The transition from the blood-soaked, heavily armored Aegis Gate into the civilian sector of the Citadel was a jarring, almost nauseating shift in localized reality.
As Ren completely tore the massive, hundred-foot-tall blast doors off their reinforced hinges, the oppressive darkness of the three-mile vertical shaft was violently banished. A massive, overwhelming wave of warm, heavily synthesized sunlight poured over his pitch-black, tungsten-sheened armor.
He stepped through the ruined threshold.
The Citadel was not a series of cramped, concrete bunkers. It was a sprawling, twelve-mile-wide subterranean utopia, carved perfectly into the planetary bedrock. Massive, pristine white skyscrapers stretched up toward a colossal, vaulted ceiling entirely coated in hyper-advanced, localized LED panels that perfectly simulated a clear, noon-day Old World sky.
