The halo finished forming and nothing happened.
It just hung there, three rings deep, pulsing in slow rhythm above the Reaver's skull, and the silence that followed was worse than any attack Noah had braced for. The wind itself seemed to hold still, the smoke from the burning wreckage drifting upward in unnaturally straight columns, like the air had forgotten how to move on its own.
"You're the one who knows dragons," the General said. "What's it doing."
"I've never seen anything like this," Noah said. "Not from Nyx, not from Storm. Nothing in my catalogue prepared me for whatever this is."
The Reaver's neck bent backward.
It roared, and the sound carried something underneath the fury this time, something closer to genuine agony, and Noah watched the heartbeat become visible through its chest, a massive rhythmic bulge pushing outward against the scale with every contraction, faster than any organ that size should have been capable of moving.
[BIOLOGICAL OVERRIDE DETECTED]
