The scouts arrived hours after the battle.
Six of them. Fast and silent.
They emerged from the forest in staggered formation, their movements cautious but disciplined. Unlike the reckless soldier demons Damien had slaughtered earlier, these ones were leaner and more observant. Their bodies were built for reconnaissance rather than brute assault.
Their crimson eyes swept across the clearing. They stopped almost immediately. Silence spread among them.
The eastern stronghold was gone.
The structures that once stood there — bone pillars, suppression nodes, the central stabilization disk — had been reduced to shattered debris and broken stone buried beneath churned earth.
The forest floor looked like it had been struck by a meteor.
Cracks spread through the ground in jagged lines. Entire sections of land had collapsed inward. Trees had been uprooted and scattered like toys.
One of the scouts stepped forward slowly.
Its claw pressed into the dirt.
It lifted the claw again.
