Black lightning erupted from the metal.
Not a single bolt. Not a directed strike. An eruption - omnidirectional, explosive, the energy detonating outward from the staff's head in arcs that branched and split and branched again, filling the room's airspace with a lattice of crackling dark light laced with veins of deep, arterial red. The arcs moved fast and without pattern, each one finding its own path through the chamber, striking whatever they reached first and moving on.
Glass shattered. The panels along the walls exploded inward, their surfaces fragmenting into clouds of razor-edged particles that scattered across the floor. But the glass didn't just break - it disintegrated, each shard crumbling further into dust before it landed, as if the energy hadn't merely exceeded the material's structural limit but had found and exploited its specific molecular weakness.
