Boer sat cross-legged in the air above the Execution Platform.
The dimensional boundary of the Real World wrapped him in a transparent cocoon, filtering the smoke and thunder of the material world into distant echoes.
Electromagnetic Extrasensory Perception covered the entire harbor like a sea without floodgates, pouring every wavelength, every vital sign, every electrical signal struggling on the brink of death into his consciousness.
He could see the trembling knuckles of Marine soldiers gripping their weapons.
Their fingers had turned white in the sea breeze, machine oil from cleaning their guns that morning lodged between them, old injuries from farmwork back home marking the edges of their nails.
He could see the despair in the pirates' eyes before the cannon fire struck.
There was no anger in those eyes, no resentment, only an inescapable blankness suddenly magnified in those final fractions of a second.
The battlefield teemed with furious shouts, anguished wails, dying gasps, and tiny heartbeats that no one heard, even at the end.
A soldier whose lung had been pierced by a stray bullet convulsed on the ice. His vocal cords could no longer produce a sound, but his faint heartbeat still reached deep into Boer's senses with perfect clarity through Electromagnetic Extrasensory Perception. Once, twice, three times, four. It stopped.
Electromagnetic Extrasensory Perception did not filter.
It simply delivered every scream, every broken bone, every breath flecked with blood from the entire battlefield into Boer's sensory nerves, faithfully, ruthlessly, omitting nothing and changing nothing.
He watched a pirate's blade pierce a young Marine soldier's abdomen. The soldier was still so young. As he fell, his vocal cords vibrated one last time, his lips forming the word "Mom."
He watched a pirate lose both legs to a shell and crawl across the ice toward the sea, dragging