"Boom!"
The air was instantly compressed and exploded by the immense kinetic force, forming a ring of visible white shockwaves.
Michael's figure shot forward like a solid shell fired from heavy artillery, ruthlessly smashing through the air resistance in her path.
The golden force field that had originally protected her, those defensive arrays woven from countless intricate runes, now looked as though they had suffered a dimensional strike.
Golden fragments of light exploded through the air like dying fireflies, flickering miserably and briefly before vanishing into nothingness.
Amid this rain of collapsing golden particles, a figure tore past the limits of retinal perception.
Dark-red muscle fibers dragged afterimages through the air, while savage bone spurs tore through the wind pressure.
Dago abruptly appeared along the flank of Michael's backward flight path, as though he had been standing there all along, waiting for his prey to crash into him.
His dark-red hair danced like living creatures, its tips passing within an inch of Michael's widening, terrified pupils.
Time seemed to have been forcibly slowed by some higher-dimensional power.
Michael's cervical vertebrae let out strained cracks as she laboriously turned her head.
Their gazes met.
She crashed into a pair of scarlet, demonic vertical pupils.
There was no anger, no fanaticism—only the calm, rational, and faintly inquisitive indifference of someone dissecting a frog.
It was the unique coldness of a higher life-form looking down upon a lower-dimensional creature, the most fundamental contempt for the very concept of "life."
A trembling from the depths of her soul climbed madly up her spine. Michael felt her once-proud bloodline freeze in that instant.
In the next frame, that suffocating moment of eye contact suddenly shattered.
The flow of real time snapped back at once.
Several dark-red snowflakes drifted past Michael's eyes, carrying a dense smell