The silence lasted only a few seconds—the exact time a biological system takes to process the collapse of a paradigm. But it was enough for reality itself to begin unravelling.
The air above the academy had grown heavy, saturated by a pressure that went far beyond a simple accumulation of spiritual or electromagnetic energy. It was a distortion of the metric of space-time. The physical laws surrounding those five Demon Kings seemed to behave differently depending on who was observing them, breaking Lorentz symmetry.
Gravity fluctuated in sine waves, light changed direction following impossible geodesics, and sound arrived with slight delays, a victim of localized time dilation. It was as if the space around them had ceased to belong entirely to the same plane as the academy, forming a bubble of dissonant reality.
