Chapter 253: Myst in Motion (1)
Ketal’s left leg, charged with newly mastered Myst, struck the earth with a force he had never before attempted. His movements were deliberate and measured, his concentration absolute. For an instant, there was only silence, as if the world itself held its breath.
Kain, standing nearby, watched with mounting anxiety, expecting some catastrophic result. Yet, contrary to his instincts and all the warnings his senses screamed, nothing seemed to happen at all.
“What?” Kain muttered, his eyes scanning the unbroken ground.
The earth remained utterly still, as if Ketal’s mighty stomp had been no more than the footfall of a common man. There was no crater, no debris, no shockwave. For a moment, the anticlimax was so profound that Kain wondered if Ketal’s experiment had simply failed, since such overwhelming power seemed to produce no effect at all.
Just then, the change began.
At first, it was a faint tremor, so subtle Kain thought he might have imagined it. Then the ground began to vibrate, gently at first, but with alarming speed, the vibrations grew in magnitude. A rumbling noise swelled from beneath their feet, and before anyone could react, the ground itself started to shake in earnest.
Kain’s heart pounded. “What’s... going on?”
The tremor quickly escalated into a quake, shaking the very earth beneath them. The once-stable ground buckled and split, deep cracks spiderwebbing outward in every direction. The soil shuddered as if something titanic was stirring below. The quaking intensified, and within moments, it became nearly impossible to keep one’s balance. Cracks ripped through the earth with a deafening roar.
Kain stumbled as a chasm opened beneath him, threatening to swallow him whole. He managed to leap away just in time, using all his Transcendent reflexes to propel himself into the air, landing a safe distance away. As he glanced back, he saw the ground where he had been standing moments ago collapse into a gaping fissure.
“What the hell!” he shouted from midair, his voice trembling.
Looking down, he saw that the entire plain was being torn apart. The devastation was enormous—whole swathes of the landscape shattering as if a giant had smashed the ground with an invisible hammer. This was no mere display of force, no metaphorical earth-shattering blow. It was an earthquake, a true and natural cataclysm unleashed by the will of a single being.
Of course, it was not entirely unfamiliar. In countless battles before, Ketal had left scars upon the earth, his strength cleaving rifts in stone and dirt, making the ground tremble as though a small quake had struck. However, all those times, the destruction had been contained—a patch of land, a ridge, a ravine. This was different.