Silence settled over the battlefield in a way that felt almost unnatural.
Not the peaceful kind—there was nothing peaceful about what remained—but the exhausted stillness that followed catastrophe, when even the world itself seemed to pause and take stock of what had been lost.
High above the fort, the 9-star tamer hovered motionless, his gaze sweeping slowly across the ruins below.
From this height, the damage was impossible to ignore.
The northern section of the fort no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Towers had been flattened into jagged foundations, walls reduced to rubble and scorched stone. The ground itself had been torn apart and reassembled so many times by overlapping domains that it barely resembled terrain anymore. What had once been a defensive bulwark was now an open grave.
There were no survivors there.
Not among the defenders.
One hundred percent casualties.
The west and east were scarcely better.
