The battlefield offered no celebration of victory. It neither roared nor trembled in triumph; it simply lay there, broken, scorched, and gutted, like a corpse too vast for mourning.
Once a sovereign domain ruled by fire and abyss, it had become a wasteland stripped of identity, its very geography erased by violence so extreme that even the land seemed reluctant to remember what it once was.
Craters overlapped like scars upon scars, molten rock cooling into jagged obsidian veins while residual mana storms drifted aimlessly above, spiraling without purpose like the last breaths of a dying god.
At the center of this devastation stood Valeria. She leaned heavily against her sword, the massive crimson blade embedded deep in the ruined ground, its edge chipped and dulled from the most brutal battle of her life.
