Northern's body cut through the air like a blade, cleaving the atmosphere as he soared higher into the sky, his figure blurring with velocity.
In a heartbeat, he halted abruptly and fixed his gaze on the rift with its strange blanket of darkness looming above the city, partially veiling the sky in an eerie mist.
He furrowed his brows as he studied the rift. The massive burnt hand of the abomination hung lazily outside, resembling a titan that had failed to squeeze through a tiny hole—its colossal hand trapped in the breach, unable to retreat inside yet incapable of fully emerging.
The whole scene defied logic and reason.
Everything about rifts and monsters was inherently unnatural, but that unnaturalness had—in this world—become a twisted kind of normal. So within that new normal, this situation stood out as particularly wrong.
'...very, very wrong.'
Several possibilities could explain this anomaly.
