Three days after the fall, the ruins were still smoking as residual holy light energy continued reacting with the building materials.
A seven-member demon hunter squad was searching the edge of the ruins for survivor signals.
Their captain was a woman in her forties named Jane Hawkins, her arm wrapped in a bandage soaked through with blood.
Three days earlier, during a firefight with a Bartholomew Faction angel in Hackney District, a holy light blade had sheared off half her shoulder blade. The field medic had injected her with a high-grade enhancement drug urgently dispatched by the guild. Her wound was slowly healing, but every breath felt like someone was hammering against her chest.
"Here!" The young team member James lay at the edge of a slanted concrete slab, reaching into a gap. "There's someone here. She's still alive!"
Jane hurried over and dropped to one knee.
The gap was narrow. Her flashlight barely illuminated an upside-down figure two meters below—a girl in her early twenties, her legs pinned beneath a collapsed floor slab, her face deathly pale and her lips dry and cracked.
"Help... help me..." Her voice was so weak it was almost inaudible.
"James, hold me." Jane removed her weapons belt, took a deep breath, and lowered her upper body into the gap.
The jagged rebar along the concrete edge scraped against her wound, and the pain blackened her vision.
Gritting her teeth, she reached toward the girl.
"Take my hand."
The girl desperately raised an arm.
Just as their fingertips were about to touch, a sharp whistle tore through the air above. A blue-white spear of light descended from the sky and punched straight through the floor slab where the girl was trapped!
The shockwave hurled Jane out of the gap and slammed her into a