For a single, silent moment, the universe was white.
It was not a color. It was the absence of everything else, a wave of pure erasure that consumed sound, thought, and sensation. For Lin Feng, at the absolute heart of the blast, it was a moment of perfect, terrible peace. He felt his own power, the lightning he had summoned, being devoured by the stellar nucleus core of the Titan. He felt the machine's energy surge back into him. He was the conduit, the bridge between two impossible forces, and the toll for crossing that bridge was his own existence.
Then the white collapsed, and reality returned with a scream.
The shockwave was not a sound; it was a physical blow that struck the joint task force miles away. It flattened tents, shattered the screens in the mobile command center, and threw warriors to the ground as if swatted by an invisible hand.
Diego felt it not in his ears, but in his soul. It was a raw, agonizing cry from the earth itself, a wound torn in the fabric of the desert. He scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide with a horrified awe, and looked towards the Alliance fortress.
Where the command hub had been, there was now a new, rising sun. A hemisphere of incandescent energy, roiling and unstable, pulsed outwards, vaporizing everything it touched. The sand for a kilometer around the blast was instantly turned to shimmering, molten glass.
Inside the Alliance fortress, what was left of it, chaos reigned. The command structure had been decapitated. All automated systems were fried. The Jackal mechs, their control links severed, stood motionless like steel statues in the swirling storm, some melting where they stood from the sheer radiant heat. The gene-modded soldiers, their comms dead, their orders gone, reverted to panicked, terrified men. The retreat was not a retreat. It was a rout. They scrambled for their transports, trampling their own wounded, a broken, terrified mob fleeing a hell of their own making.
"Advance teams! Go!" Diego roared, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of his own forces. "Search for him! Now!"
He led the charge himself, his LAAU warriors flowing over the dunes towards the epicenter. The heat was a physical barrier, but they pushed through, their faces wrapped in wet cloth. The scene that greeted them was apocalyptic. The fortress was a skeleton of twisted, melting steel, and at its heart was a new, glass-like crater, still glowing with a malevolent, crimson light.
They found Lin Feng at the very edge of this new crater. He was unconscious, his advanced EAC combat suit fused and blackened. Where his hands had been exposed, his skin was not burned, but covered in strange, glowing, crystalline patterns, like frost forming on a winter window. Faint, uncontrolled arcs of blue electricity still sputtered weakly from his body.
Diego and his men gently lifted the unconscious soldier, their faces a mixture of awe and grim respect for the man who had become a living bomb to win them the day.
As they carried him back, the first EAC medical teams, led by a pale-faced Mei-Ling, rushed to meet them. The victory was absolute. The Alliance was broken, their prize a poisoned, unstable ruin. But as Diego looked at the grim faces of his own warriors, at the makeshift med-tents that were already overflowing, and at the still, broken form of the man who had paid the highest price, the victory felt as empty and desolate as the desert around them. The ground beneath their feet trembled, and from the deep, newly exposed veins of the mine, the stellar nucleus crystals pulsed with a new, erratic, and deeply wounded light.