The cracks kept spreading.
They raced outward from Do-yun's fists through the empty air, white and jagged and splintering, until the space in front of him looked like a window someone had thrown a brick through. For one strange, silent heartbeat, everything seemed to hang there, the cracks, the dust, Beom-seok frozen with his rope half wound.
Then the air broke.
The sound hit first, a deep, heavy boom that Do-yun felt more in his teeth than his ears. Then the force came, and it didn't travel the way his pulses usually did, pushing out in a single direction. It went everywhere at once. The whole shattered patch of air collapsed outward like a building falling in every direction, and the stage shook so hard that the dead stumps jumped straight out of the ground.
