You reach past the glittering clouds of probability, and find the particle-waves. There is beauty in the whirling clouds on their endless dance, and it distracts you for a moment. But then you push on, bearing down with your will, and the particles waver.
Anticipation stretches your face into a feral grin, and you clench your hand.
The particles flip.
Too late, you see your mistake.
You overreached.
Millions, billions, trillions, are chump change compared to what you do. What you can do.
Antimatter blooms out of thin air, out of the fabric of the pavement, of the surroundings at your command. Nearly a kilogram, all told, none of which takes kindly to finding itself surrounded by ordinary matter. There is a brief moment of conflict at the subatomic level, to the mutual demise of both matter and antimatter.
Just over half the energy is wasted as proton and antiproton annihilation creates charged pions which evaporate harmlessly into muons and neutrinos. Mass-energy equivalence is a harsh mistress, however, and half of forty megatons of TNT equivalent is still a lot of energy. Waves of gamma rays and other, more exotic particles sleet out, more than enough to superheat the air past the temperature of the sun.
You are, briefly, at the center of a nuclear fireball that rockets up to millions of degrees Kelvin in a split second, before magically toughened flesh is stripped from bone and the bone ablates to dust. By some quirk of magic, your Soul Gem lasts a little longer before it melts to slag.
Not much longer, really.
Not even a microsecond.
The blast wave ripples out at over ten times the speed of sound, hammering buildings and unfortunate people out in the street with impunity. Glass, concrete, and steel fare poorly, and skyscrapers crumble.
There's a moment for Homura to flinch at the sudden, unbearably bright light that sears her back and ignites her hair before the blast wave hits. Her magically enhanced body is tough enough not to be immediately pulped, but her impact against the wall is enough.
Madoka happens to be unlucky enough to be looking in the direction of the old industrial district. Her eyeballs burn out in the titanic flash of light, but it's hardly a concern when the school building collapses, entombing her, Mami and Sayaka besides.
Minutes later, a small, white alien manifests a hardened body, and observes the mushroom cloud rising over the ruins of Mitakihara. Crashes and rumbles reach its auditory organs as buildings continue to crumble in the aftermath. Perched on a piece of steel barely identifiable as the warped and melted remains of an I-beam, it tilts its head in a learned behaviour and considers the situation. Insofar as it can be said to have emotions, it is surprised, or rather, one of the anomalies that had been plaguing it had decisively resolved itself, along with two others, in a way that had been considered to have a low probability of occurring.
The Incubator hops off the I-beam and vanishes. The repercussions of this event will reverberate around the world, leaving it and its ilk with plenty to do in the coming months and years.
