BOOM.
The light didn't land so much as detonate.
It caught the creature's reaching arm dead center, and for one impossible instant the whole avenue turned white, every shadow burned out at once. The shockwave came a half second later, a wall of pressure that cracked every remaining window on the block and sent Jin's own hair whipping back from his face even from two hundred feet away. Loose signage tore free somewhere down the street and clattered end over end across the pavement.
The arm didn't just fold. It tore free entirely, spinning off into the dark in a long arc of splintered bark, and the rest of the creature went with the force that had ripped it loose, hurled backward down the avenue and through the front of a building hard enough to fold the whole wall inward around it. The building groaned, settled, and went still, a thin column of dust rising slow from the wound in its front.
