She was floating above them with a smile on her face, looking down at all of them with nothing but pity in her eyes. Nobody wanted to admit it out loud, but they were all scared, and she could sense every bit of that fear from all the way up in the sky.
"Do you understand it now?" She smiled. "I'm not like those rats you fought before. I'm the one you people should be seeing as your god."
The field was open; corpses spread across it in every direction. The only soldiers left standing were the ones strong enough to still be on their feet, but even their combined presence meant nothing against what they were facing. She was something else entirely. Something none of them could stop, and the only thing any of them could think about was what she was going to do next.
Because it was clear she was holding back. Whatever she had shown them so far wasn't everything she had, not even close. There were only seven of them left against her, and every single one of them had their eyes on Seth. Whatever Seth decided next, the rest of them were going to follow.
But Seth said nothing.
She just stared down at them without making a single move, and they all started to wonder why. For her it was simple. She was waiting for them to move first so she could toy with them some more. That's all this was to her.
Seth stepped forward.
He reached down, picked up the staff, and threw it onto the ground. The sound of it hitting the earth and slowly rolling away caught everyone's attention at once. Some of them were confused. Others understood immediately, and the ones who understood dropped their weapons too.
All except two.
Samuel and Grey stood where they were and just stared at Seth as he dropped to his knees and pressed his face into the ground.
"I accept you as my god." Seth's voice came out muffled against the dirt. "Please spare us all, mighty one. I swear I'll dedicate my entire being from now on to pleasing you with whatever you desire."
He pushed his forehead harder into the ground and could feel the roughness of the earth against his skin.
Everyone else followed. One by one they dropped and bowed in front of her.
Everyone except Samuel and Grey.
What is this. Samuel couldn't move. Why are they doing this. These people swore they'd sacrifice their lives for this earth and now they're worshipping her.
His legs were shaking. He didn't know what he was supposed to do and his body wasn't giving him any answers, so he just stood there completely still, unable to do anything at all.
Grey was the same. She didn't know whether to run or bow like everyone else but she knew one thing clearly. She had never been this scared in her entire life.
"No."
The woman spoke from above.
"No, no, no, no, no, no."
She let out a small laugh before lowering herself slowly toward the ground. Her smile faded as her feet touched the earth and her expression settled into something flat and completely unreadable, her eyes going straight to Samuel's.
"No," she said one more time.
The wind moved across the field hitting her hair and her clothes in the same direction, the sun burning down harder than it had any right to. Every one of them watched in silence as something with the weight of the sun itself took its first steps toward them.
She smiled again. She couldn't help it.
"You can't quit now." Her voice was calm. "You can't ever quit. Because this isn't about you worshipping me or me being your almighty. This is a battle between you and me now. You either kill me or I kill you. That's the only way this ends."
She raised one hand and a small ball of light appeared between her fingers. She held it up and looked at it for a moment then looked back at all of them, amused and disappointed at the same time, like they had let her down by even thinking about surrendering.
The intention in her eyes was clear.
She wasn't letting any of them leave this field alive.
"I beg you, oh great one." Seth's voice cracked from the ground. "Please don't do this. I'll do anything, just please don't let us die. Please."
Samuel had never heard Seth beg like that. Not once in his entire life. If anything was going to show him just how serious this moment was it was that, and everyone around him seemed to feel it too because they started getting back to their feet one by one.
The first one to move was Grey.
She turned around, faced the opposite direction, and ran straight past Samuel without a single word. She didn't look back at anyone. She wasn't thinking about anyone else. She was just trying to survive.
Samuel wanted to follow her or at least call out to her but nothing in his body was working. He couldn't get a single word out, let alone move his legs.
Then the explosion happened.
It came from the direction Grey was running toward and the force of it sent a heavy gust of wind tearing through everything within range. Every head turned toward it at once and everyone already knew who had caused it.
It was her.
Samuel saw it before he could process it. Grey's decapitated head tumbling through the air in his direction, hitting the ground, and rolling until it stopped at his feet.
"Grey." He whispered it to himself. He couldn't bring himself to say it any louder than that.
The people around him started begging for their lives. Samuel stood in the middle of all of it watching the people he had fought beside, the people he had walked with for most of his life, the people he had looked up to, reduced to begging on their knees. He didn't want to understand it but he did, because somewhere inside himself he was begging too, silently, that she wouldn't kill them.
But all the begging in the world wasn't going to change what everyone already knew.
She wasn't planning on letting a single one of them walk away from this field. It was only a matter of time before she worked through them one by one. And Samuel was stuck right in the middle of it, unable to decide whether to follow his leaders and beg for his life, or die knowing he never stopped fighting.