***
{Outside The Projection}
As was usual, the crowd didn't know what to say.
Not because there was nothing to say, but because there was too much.
Too many thoughts ran wild in their heads. Too many emotions trying to tear their way out of their mouths all at once.
They were absolutely stunned. Speechless. Lost for words. Dumbstruck. Tongue-tied. Dumbfounded. Shell-shocked. Astounded. Flabbergasted. And simply gobsmacked.
They were far from okay.
The build-up to what they had just seen had already floored them. But this?
It was beyond the floor. Somewhere underground, inside the core of the earth, knees shaking from the aftershocks.
Malik's ascension into a Great Demon.
Another achievement in his long list of impossibles.
He had done this particular 'achievement' twice.
Twice.
And it was somehow even worse.
Absorbing an opposite-element core was suicide.
They could not understand how he had even survived, never mind succeeded.
