The shot splits the world in half.
Every living thing on the battlefield—human and monster alike—flinches. An involuntary, universal surrender to a sound that bypasses the brain and goes straight to the marrow.
I don't think I'll ever get used to that noise.
The projectile doesn't travel through the air. It tears through it—a screaming line of compressed force that shreds the wind with the voracity of something starving. The trail it leaves behind shimmers with heat distortion, the atmosphere itself recoiling from the violation.
For a microsecond after the trajectory sound, everything goes silent. The monsters freeze. The soldiers freeze. Even the dust in the air seems to hang motionless.
Then the backline of the Red Tide detonates.
The explosion doesn't bloom. It erupts—a concussive pillar of orange fire and superheated debris that swallows a fifty-foot radius of the Tide's rear formation.
