The blazing sun scorched the streets of Kahndaq. Before a magnificent dome undergoing renovation in the city center, the clamor of the marketplace was violently torn apart by a despair-inducing metallic snap.
The boom of a massive crane carrying a stone sculpture weighing dozens of tons suddenly broke at its base. Its enormous shadow enveloped the panicked crowd below like the cloak of death.
People scattered in a frantic rush, but at the center of the collapse, a middle-aged man's legs were pinned beneath fallen scaffolding. The mountainous stone was about to crush him to a pulp.
"Father!"
With a heart-rending scream, a teenage boy charged madly against the fleeing crowd.
With a heart-rending scream, this teenage boy did not flee like everyone else. Instead, he charged madly back against the crowd.
He knew he could neither move the scaffolding nor pull his father free.
In the final fraction of a second before the stone fell, the boy closed his eyes and spread his arms, shielding his father's head with his frail body of flesh and blood as he calmly faced death.
Boom-!
At that critical instant, a dazzling bolt of golden lightning suddenly struck down from the sky.
Violent lightning exploded less than half a meter above the boy's head, and time seemed to freeze.
The stone weighing dozens of tons, heavy enough to smash through the entire street, stopped in midair.
Teth-Adam hovered amid the swirling dust and flashes of lightning.
Kahndaq's guardian deity had extended just one hand to hold the deadly stone steady, as though lifting a feather.
Then, with a casual sweep of his hand, he hurled the stone with a gust of wind onto an empty patch of ground over a hundred meters away, where it landed with a deafening thud.
The boy who