Huge chunks of black rock broke away from the main mass one after another, trailing long tails of dark purple flame as they plunged into the sea and sent waves hundreds of meters high surging upward.
The beam continued downward, piercing the last remaining cloud above the Sabaody Archipelago.
The instant the beam struck the sea, everything at the point of contact vanished.
Seawater for tens of thousands of meters around evaporated, was erased, was forcibly stripped away in an instant, exposing the dark depths of the seabed below.
The moment the beam grazed the seabed, the solid rock vaporized, leaving a vast, bottomless hole.
For several seconds after the beam pierced the sea, a void opened across the waters.
The sea was gone. The seabed was gone. The beam that pierced heaven and earth had wiped it all away.
Then the beam faded.
Only a few breaths had passed between its appearance and its disappearance.
Yet in those few breaths, the sky and sea around the entire Sabaody Archipelago had been transformed.
Where the beam had pierced the sea, a vast hole thousands of meters across was filling as the surrounding waters rushed back in. Waves surged from every direction, colliding, churning, and tearing at one another until they formed wall after twisted wall of water.
But the meteorite had not been completely destroyed.
The beam had pierced its core, punching a hole hundreds of meters wide straight through its center. Yet roughly a third of the main mass remained, and it was breaking apart, disintegrating, and falling with no way to stop it.
It was no longer a single meteorite. It had become a rain of hundreds of massive fragments that covered the entire sky.
The fragments were falling. The largest were hundreds of meters across and descended