Sutra, Serica.
The wind stopped. The Primal was gone.
Noah was still on the ground. Ignis was gone, but the terrifying silence he left in his wake was heavier than the deafening roar of the explosion.
The damage he had left behind was nothing short of a cataclysm. circular, four-hundred-meter radius of the capital had been completely eradicated. It wasn't just ruined, it was gone. Thousands of casualties in the blink of an eye. Buildings, streets, and people had been reduced to floating gray ash.
Cutting directly through the center of the devastation was a molten, glass-like trench, a perfectly straight line marking the exact path Ignis had walked, where no building or living entity could survive even the ambient heat of his presence.
Noah slowly pushed himself to his knees, his hands trembling slightly against the scorched earth. He stared at the apocalyptic crater, his face pale and coated in soot, but when he finally spoke, his voice emerged completely steady and unmoving.
"Selena. Can you hear me?"
Yes, I can, her voice resonated in his mind, carrying a heavy, exhausted echo.
"I am done with you keeping secrets from us," Noah stated flatly, his eyes scanning the molten ruins. "You either tell me what just happened here, or I won't help you anymore. I just risked my life for you. I stood in front of a monster that vaporized your strongest beasts just by existing. I can't keep doing this if I'm kept in the dark."
Selena stayed silent. The telepathic connection remained open, but she offered no response to his ultimatum. Only the crackle of dying flames and the distant, horrified screams of the surviving citizens filled the air.
Noah tightened his fists, refusing to back down. "Why did he think I was the original? How did you know he wouldn’t kill me on sight? And why was he so confused when he looked at me? Just what exactly is happening here, Selena?"
After a few agonizing seconds, Selena finally responded. Her resonating voice dropped to a somber, terrifyingly serious whisper.
Noah. It is not about me keeping these secrets from you by choice. She paused, and the absolute certainty in her next words sent a fresh chill down his spine. If I answer the questions you just asked me... our chances of surviving this epoch will suddenly vanish.
Noah pushed himself up from the dirt, his arms trembling violently under his own weight. His palms were already blistered, raw and weeping fluid just from touching the ambient heat of the ground. He knelt there for a long moment, struggling to draw a single breath. The air didn’t feel like air anymore. It was heavy, devoid of oxygen, a sickening blend of cooked copper, sulfur, and burning hair. Slowly, with stiff movements, he forced his head up. The view was nothing short of catastrophic.
And it wasn’t just the four-hundred-meter explosion after his final attack against Selena, the trench showing the path that ignis walked cut a perfect line through Serica. The grand verticality of the city, the trees, the intricate brass pathways, the tiered merchant districts, hadn't just been knocked down. They had been erased. The structures on the very edge of Ignis’s path were sheared perfectly in half, their exposed cross-sections of stone and metal glowing in orange. The ground itself, the cobblestones and the bedrock beneath, had been fused into a bubbling river of smooth, dark glass.
Gray ash fell from the hemorrhaging red sky. It drifted downward in a slow, suffocating curtain, coating Noah’s blonde hair and settling onto his shoulders. It looked exactly like a quiet winter snowstorm.
A faint sound broke the absolute silence. It was a wet, heavy dragging.
Noah turned his head, his eyes struggling to focus through the haze of heat distortion. An old man was pulling himself across the melted cobblestones. His legs ended abruptly at the knees. The wounds weren't bleeding; the ambient temperature of Ignis’s beam had instantly and flawlessly cauterized the severed flesh into a hard, black crust. The man reached a trembling, soot-stained hand toward Noah. His jaw unhinged, his mouth opening wide in a desperate plea for salvation, but absolutely no sound came out. The superheated air he had inhaled moments before had completely scorched his vocal cords.
Noah’s heart hammered against his ribs. He forced his legs to move, taking a stumbling step toward the survivor. "Hold on," Noah rasped, his voice cracking.
Before Noah could close the distance, the old man’s eyes rolled back into his skull. His face collapsed downward, striking the hot earth, the residual heat of the ground ignited the dry fabric of his tunic. The man’s clothes caught fire, blooming into bright yellow flames. He did not twitch. He did not move again.
Noah stood frozen, watching the body burn. He forced himself to keep walking, turning away from the pyre. With every step, his boots stuck to the ground, the rubber soles melting and leaving long, stringy black smears across the glowing trench.
Noah started running around, looking for survivors, anybody he could save. He kept running and running, screaming through corners, checking for any sign of life.
Then, a scream cut through the dead silence.
It wasn't the muffled gasp of the dying. It was high-pitched, raw, and entirely desperate. A child.
Noah broke into a dead sprint, abandoning caution. He stumbled blindly over piles of smoldering charcoal, his boots slipping on the melted brass piping that webbed the ruined street. He followed the agonizing wail until he found the source beneath a collapsed industrial transport pipe.
