But the moment Sebastian's boots hit the red stone, the screaming stopped.
The silence that fell over Tartarus was heavier than gravity. It was the suffocating, profound quiet of a trillion entities suddenly realizing that the door to their cage had just been kicked open.
Slowly, in eerie, horrifying unison, a trillion pairs of eyes turned.
From the closest iron spires just a hundred yards away, to the massive, mountain-sized needles miles in the distance, every single crucified soul stopped writhing. They lifted their skinned, bleeding, pixelated heads, and they looked directly at the entrance.
They looked at the towering monster of black static and the woman of blue light.
The sheer, unadulterated weight of a trillion desperate, agonizing stares pressing against his avatar made even Sebastian's optimized brain stutter for a microsecond. It was a suffocating ocean of attention. They weren't looking at him with anger. They were looking at him with absolute, starving disbelief.
