A kilometer of rock below the market square, Kaiden Grey had just brought the Blood Monarch's Gauntlet down on the Kawanami dungeon's core, and the first the surface knew of it was the light.
The violet glow drained out of the parted barricade between one axe-swing and the next.
Calypso's blade was already committed, mid-arc into a shell-boar's charge, and the boar simply was not there to receive it. Its legs had quit. It hit the flagstones on its chin, slid the last two meters into her shins, and did not get up, because nothing in the square was getting up anymore.
The horde died where it stood.
Hounds dropped mid-leap. Mantids folded off the barricade halves in rows, hook-limbs curling inward like burnt paper.
The wave that had been breaking against Alexandra's wall of light for the better part of an hour sagged, knelt, and lay down, hundreds of bodies letting go of their own weight in one rolling hush that swept the square from the gate outward.
