It took less than a minute.
Less than a minute for an entire planet to collapse.
At first, it was still manageable. A handful of soldiers here and there — men and women who had survived wars whose names had disappeared from every archive — turning on their comrades with empty eyes and mechanical gestures. Isolated incidents. Situations that officers could still contain, manage, control.
Then something changed.
Not gradually.
All at once.
As if an invisible signal had been sent simultaneously through every touched mind — a switch thrown, a dam giving way — and suddenly more than half the army plunged into anarchy at the same moment.
It was no longer isolated incidents.
It was the end of the world.
The soldiers who had succumbed were no longer simply mad.
They were free.
Free from everything that had restrained them — discipline, loyalty, the fear of death, respect for their own survival.
Everything a divine being contains at all times — that colossal power one learns to control from the first instants of existence — was released without restraint, without direction, without any intention beyond pure destruction.
The first explosions razed the outer military camp in seconds.
Not a coordinated attack. Simply beings whose energy ignited without control, discharges of qi and mana that collided, combined, multiplied until they produced detonations capable of pulverizing continents.
Soldiers striking each other released, in the mere impact of their bodies, forces that would have sufficed to extinguish stars.
The ground shook.
Then ceased to exist.
The forests covering the planet's surface were erased in a fraction of a second — not burned, not felled, simply wiped away, reduced to atoms dispersed in the atmosphere before the light of the impact had even had time to propagate.
The mountains exploded inward, their titanic masses compressed by forces geology had never anticipated.
The oceans — those vast expanses of ancient water that had crossed aeons without moving — rose up, froze under waves of extreme cold, then evaporated into clouds of vapor that climbed to the upper atmosphere before being swept away by successive shockwaves.
In the space of a few seconds, a living planet had become a desert of broken rock.
And yet it held.
The protective seals Aethron had woven — layer after layer, from the bastion's command chamber — absorbed the unthinkable.
Not elegantly.
Not without effort.
With a resistance that made the structures themselves vibrate, that made the rock groan beneath the bastion's foundations, that consumed the support mages' energy at an alarming rate.
But they held.
For how long, no one could say.
In the corridors of the bastion, Aethron worked.
His hands did not stop. Around him, a dozen support mages fed the structures he was building, relaying energy to where the seals were beginning to weaken, reinforcing the breaking points before they gave way completely. He did not look out the windows. He did not need to see to know. The data coming back through the detection networks painted a sufficiently precise picture.
Too precise.
His communicator activated.
« Aethron. »
Sabelle's voice.
Calm on the surface. But something beneath it — a tension so controlled it only showed itself to an ear that had known her for a long time.
« What is the overall situation. I want everything. »
Aethron answered without interrupting his hands.
« Sixty-three percent of effectives confirmed out of control. Planetary protection seals at forty-seven percent of nominal capacity. »
A pause of a fraction of a second.
« They are degrading faster than I can reinforce them. »
Another pause.
« The bastion holds. The soldiers stationed here have formed collective shields absorbing the energy overflow. For now. »
« How long? »
« At this rate? »
He calculated.
« Twenty minutes before partial rupture. Less if the intensity continues to increase. »
The communicator remained silent for a moment.
Then Sabelle said simply:
« Understood. »
And cut the communication.
Sabelle held herself above the devastated surface of the planet, her slender silhouette suspended in the low atmosphere, her silver hair whipped by winds the devastation had created. Her scale armor reflected the flashes of explosions below — chaotic lights, red and white and gold, the fire of divine energies released without restraint.
She held out her hands.
Binding spells deployed from her fingers in luminous arcs — geometric structures that coiled around afflicted soldiers, slowing them, limiting the damage of their energy explosions, creating containment zones that lasted only a few seconds before being shattered but that sufficed to deflect the worst impacts.
It was like trying to stop a tidal wave with bare hands.
She knew it.
She continued anyway.
Below, a group of still-sane soldiers was attempting to contain their infected comrades. Five men against roughly twenty infected — not a battle but a desperate attempt at reasoning, control, recovery.
« Listen to me! » one of them was shouting — an officer, his voice carrying despite the chaos. « It's me! You know me! We fought together at— »
The infected soldier turned toward him.
His eyes were empty.
No hostility. No hatred. Simply a total absence of recognition, as if the officer's face was that of a stranger, an obstacle, a thing.
He struck.
The officer was thrown through what remained of a military building, the dark stone disintegrating under the impact. He rose — beings like him did not die easily — but he rose differently. With something broken in his gaze that had nothing to do with his physical wounds.
Another sane soldier seized an infected comrade's arm.
« Stop! It's me! Look at me! »
The infected soldier looked at him.
And in that gaze — in that second where something seemed to almost cross the void of his eyes — he said in a hollow, mechanical voice that no longer quite resembled his own:
« Kill me. »
The sane soldier went still.
« Kill me or save me. »
A silence lasting a fraction of a second.
« You can't do this to me. »
Then the infected struck, and the sane soldier did not dodge in time, and both fell into the chaos below.
Ignivar saw everything.
He stood in the high atmosphere, motionless, lance in hand, his red hair frozen in the still air at that altitude. Below him the planet burned. Around him space was beginning to fill with debris — fragments of rock, metal, crystallized energy torn from the structures the seals had failed to protect.
He saw his soldiers.
He saw all of them.
Those fighting their infected comrades with precise and controlled movements — warriors trying not to kill what they were attempting to save. Those who had given up reasoning and were simply surviving. Those who had fallen. Those still standing but for how much longer.
