around him slowed.
Every piece of suspended debris froze in mid-air, hanging still as if time itself had dilated around him.
The anti-gravity shut off.
The boy’s body dropped.
His bare feet struck the broken asphalt with a heavy, wet thud.
He stood up in the center of the crater.
He slowly lowered his gaze, observing his own small, bloody hands.
He casually curled his fingers into fists, feeling the bruised knuckles pop.
When the boy spoke, the sounds didn’t belong to a human throat.
The unknown syllables vibrated through the rain, scraping against Voss’s bones like rusted metal.
“Zha’kor…
rel’vaas nah’thul,” the boy muttered.
Voss grunted, his hands instinctively coming up to his head.
The entity wasn’t just speaking out loud, it was broadcasting its mind.
The raw, arrogant intent slammed into Voss’s brain so violently that his own thoughts were overwritten, forcefully translating the alien frequency into a meaning he could understand: [So this is the broken meat I wake up in.
A fragile, pathetic shell.] The boy looked back up at the charging swarm.
His expression tightened with absolute disgust.
“Vex’al…
khor’thas.” [And you bugs are ruining my air.] He stepped forward, walking directly into the tsunami of claws and teeth.
A Disaster-Class beast reached him first, lunging with jaws wide enough to swallow a tank.
The boy didn’t dodge.
When the beast swung its heavy claw at his head, the boy stepped inside the arc.
He planted his bare fist directly into the center of the monster’s chest.
Voss watched the impossible kinetic force of the punch blow the monster’s sternum out of its back.
But the physical kickback punished the vessel.
The boy’s frail shoulder dislocated with a loud, wet pop.
The kid didn’t even wince.
He just let the broken arm hang uselessly at his side.
As another beast lunged from his blind spot, the boy didn’t turn around.
He simply drove his bare heel backward into the creature’s kneecap.
The monster’s joint snapped with a heavy crunch, but the brutal physical impact immediately fractured the boy’s shinbone.
The crippled leg gave out, dropping him hard to one knee.
The human shell was tearing itself to pieces just from the physical recoil of its own strength.
“Se vokyris…
nuha aelion drivas,” the boy mumbled.
He let out a cold, hollow laugh and stopped moving.
The jagged obsidian horn above his temple suddenly flared, pulsing with a blinding, violet light.
It released a sharp, high-frequency metallic hum that vibrated the blood off his skin.
The humming grew sharper, vibrating through the air until every remaining pane of glass in a three-mile radius fractured into glittering dust.
He didn’t try to throw another punch.
He just gave a simple, passing glance at the swarm.
Thwip.
Voss blinked.
The nearest Disaster-Class Beast vanished from the chest outward.
There was no explosion.
No flash of thermal energy.
A perfectly smooth, circular cavity now occupied the exact space where its heart, lungs, and spine had existed a millisecond prior.
The missing matter wasn’t blown away or incinerated.
It simply wasn’t there anymore.
The colossal creature continued charging forward on pure momentum, until its severed nervous system finally realized it no longer possessed a physical body.
Another lazy glance.
Another Riftborn vanished.
Thwip.
Thwip.
Thwip.
Perfectly smooth, cylindrical voids punched through dense armor, alien flesh, and bone with surgical precision.
The invisible trajectories of his gaze continued far beyond the targets.
Another carved smoothly through the military transports lined across the avenue.
A third vanished somewhere beyond the city’s skyline, leaving a pure vacuum in its wake.
The swarm kept charging, driven insane by the blind panic of their collective hive mind.
A Mawback launched itself through the air, its scythe-like claws extended toward the boy.
Halfway through its leap, its head ceased to exist.
Momentum carried the headless, armored corpse several meters before it struck the asphalt.
Another beast filled the gap.
Then ten more.
Then a hundred.
The endless tide never stopped.
The boy’s eyes alone drifted casually across the battlefield.
Every single place his gaze lingered…
matter vanished.
Circular voids bloomed faster than human thought.
Buildings collapsed inward along perfect geometric lines.
