"What do you mean," the man standing by the king asked, his face shining through the small opening in his robe, "what's different about this attack that you can't defend against?"
It was the pope, holding the same staff that he kept alongside him in the carriage ride.
"Look, feel for the ambient energy. Don't you notice something amiss," Corien asked, pointing to the area surrounding the ball of energy.
To everyone else, it just seemed to be the same destruction as before--space-rending as it was, but Corien could tell.
And it made his skin crawl.
"This time, it's different. Before, he'd used a combination of Ryudo and Nendo to produce the gravity-defying effects that he held, but he's accumulating something within his palms that I'm not sure I could even call 'energy.'"
Corien prompted everybody else to observe the blast one more time, this time guiding them to the aether surrounding it.
"What..." Lucien questioned, stepping back.
"So, you see it hero?"