He saw the cause of all of it.
The silhouette in the ruins.
Still walking. Hands behind its back. Gaze moving across the chaos with that light and detached attention that was not cruelty but something worse — indifference. As if everything burning around it was simply a natural phenomenon, interesting to observe, of no more consequence than a storm or a tide.
The rage rose in him.
Not an explosion. A slow, deep surge, like heat accumulating before reaching its ignition point. His energy vibrated around him — the flames of his armor intensified, the space around him rippled slightly under the pressure.
But his mind.
His mind remained calm.
Like the surface of a lake on a clear day.
That was the difference between a warrior and a soldier. The soldier felt the rage and let it dictate his actions. The warrior felt it, recognized it, and continued to think despite it.
He had to choose.
Descend toward that silhouette — neutralize it, stop it, end the source of all this. That was what everything in him wanted to do. That was what his instincts, his reflexes, his billions of years of existence as a fighter dictated.
Or stay. Coordinate. Save what could still be saved.
It was not a simple choice.
It was not a choice he could afford to make alone.
Sabelle arrived at his level in silence.
She said nothing immediately. She placed herself beside him and looked at what he was looking at — the planet below, the walking silhouette, the spreading chaos.
Then she said:
« The seals are giving way. »
« I know. »
« Aethron estimates twenty minutes. »
« I know. »
A silence.
« And you are watching. »
It was not a criticism. It was an observation, carried by someone who knew this man well enough to understand that watching him think was sometimes more useful than speaking to him.
« I am thinking, » said Ignivar.
« About what? »
« About whether I can afford to go down toward him. »
Sabelle looked at the silhouette below.
« And? »
« If I go down toward him, my soldiers have no one to coordinate their defense. »
« If you don't, the source of the problem remains. »
« Yes. »
Silence.
« Then the real question, » said Sabelle quietly, « is which of those two things kills more people. »
Ignivar looked at her for a moment.
Then he looked down again.
The planet vibrated.
And in a sound that was not a sound but a sensation — something deep and irreversible that propagated through rock and space — the protective seals began to give way.
Not all at once.
By zones.
But once they started, the others followed rapidly — like links in a chain breaking one after another, each rupture accelerating the next.
The planet exploded outward.
Not all in one piece — in waves, entire sections of the crust projected into space, masses of rock the size of continents fragmenting into billions of shards scattered across the solar system. The two moons — already damaged by hours of energy overflow — disintegrated, their fragments joining the deluge of matter now spreading through the entire system.
The infected soldiers did not notice the difference.
They continued their frenzy — now in the void of space, their energy explosions no longer meeting any ground to absorb them, no longer contained by any seals. Divine beings releasing their power without restraint in open space.
The entire solar system became a battlefield.
Neighboring planets were struck — first by debris, then by energy waves, then by the soldiers themselves spreading through space without direction or objective. Stars that had existed for billions of years were reduced to cosmic dust in seconds.
It was the apocalypse.
Not because anyone had decided it.
But because no one could stop it.
Ignivar made his decision.
He turned to Sabelle.
« Coordinate with Aethron. Form units with every soldier still sane. The objective is no longer to save the infected — it is to immobilize them. »
Sabelle nodded.
« And you? »
He looked down.
The silhouette had stopped walking.
It was looking upward.
Toward him.
And in the eyes of that young man — even at this distance, even through the chaos and the dust and the explosions — Ignivar saw something.
Not threat. Not malice.
Curiosity.
As if he too was observing something interesting.
Ignivar tightened his grip on his lance.
His armor ignited — the scarlet flames of the Primordial Sun burning in his soul, contained since the beginning of all this, finally releasing. The space around him rippled, warmed, curved slightly under the pressure of his presence.
« Me, » he said simply.
He dove.
The descent was brief.
Ignivar crossed what remained of the planet's atmosphere — debris, rock fragments, shards of crystallized energy scattering in every direction — without slowing, without deviating. He passed through them, his armor absorbing or deflecting whatever lay in his path.
He landed.
Or rather — he stopped.
In the void of space, where the planet's surface had existed minutes before, he stood on nothing. His energy creating beneath his feet an invisible surface, an anchor in the fabric of reality that allowed him to stand upright as if touching ground.
And before him.
A few hundred meters away.
The silhouette.
It too stood in the void.
Not levitating. Not floating. Standing. As if space itself had decided to support it — not because it asked, but simply because that was how it was. Because the void and this being had a relationship that the ordinary laws of physics could not describe.
Hands behind its back.
Face calm.
Its eyes — those impossible eyes, those pupils forming symbols the mind could not retain — looked at Ignivar with that tranquil curiosity that had nothing of caution and nothing of arrogance.
Simply interest.
The silence between them was absolute.
Around them the solar system was collapsing — planets exploding, stars trembling under shockwaves, thousands of divine beings gone mad unleashing themselves in open space. An apocalypse that neither of them seemed particularly affected by.
Ignivar looked at him.
His rage was still there — that deep and controlled heat burning in his chest since he had watched his soldiers turn on each other. It did not disappear. But it did not control him either.
His mind was calm.
Like the surface of a lake on a clear day.
He tightened his lance in his hand.
The flames of his armor trembled — not in explosion, not in demonstration, just that natural tremor of something that burns and waits.
And in the void between two beings that nothing should ever have brought face to face, something prepared itself.
Something irreversible.