The sky over Jiangnan didn't look like a sky anymore. It looked like a broken mirror, reflecting the fire from the falling battleship and the purple static of the dying rift. Below, in the ruins of the Central Plaza, the silence was heavier than the roar of the engines.
Xin had done it. He had caught the ship. But the price was written in the blackened concrete where he lay.
He wasn't a god now. He wasn't even a soldier. He was just a boy in a torn, gray shirt, his body smoking from the sheer friction of stopping ten thousand tons of falling steel. The "Clear Light" that had saved him in the Underground Trial was gone, used up in one final, impossible act of protection.
"Xin! Get the med-kit! Move!" Captain Han’s voice was the first thing to break the silence.
The Resistance soldie
