The silence that followed Zorak's complete erasure from existence wasn't just the absence of sound—it was the absence of challenge itself. Word traveled faster than light across dimensional barriers, carried by trembling witnesses and whispered through quantum communications networks that spanned entire reality clusters. The message was simple, brutal, and absolute: do not mess with Elias Vance and his business.
It wasn't a law written in any cosmic charter or enforced by any galactic authority. It was something far more fundamental—a truth that embedded itself into the very consciousness of every being powerful enough to matter. Multiversal entities who had once observed his rise with casual interest now found themselves unable to even look directly at his holographic advertisements without feeling an instinctive chill. The kind of primal fear that reminded apex predators what it felt like to be prey.
