Five minutes passed after their departure, and in that fragile, trembling stillness the forest dared to breathe again—though not freely—only in shallow, terrified gasps, as though the land itself feared that any fuller exhale might summon back the thing that had just violated it.

The cottage stood exactly as they had left it, quiet and outwardly untouched upon its hill, its walls straight, its roof unbroken, its silence perfect. Yet beneath that fragile mask, tension stretched thinner than a scream held behind clenched teeth—a lie waiting for the moment it would finally tear open.

Then—

Eira revealed herself.

She did not step out like she had been hiding... she was simply there, as though the world had briefly forgotten to render her and had only now remembered its mistake with a guilty flinch.

Her presence carried none of the suffocating, world-raping weight Sienna had unleashed, no violent distortion or crushing entropy. Yet the air bent subtly around her form—a quiet, surgical interference, precise and infinitely more controlled, like a scalpel sliding between the ribs of reality without ever alerting the body.

She exhaled softly.

Not relief.

Assessment.

Then she brought her hands together and the clap that came out was light.

Almost delicate.

But the world obeyed.

The invisible construct dome she had woven over the area—the false barrier layered so carefully to mimic the original, to delay discovery, to deceive even some celestial alert set by Maxtons meant to scream at the first sign of disruption—fractured instantly.

Not in violent shattering, but in quiet, final unraveling. Its threads snapped out of existence one by one like spider silk dissolving under invisible flame. The faint blue shimmer that had lingered around the area flickered once, violently—

and vanished.

Reality corrected itself with a wet, sucking sigh.

And in that same instant—something above noticed.

The sky tightened.

A pressure descended from on high, subtle at first, then catastrophic in its intent, as though an ancient and absolute eye had finally shifted its gaze downward and chosen a single point on the earth to punish.

The cottage trembled.

Not from within.

From above.

Then—

BOOOOOMMMM!

A figure fell from the sky like divine judgment given flesh and fury, his descent so impossibly fast that the air screamed in raw agony, compressing and tearing around him in a violent corridor of displaced atmosphere.

There was no grace, no controlled descent—only raw, overwhelming force carried in a single descending body that struck the hilltop with the weight of a falling god.

The cottage was erased.

The instant his feet touched ground, the entire structure detonated outward in a blooming cataclysm of splintered wood and atomized stone. Timber howled as it tore apart, beams snapping like brittle femurs, walls bursting into expanding waves of debris that were instantly seized by the shockwave and hurled screaming across the forest in every direction.

The hill itself it had once sat on fractured open beneath him, earth splitting in jagged, lightning-like fissures that raced outward like cracks racing across the shell of a dying egg. Trees at the clearing’s edge bent violently, trunks groaning before several were ripped free entirely, roots tearing from the soil in filthy sprays as they were flung backward like broken spears.

BOOOOOMMMM!

The sound arrived again—a thunderous, bone-deep roar that rolled outward across the forest, scattering unseen flocks into the sky and sending violent ripples through the canopy as leaves tore free in a sudden, golden-green storm and tearing the tress from the ground up creating a dead clearing like a nuclear bomb had fallen there.

And at the center of the devastation—

he stood.

Danton.

The Jörmungandr Prince.

His form remained perfectly still, rooted like an executioner in the heart of the ruin while the last remnants of the cottage rained down around him in a slow, pathetic drizzle of dust and splinters.

Dust rolled off his armor in lazy clouds, yet the plates themselves looked untouched, pristine, as though the annihilation he had just caused was beneath their notice. His mere presence forced the fractured ground into a tense, unnatural stillness, as if the earth itself was holding its breath beneath his boots.

His head lifted.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Eyes narrowing into slits of cold, merciless focus.

The air around him shifted as he inhaled—not deeply, not dramatically, but with surgical precision, breathing in information rather than oxygen. His gaze swept the ruins, sharp and unyielding, tracing every fractured line, every displaced fragment, every glaring absence that should not have existed.

But there was nothing.

No trace.

No scent.

No lingering imprint of power strong enough to follow.

The witch—gone.

Whoever had taken her—

gone.

The silence that followed was restrained.

From her unseen vantage, Eira watched him, her eyes narrowing slightly as she studied the coiled stillness wrapped around him like a second, tighter skin. On the surface there was nothing—no rage, no roar, no explosive retaliation to match the violence of his arrival.

But beneath that—

she felt it.

A pressure.

Contained.

Coiled.

Boiling in anger, are we?

His rage pressed outward from him in faint, almost imperceptible waves that rolled off him creating small waves that pushed the destroyed earth’s dust away from him each time he breathed—

It was the kind of presence that did not need to erupt to be understood.

It lingered in the way the air refused to settle near his body, in the subtle tremor running through the cracked earth at his feet, in the way reality itself seemed to brace, muscles tensed, waiting for the inevitable.

He did not move.

For one heartbeat longer he simply stood there, eyes scanning the nothingness left behind.

Then—

he shifted.

One step.

The ground responded.

Not with collapse.

With submission.

His leg bent slightly, muscles coiling beneath the stillness, not with visible effort but with absolute inevitability, as though the motion that followed had been decided eons before it began.

Then he launched up and the earth broke beneath him.

The ground detonated downward in a violent implosion as his body tore upward, launching into the sky with such catastrophic force that the air screamed again—a sharp, tearing wail as he displaced everything in his path.

The crater he left behind deepened instantly, soil and stone collapsing inward as though sucked down by the sudden vacuum of his absence.

Above—

the sky warped.

For a fraction of a moment space itself rippled and distorted under the sheer density and speed of his ascent, leaving behind a visible tear in the fabric of the air that only snapped shut long after he had already vanished beyond mortal sight.

The forest shuddered violently in his wake.

Leaves tore free in spiraling tempests, branches snapped like gunfire, the entire canopy writhing as though something immense and wrathful had just torn through its domain and left it struggling to remember how to be still.

Silence returned slowly.

Uneven.

Shaken.

Eira watched the empty sky long after he had disappeared, her expression shifting—not into fear, not into concern, but into something sharper, colder.

Recognition.

"...Impressive," she murmured softly, the words slipping into the unsettled air like a blade sliding home. "Danton... you’re stronger than Phei."

There was no doubt in her tone.

Only conclusion.

"In a fight..." she added quietly, almost to herself, "he’d lose."

Her eyes lowered slightly, not to the smoking ruins, not to the fractured earth—but to something far beyond both, something that had not yet happened but had already begun to take unmistakable shape.

"And that confrontation..."

A faint smile touched her lips.

Not amused.

Certain.

"...is inevitable."