White.
Not ordinary white, but the kind that swallowed everything, drowned everything, and made people forget that the world had ever possessed color.
An instant—perhaps a breath, perhaps an eternity.
The white light slowly faded.
Immediately afterward, an orange-red fireball rose from the ground.
It expanded, expanded, expanded again, like the gates of hell opening upon the human world.
At the center of the fireball was blazing white, followed outward by orange-yellow, blood-red, dark red, and finally rolling black smoke at its edges.
Then—
BOOM!!!!
A shockwave traveling thousands of kilometers per hour came roaring in, leaving no possibility of escape.
Several F-22 Raptor fighter jets stood neatly lined up on the runway, each worth 150 million dollars. Now, they were like toys slapped away by a giant's palm.
Their wings snapped, their fuselages twisted, and their engines tore free from their mounts and rolled across the ground.
Aviation fuel ignited, turning into small fireballs that blossomed amid the larger inferno.
The massive fuel storage tanks were like paper before the shockwave. Their walls ripped apart, spewing tens of thousands of gallons of fuel.
Flames spread along the flowing fuel, and within seconds, the entire area became a sea of fire.
Explosions came one after another, each hurling even more debris into the sky.
The missiles, shells, and bombs stored in the ammunition depot were ignited at the same moment.
A Tomahawk cruise missile was thrown into the air by the blast wave and exploded a hundred meters above the ground, its fragments igniting even more explosions.
The soldiers who had not made it into the air-raid shelters knew nothing the instant the shockwave reached them.
Some were still running, their silhouettes frozen in the firelight. Some curled up in corners, believing they could escape disaster.
Some had just pushed