The Aegis camp was no longer a military installation; it was a charnel house of glass and scorched earth. The silence that followed the explosion of the "Silence" frequency was more deafening than the roar of the atmospheric cannons had been. Smoke, thick with the scent of ozone and burnt hair, swirled around the ruins of the command center where General Vance’s dreams of a "sanitized" world had finally been reduced to ash. The remnants of his elite "Purge Squads" had vanished into the treeline, leaving behind high-tech toys—shattered drones, cooling thermal rifles, and tactical HUDs—that flickered with dying red lights like malevolent eyes in the dark.
I knelt in the center of the devastation, my knees sinking into the soot-stained snow. Beside me, Killian lay in his human form, a sigh