A boy, no older than seven, was pinned flat against the scorching earth. The massive brass cylinder lay directly across his small chest. Next to the child lay the upper half of a woman. Just the upper half. She was dead, her eyes wide open, her severed arms still reaching desperately toward the boy in a final, frozen act of maternal instinct.
"I'm here!" Noah gasped, dropping to his knees beside the boy, ignoring the searing heat radiating from the metal. "I've got you, I'm right here!"
Noah grabbed the massive brass pipe with both hands. The metal was superheated, searing the flesh right off his palms, but Noah ignored the agonizing pain. With a sudden, explosive surge, Noah effortlessly ripped the colossal cylinder off the child and hurled it aside. It crashed into the molten bedrock with a heavy, echoing clang.
"I've got you," Noah panicked, completely unraveling into pure, unadulterated terror as he reached for the boy. "Just hold on!"
But removing the weight didn't erase the reality of what had already happened.
"Please," the boy choked out, his small hands weakly clutching at his ruined chest. Blood bubbled from his pale lips, sizzling as it hit the hot ash. The heavy brass had already sunk too deep, completely crushing his ribcage and fatally cooking his internal organs.
Noah frantically pushed past his exhaustion. Please. The mist coalesced, forming the silhouette of Zoe. Without needing a command, she pressed her hands desperately over the boy's ruined chest.
But the light only illuminated the sheer, irreversible horror of the damage. The superheated brass hadn't just crushed the child; it had cooked him alive. His sternum was entirely pulverized, driving jagged shards of bone deep into his collapsing lungs. The searing heat had melted right through the muscle, turning his internal organs into a boiling, blackened sludge. His heart was nothing more than a ruptured, failing muscle struggling to pump inside a cavity of cauterized, dead flesh.
Zoe’s healing magic washed over the wound, but the light sputtered and slipped off the charred tissue. There was no living biology left for her to knit back together. Her glowing hands trembled as they rested over the ruined chest. Slowly, she looked up at Noah.. Noah had been strong enough to lift the metal, but even his most precious summon was entirely powerless to save a body this destroyed.
The kid looked up at him. His eyes were wide with a specific, haunting terror that Noah knew entirely too well. It was the exact same look Zoe had given him before her light faded. The boy coughed once. A thick, wet spray of blood hit Noah directly in the face.
The frantic light left the boy's eyes. His jaw went slack. The heavy, sweet smell of roasted meat and blood hit the back of Noah’s throat, making him gag.
Noah stumbled backward, his legs giving out. He fell hard onto his backside, the hot ash clouding around him.
He forced himself up again, wandering deeper into the blast zone like a ghost trapped in purgatory. It was a graveyard, a museum displaying human fragility.
To his left, a severed arm lay perfectly intact in the ash, the fingers still twitching with phantom nerve impulses. To his right, a towering stone wall had miraculously survived the shockwave, but it carried a permanent scar. The silhouettes of a man holding a baby were pitch-black, baked directly into the pale stone. They hadn't even had the time to process their own deaths. They had been vaporized so instantaneously that only their shadows remained, eternally printed onto the architecture of their ruined city.
Noah saw a young woman impaled through the abdomen. She was sitting in a pool of her own ruin, her hands slick with gore showing that she desperately, futilely tried to push her spilling intestines back into her stomach
Further down what used to be a bustling merchant avenue, Noah found a group of men and women trapped inside an armored transport carriage. The exterior heat of the beam had warped the metal frame and entirely fused the heavy doors shut. They were alive inside, screaming like animals, beating their bloody, broken fists against the thick, warped glass windows. The metal interior of the carriage was acting like an oven, slowly turning them into liquid.
There was absolutely nothing he could do. He couldn't save a single one of them.
He fell to his knees in the gray snow. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and screamed, a hollow, broken sound that was instantly swallowed by the vast, dead expanse of the city. He threw up, emptying his stomach until there was nothing left, dry-heaving blood and bile onto the molten, glassy earth.
The sheer weight of his helplessness finally broke whatever was left of his mind. Noah clawed frantically at the ground, his blistered hands scratching against the jagged, fused bedrock until his fingernails splintered and his raw flesh bled. But the pain in his hands wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough to drown out the suffocating agony crushing his chest.
He slammed his forehead aggressively into the hard, scorched earth. Crack.
He pulled his head back and violently slammed it down again.
"I'm so weak!" He bashed his skull against the unyielding stone over and over and over again, completely unhinged. The jagged ground split the skin deep across his forehead. A thick stream of hot blood poured down his face, blinding his eyes and mixing with the gray ash, turning it into a dark paste.
"Why am I the only one?!" Noah screamed, lifting his ruined, blood-soaked face toward the hemorrhaging red sky. "Every time! Everyone around me dies, and I get to live! Why?!"
"Why do I deserve to live?! I don't!" he roared at the deafening silence of the blast zone. "Why am I not dead?! Kill me! Please, somebody just kill me! I should be dead! I should be dead!"
The truest horror of Noah's existence was that he was always forced to survive the ashes he couldn't prevent.
And he was condemned to live with it.