The impact didn’t look like destruction at first, it looked like light.

A single point ignited in the world, brighter than anything the wasteland had ever known. And for an instant, it erased every shadow, every scar, and every stain from the world.

The world was reduced to pure white, as if reality itself had been overexposed.

Then the light expanded.

Violently.

KABOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!

The fireball blossomed outward in a perfect sphere, swallowing everything in its path from machines to bodies to weapons, including the very air itself, igniting as it was consumed by the flames.

Oxygen was sucked from the atmosphere, creating a vacuum that briefly stole all sound from the world as heat surged across the land in a tidal wave, turning sand into glass, metal into liquid, and bone into nothing!

Then the shockwave followed- a wall of force that flattened what little still stood, racing across the wasteland faster than thought!

Dunes collapsed, ruins disintegrated, and the ground itself seemed to recoil, folding under the sheer violence of it.

And above it all, the mushroom cloud rose.

It was slow at first, almost majestic, then towering, boiling upward into the heavens like a flame defying fate. Its stem churned with ash and fire, its crown spreading wide like a monstrous canopy, blotting out the sky completely!

BZZZZZT!

Lightning zipped and flickered within it, with veins of energy ripping through the roiling mass in an epic show of spontaneous disintegration and destruction.

An entire ecosystem, if it could still be called that vanished in seconds!

All the occasional Neon Beasts prowling within miles, all the thousands of terrorists who participated in the great Exodus to save their leader, including the crawling things beneath the sand and the circling Neon Beasts in the toxic air, all of it was erased!

Not destroyed, not scattered. Erased.

Where there had been chaos, there was now only a widening circle of glass and shadow.

And at its center...

Nothing.

No sound, no movement, no life.

Just a silence so complete that it felt unnatural, as if the world itself had forgotten what used to be there.

The wasteland hadn’t just been scarred, it had been cauterized.

And the fire was still rising, while the radiation levels festered like a diabetic wound, spreading like a plague.

...

A few seconds before the ecosystem was erased, inside the Zerphyr-7 Stealth Reconnaissance UAV...

Enhance!

For the very first time since becoming a D Rank Ascended, Leon used Enhance on its largest ever scale as he used it to amplify the Zerphyr-7, pushing it to the absolute limits of its speed.

WHOOSH!

The stealth aircraft cut through the air like a blade cutting through space.

But despite its current speed and momentum, it was not fully safe as the nuke finally detonated behind them, spreading through the world like a plague.

The warning lights came alive before the blast did.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Inside the stealth aircraft, the cockpit erupted in crimson as alarms screamed and systems strained, with the hull creaking as if it could already feel the future rushing toward it.

Having crawled his way towards the cockpit area, Leon didn’t look back as he poured everything- all his ADE outwards, pushing it to its limits.

Yet, the instruments and alarms told him the truth.

The heat spiked, radiation surged, with the pressure anomaly climbing beyond measurable thresholds!

Behind him, the world was ending.

"MOVE!" He growled, not to anyone but to the Zerphyr-7 like it was a human and could hear him.

The engines howled in response.

The aircraft shot forward, skimming just above the fractured ground, kicking up trails of ash as it tore through the wasteland.

The controls fought him as the air currents twisted violently as if the sky itself had begun to convulse.

Then the light hit.

Even through the polarized glass and layered shielding of the Zerphyr-7, it flooded the cockpit with pure blinding white.

And for a fraction of a second, everything disappeared! And Leon became blind.

No horizon, no instruments, no world. Just a burning void.

The aircraft bucked hard, but it was just the beginning because the shockwave finally hit.

KABOOOMMMM!

It was not the full force yet, but the leading edge of it, a violent distortion slamming into the tail of the aircraft.

Immediately, the entire craft lurched sideways, metal screaming in protest even as warning indicators cascaded across the console, showing stability failure, control drift, and structural stress climbing into the red.

Leon gritted his teeth and forced the nose down, hugging the terrain.

’F*CK... COME ON!’ he snarled in his mind, hissing as his hands locked tight on the controls.

Behind him, the flames were expanding far faster than anything should.

It wasn’t just chasing, it was catching up as the sky itself quickly began to ripple like the surface of an ocean.

Air turned into a visible force, a wall folding inward on itself and devouring distance as the mushroom cloud surged upward, while its base- the hungry, expanding edge of the flames rolled outward with terrifying speed.

Closer, and closer still.

The aircraft’s systems started to fail in sequence.

External sensors blinked out, overwhelmed. Heat warnings escalated into critical thresholds. The rear camera flickered once and in that single, fluttering frame, Leon saw it.

He saw a horizon made of fire.

It was almost beautiful if it was not so terrifying, and it was right behind him.

The second impact came like a god’s fist as the full shockwave finally hit.

KABOOMMMMMMM!

CRKSH!

This time, the aircraft didn’t just shake, it was thrown violently and uncontrollably through the air!

The nose pitched up, then down, then spun as the pressure wave rolled over it. The sound was deafening and all-encompassing- a deep, crushing roar that seemed to come from inside their skull.

And for a moment, they were all flying inside the aircraft- falling in every direction at once as altitude dropped and their speed spiked!

No one screamed, they were all soldiers and they held it all in but in that moment, Leon was sure that even Lt. Colonel Umar Farouq saw death and flinched.

Beneath them, the ground rushed up to meet them, glassing over as the heat wave swept across it.

Sand liquefied into shining black mirrors beneath them!

It reflected the inferno in the sky.

"F*CK... COME ON...!" Leon growled as his ADE flared.

For a moment, he was beginning to regret pushing Dhruv Laden so hard but it was too late to regret now.

He fought the controls, pouring even more ADE in with Enhance to stabilize the vessel, dragging the aircraft back from the edge.

Leon felt that this current struggle was more intense than the fight that he had with the terrorist leader.

The Zerphyr-7’s engines sputtered, choking on superheated air before roaring back to life with a desperate surge.

The craft finally leveled, barely.

And behind them, the shockwave surged past, finally overtaking their position. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was close enough that it felt like the world had tried to close its hand around them and missed by inches.

The tail end of the blast clipped the Zerphyr-7, a glancing blow but it was enough to send the aircraft spiraling once more, alarms peaking into a single, continuous scream.

Then... it was over.

BADUMP! BADUMP!

Leon’s heart hammered hard and fast against his chest.

The pressure eased, the air became survivable again, and the blinding light dimmed just enough for the world to exist again.

Leon finally stabilized the aircraft, breath ragged, his hands trembling just slightly on the controls.

He looked at his companions.

They were drenched with sweat and were all trembling, including the Lt. Colonel who gritted his teeth on feeling his stare. He avoided his gaze.

Leon couldn’t even blame him, he was also traumatized by what just happened.

And finally, he looked back beyond the aircraft, and what he saw...

The wasteland behind him was gone.

In its place rose a towering pillar of fire and ash, boiling into the heavens, casting a shadow that stretched impossibly far.

Lightning crawled through it, corrupted ADE snaked like living tendrils through it, and the ground beneath it glowed like a wound that refused to close.

"We escaped..." he muttered in disbelief.

They escaped by seconds and by mere meters, by something so thin it barely counted as luck.

The aircraft shuddered as heavily damaged, it persevered and pushed forward into the darkening sky, leaving behind a world that had been erased, and the echo of destruction that Dhruv Laden left for the world.

Leon remembered the terrorist leader’s words, and he thought.

’A Glorious Exit indeed...’

DING!

~----~

[You have gained +203 Ascended Essence...]

~----~

...

[Special Appreciation to ImperialJadeDragon, r03n, and Roger_Pearson for the Golden Tickets!]