From the smoke emerged the Demon King. His golden armor was fractured; a bony arm hung inert, throwing off sparks of dark energy. But his combat will remained intact. He kept walking, an unstoppable war machine.
Hok Nerris, the survival professor, dealt with the Gravitational Crystalline Mass. The monster had grown in volume after assimilating remains of machinery and biomass from the fallen. Its body was now an irregular polyhedron of dense crystal, where human faces screamed under the translucent surface in eternal agony. Gravity in a fifty-meter radius had become prohibitive: the air was so heavy that it burned the lungs upon inhalation and metal fragments were drawn toward the core of the creature to be pulverized by hydrostatic pressure.
