I should've felt relief.
I should've collapsed, satisfied that—for once—we stopped something before it destroyed us all.
But instead… I stood frozen, staring up at the sky as the world came undone.
It began in silence.
No more Nomu. No more Joker.
No more clones of heroes with hollow eyes.
Just glowing ash raining down from the skies like snowflakes lit on fire.
But then…
The wind turned.
Not a breeze.
A shift.
Like the air had decided it no longer belonged to this world.
And then came the crack—not thunder, not lightning. Reality tearing at the seams.
Zane gripped my shoulder. "What did you do?!"
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
Because the sky was no longer blue or gray.
It was white—blinding and swirling, a vortex stretching across the horizon.
And at its center… the place where the Genesis Flame detonated—was gone.
Erased.
The rift, the tech, the Nomu hordes—all of it sucked into the flame like they never existed.
I could feel it—gravity bending, the air turning thick, unbreathable.
The clouds above rippled, distorted, and then—
Boom.
The storm hit.
Not like rain.
Not like thunder.
Like vengeance.
Tornadoes formed out of raw wind and arcane energy, spiraling upward instead of down, creating inverted funnels of destructive force. Lighting snapped in unnatural colors—purple, gold, black. Earthquakes rippled from the detonation point, and something deep below Tokyo shifted, like an ancient giant waking from slumber.
Then came the water.
Tsunamis.
Rushing from the distant edges of the coastlines, walls of ocean hundreds of feet tall, crashing into the ruined sectors surrounding us like fists made of liquid steel.
My ears rang.
I heard screaming—but I didn't know if it was mine.
Or the world's.
"Anos!!" someone shouted behind me.
I turned, barely processing the faces through the wind and chaos.
Diamond, limping. Riley shielding her eyes with frozen mist swirling around her. Marcus dragging a barely-conscious Ryan behind him.
My friends.
All of them looking at me like I was no longer the boy they once knew.
Like I had become something else.
And maybe I had.
The storm raged harder.
We braced behind a crumbling structure as shards of ice rained from above. I could hear comms flaring again, survivors reporting mass blackouts, unnatural tides, electromagnetic pulses frying half the satellites still left in the sky.
"What the hell did you throw?!" Marcus yelled through the wind.
I clenched my jaw. "Something that was never supposed to be used."
Riley's voice was soft. "Is it over…?"
We all looked up.
The Nomu were gone.
The clones, the Joker—vanished, consumed by the Genesis Flame.
No trace.
And yet—
I felt none of the peace that should've followed.
Zane moved beside me, arms crossed, watching the chaos twist around the world we were trying to save.
He said what we were all thinking:
"Did we win?"
No one answered.
Because behind us, the storm grew louder.
Nature itself was lashing out now. Hurricanes had formed on the radar.
Tornadoes touched down in parts of the city untouched by war.
And people were dying—not from villains—but from the aftermath of what I'd unleashed.
My chest tightened.
I had done this.
No.
I had chosen this.
In order to stop hell, I might've ripped open something worse.
I looked out at the wreckage, the sky twisting like a living creature, and asked the one question that burned hotter than flame in my chest:
"If we had to destroy the world to save it… what did we really save?"
And the silence that followed said everything.