For a brief, suspended moment after the sound of my arm breaking echoed across the training field, everything seemed to fall into a strange and unnatural silence, as if even the world itself needed a heartbeat to understand what the hell had just happened. The crack of bone still rang in my ears. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. All I could feel was my arm... my arm... And then the pain came.
Not gradually, not in a way that allowed me to prepare for it, but all at once, like something inside me had shattered and sent fire racing through my veins. It consumed everything, climbing from my wrist to my shoulder in a violent wave that left me gasping, my vision blurring at the edges as my body instinctively tried to escape something it could not.
A broken sound tore from my throat befor
