Far from the docks, but within the confines of the town, a single story house, gutted by fire, sat between completely undamaged houses. From the outside, the gutted building was identical to the actually intact ones. It was only once one entered the premises that the smell of burnt flesh would hit, a bit before the sight of a man meditating in the open center was visible. Every wall, floor, bit of furniture, or anything that would be a distraction from empty silence, was in fact not there, leaving behind the occasional lump of black char. To compare with an intact structure, there would be walls to hold up the ceiling at the very least, but instead there was a banding of metal extending up the outer walls to meet in the center of the roof. The only thing that wasn’t ash, shell of a building, or metal holding the appearance of an intact structure up was the person meditating near a fresh lump of char and a metal arm.

His cheek red, the man frowns in his meditation, eyes closed. Steam starts rising from his clothes as he sits still, and the air grows hotter. Suddenly, fire blasts out from his center, a wave of plasma devouring all the air in the giant room. The metal skeleton holding the building up contains the flames, preventing the blaze from escaping out into the rest of the city. Having experienced this multiple times before, the bands glow white with the heat, but this time, one of the beams shifts, melting under the heat. Without one of the pillars supporting the whole, the other lines of metal quickly follow suit as the heat is distributed to less total metal trying to contain it.

The man’s eyes open as the building collapses.

Fire suddenly extinguished when the entire container imploded, the only thing left is the single person standing in a pile of rubble. Having slapped aside the chunk of falling roof, he scowls harder, and picks up the metal arm next to him.

“I’m going to have to return the favor to Wang Yun,” he says, taking a step toward the streets, “but since it is time, might as well get my part over with.”

Waving his arm toward the remnants of the building he had so recently been sitting in, the man gestures toward the house in front of him. Following his upward movement, the molten metal buried below stone and mortar coalesce into shining balls that float around him, and with his second gesture one flies forward to crash into the residence. The orb smashes through the wall of the building, and explodes. Raw heat, enough to melt the metal in the first place, releases into the home and the entire place catches alight. Unlike the last building, this one didn’t have a cage containing the blaze.

Walking toward the docks, the man waves every few houses, leaving behind him a flaming trail of destruction.