Thousands of Mawbacks vanished before the electrical signals in their tiny brains could even register that they had already died.
The Vacuum Implosions arrived a second later.
One after another, reality violently corrected itself.
The atmosphere rushed inward at hypersonic speeds to fill every impossible vacuum cavity carved across the sector.
The air itself became artillery.
Ash, black blood, and pulverized concrete rose together into a localized hurricane that swallowed half of Sector 135.
Perfect circular cavities continued to punch relentlessly through the advancing tide, the delayed sonic recoil rolling across the district and collapsing structures that had originally survived the alien invasion.
Through the chaos, the Mawqueen witnessed the absolute slaughter of her invincible army.
One Disaster Beast disappeared.
Another.
Then three more at once.
Their colossal bodies continued forward for a single moment before collapsing into the ruined streets like hollowed-out, useless shells.
Her colossal body twisted violently toward the Spiral Rift.
Concrete exploded beneath her massive legs as she turned away from Willow Street, sprinting in blind, absolute panic toward the open cosmic gateway.
Voss lowered his guard slightly.
For the very first time since the invasion began…
he was watching the invincible Mawqueen run for her life.
The Queen released a final, shrill roar.
The remaining beasts answered, throwing their massive bodies into a literal wall of flesh to block Willow Street and buy their monarch time.
The boy watched them come.
The obsidian horn above his temple emitted another quiet, vibrating hum.
His head tilted ever so slightly, looking down at the frantic insects.
The psychic overwrite slammed into Voss’s head again, the voice echoing coldly across his mind.
“Zīr…
rhaenās vaelāros.” [Thus you demand absolute erasure] His gaze shifted.
The charging Mawbacks simply stopped existing.
The whole volume of space they occupied collapsed inward upon itself.
Rows of massive circular voids bloomed through the battlefield faster than the human eye could register, erasing whole battalions of monsters at once.
Then, the sonic recoil arrived.
A wall of compressed air tore brutally across Sector 135.
Hunters were hurled violently from rooftops like ragdolls.
Reinforced Resonance barriers shattered effortlessly under the delayed pressure waves.
Voss planted both feet, bracing his massive weight.
He dug his boots into the fractured asphalt, his muscles screaming beneath the impossible strain, but he refused to take a single step back.
The Mawqueen reached the Rift.
The cosmic void rippled welcomingly before her face.
She was mere inches from safety.
Space folded.
The Queen slammed on her brakes, her massive joints clicking in absolute horror.
Directly in front of the portal, hovering upside down in mid-air, was the boy.
His broken arms were crossed loosely over his chest.
His hair defied gravity, and his glowing eyes stared straight into her trembling, black cluster of vision.
The Mawqueen let out a terrified, clicking whimper.
The boy tilted his head, the calcified horn singing with a cold, white light.
He extended a single, fractured human hand and gripped the monarch’s massive skull.
Thwip.
A perfect, meter-wide sphere of her torso simply vanished.
Instinct took over.
Sickening black tendrils burst from the Queen’s wound, frantically trying to knit muscle and bone back together.
The boy’s violet pupils narrowed.
“Dōras…
vōlqes.” [Stop squirming] Thwip.
Thwip.
Thwip.
Circular voids bloomed across her colossal frame faster than reality could even register.
For every inch of flesh the Queen reconstructed, a full meter ceased to exist.
Her tendrils were erased before they could even weave together.
Her ultimate survival mechanism was mathematically and brutally outpaced by absolute deletion and ended with the death of the mawqueen.
But the beast inside the boy’s body was insatiable.
Holding the Queen’s ruined skull in his hand, the entity slowly turned his glowing eyes toward the far end of the boulevard.
Directly at Voss and the surviving human Hunters.
Dragging his broken leg, the boy took a slow step forward through the empty air, lifting his other hand.
The atmosphere above him began to severely compress.
It howled violently as he mentally seized the air currents over Sector 135, preparing to flatten the district and erase every single living thing left inside it.