Chapter 46: Ashes and roots
Silence. Cold, unforgiving silence.
The alley in the Aether Core Reactor District was a graveyard of ash and ruin.
Collapsed concrete buried the Voidstar Crucible’s remnants, its red veins dimmed, null wave spent. Roots; black green, thorned, still pulsing with faint Genesis fury jutted from the rubble like the bones of a slain god.
The air reeked of scorched metal, blood, and something primal, older than the Forgotten Atlanta Expanse itself.
Rhea slumped against a cracked wall, her patched exosuit sparking, one arm limp from shattered bones.
Her visor was fogged, breath ragged, eyes fixed on Joren’s body, roots blooming from his chest like a grotesque monument. The third soldier lay nearby, torn apart by Clayton’s Spine Bloom, venom-sap pooling beneath him.
She’d seen death, too much, in the Ironblood’s endless war against the green. But this was different. They’d walked into a slaughterhouse thinking they hunted a weed. They’d been wrong.
Commander Drayce stood rigid, his black allow suit cracked, visor split to reveal a single gray eye, bloodshot and unblinking.
His chest core flickered, its scavenged Genesis energy drained by the Voidstar Crucible’s double pulse. The Null Crown blade hung loose in his grip, its runes dark, stained with Clayton’s chloroplasmic sap.
Drayce’s breath was steady, but his silence screamed louder than Rhea’s pain.
They’d underestimated the Verdant Lord.