Chapter 642: Booms, Cracks, and Thunderclap

Zanya said. "I think we should be very serious about killing him now."

Then she addressed the small girl directly. "Frigoris. Kill him."

The girl gave a single, small nod, then she crouched low to the ground, her small hands pressing against the broken stone, and the air around her began to grow unnaturally cold.

The moment her feet left the ground, the earth itself seemed to reject her weight as though she were something unnatural, something that did not belong in the world of ordinary gravity and ordinary limits.

Stone plates cracked and flew upward in a sudden, violent burst, shards spinning into the air like shrapnel as her small frame launched skyward with a force that defied the modest size of her body.

In less than a heartbeat—in a span of time so brief that most eyes would have registered nothing but a blur, a smear of motion against the gray sky—she had risen to the same height as Benjamin, her trajectory raising her above the rooftops, above the smoke and wreckage of what had once been a thriving block of tenements and shops.

She landed lightly on the edge of a tall building whose upper floors still stood amid the surrounding ruin, a lone survivor of whatever catastrophe had claimed its neighbors.

The rooftop groaned beneath the abrupt arrival, the wood complaining in low, mournful tones as though the structure itself understood it had just become the stage for something it could not survive.

Benjamin turned toward her at once—not slowly, not with the sluggish surprise of a man caught off guard, but immediately, fluidly, as though he had already known the exact angle and timing of her ascent.

Their fists met in the center of the open roof.

The impact produced a single, rolling BOOOOOMMM that shook the entire block—not a sharp crack, not a quick report, but a deep, sustained thunder that rolled outward in every direction, rattling windows for streets in all directions, sending birds exploding from what few trees remained standing in the ruined district.

The force traveled downward through every support beam and load-bearing wall, through every weld and bolt that held the structure together.

The building did not merely collapse—it came apart. It unzipped itself from top to bottom.

Floors sheared away from one another like pages torn from a book, outer walls peeled outward and fell in great, grinding sheets, and the whole structure dropped in on itself in a cascading roar of stone and timber that seemed to go on and on, each floor triggering the next in an unstoppable chain of destruction.

A dense cloud of gray dust and pulverized masonry erupted outward, swallowing the street below and reducing visibility to only a few meters, a choking, blinding fog that turned the world into shapes, shadows, and the sound of things still falling.

Neither fighter paused to watch the destruction.

Frigoris was already in motion again—her small body cutting low and fast through the choking haze, through the dust that should have slowed her, should have forced her to cough and stumble, but did neither.

Benjamin matched her pace exactly, step for step, the two of them exchanging blows that cracked the air and sent further chunks of debris spinning away like leaves caught in a storm.

High above, Saharit adjusted her position in the sky, her staff glowing with a golden light as she tracked the narrow windows in Benjamin’s defense, the brief openings that appeared and vanished in the space between heartbeats.

Whenever a gap appeared—even for a fraction of a second, even for the time it took to blink—she released sharp golden projectiles that streaked downward like burning spears and meteors.

Most missed by inches as Benjamin twisted or leapt; the few that came close forced him to alter his footing on the shifting rubble, to adjust his balance on ground that was still moving and deciding whether it wanted to be solid or not.

The exchange had become a three-sided storm of pure speed and power.

Limbs moved faster than ordinary eyes could follow—faster than the human brain could process.

Impacts arrived before the sound of the previous collision had finished echoing, so that the battle created its own soundtrack, a overlapping cascade of booms, cracks, and thunderclaps that never quite resolved into individual sounds.

To anyone without heightened senses the battle would have looked like little more than bright, violent blurs and successive shockwaves tearing through the already ruined area, a natural disaster that happened to have fists.

There was no room for hesitation, or space for a slower combatant to intervene without being crushed in the crossfire, or being reduced to a notable red, pulpy stain on the rubble by forces they could not hope to match.

That isolation was perfect. No one in authority had any desire to summon knights from the greater city of Thaad—no one wanted to admit that the situation had grown beyond their ability to contain, that the district’s own protectors were helpless to stop what was happening in the ruins.

Bringing outside forces into the district would only place more risk and drag the conflict into businesses that still held illegal and forbidden operations.

Better to let the storm remain contained within the damaged zone already written off as lost, already marked on the maps as abandoned, and mourned by those who had once called it home.

And so the fight continued without interruption while the ordinary people of Lot simply prayed they would not be unlucky enough to stand in its path.

Doors stayed barred, shutters remained closed. Those who could move farther away did so quietly and without looking back, taking what they could, leaving what they could not, and trying not to think about the sounds that followed them.

******

To my complete shock, after I had delivered the group who called themselves the Apex Girls to the gates of the city and watched them walk away with cheerful waves, they somehow managed to retrace the route all the way back to my own front door.

That same day they stood on my threshold as though they belonged there and informed me firmly, that they would be remaining under my roof until they located the person they had come to find.