The swimming stirred ripples across the water, which lapped against his body.
**[Because of his swimming, ripples formed in the water, which travelled and touched the body.]**
{What happened next was beyond anyone's imagination.}
While Moras ran, panting heavily, a full minute and twelve seconds had ticked by. His heart felt like it was about to burst—he was sprinting at such a furious pace that he'd already covered more than five kilometres.
In six seconds, absolute silence descended. The clouds halted in the sky; the wind fell still. Across an expanse of 150,000,000,000 square meters, everything that existed there went quiet—everything froze, and everything grew warm. All the animals stopped dead, the birds wheeled upside down in the air. In that moment, within that vast area, only two souls remained aware, witnessing it all and feeling its weight.
{The earth itself began to count.}
One…Two…Three…Four…Five…Six
{Due to the water freezing solid, they swelled and expanded, forming mountains all around—each one two and a half kilometres high—that began to resemble vast basins, which had spread across 25 kilometres. Steam erupted from between them, shooting up several kilometres into the sky. But the temperature there was slightly milder, warmed by the sunlight, which caused the steam to drift slowly downward. Fog soon blanketed the surrounding thousands of square kilometres, the harbinger of temperatures plummeting to -75 degrees.}
57-megaton blast ripped that place asunder. The ground shuddered for 37 kilometres in every direction. In the blink of an instant—less than a second—the river vaporized into steam. The mountains of ice themselves dissolved into billowing clouds of it, which cooled against the rushing wind and condensed into droplets of water. Those droplets plummeted 21 kilometres away, freezing solid the moment, they met the bone-chilling cold, unleashing a savage hailstorm upon the land.
**[The place exploded with a force of 57 megatons. The ground shook up to 37 km away. The river turned into steam in a fraction of a second. All the mountains of ice turned into steam, and that steam, floating through the air, turned into water. And those water droplets travelled 21 km before falling, whereupon they instantly froze in the extremely low temperature and turned into ice, beginning a rain of hail.]**