The silence that followed Apollo's question was not a void; it was a pressurized chamber, a heavy, suffocating weight that seemed to squeeze the very oxygen from the lungs of everyone present. It was the kind of silence that precedes a tectonic shift, the momentary, terrifying stillness before the earth groans and the mountains begin to crack.
Rex counted the seconds.
'One.' The air felt thick, like breathing liquid lead.
'Two.' He could hear the frantic, rhythmic thrumming of his own pulse in his ears.
'Three.' He watched a single bead of sweat trace a slow, agonizing path down the temple of the Apostle representative sitting across from him.
'Four.'
Then, the room broke.
It wasn't a sudden explosion of noise but a controlled, cascading collapse, the specific, jagged way a structure fails when its foundation has been pulverized. It was a fracture spreading through glass, a series of sharp, overlapping cracks that signaled the end of the world as they knew it.
