Kruel laughed.
And laughed.
And then his legs gave.
Not dramatically. Not a collapse. Just his knees hitting the alien stone one after the other, the weight of him coming down slowly, his hands finding the ground in front of him, and he was on all fours in the crater he had made and the laughter was still coming out of him in short bursts, each one shaking his frame, black blood dripping from his mouth and hitting the alien stone beneath him in a steady rhythm.
The hole in his chest was still there.
The void didn't close. That was the thing about erasure. It didn't damage. It removed. And what was removed didn't come back the way damaged tissue came back, the regeneration finding nothing to rebuild because there was nothing left to build from, just absence where something had been.
He was still laughing.
He started to crawl backward.
