The silence after the Doom Monarch fell did not last.
It broke with an announcement, the last one the warfare event would ever send, and it reached every soul still standing on the broken mainland at once.
[The Doom Monarch has been destroyed. The Warfare Event is complete.]
[Victor: Ananta Regalon Kingdom.]
The words settled over the combined force, and for a moment no one moved, and then the mainland erupted. The soldiers of five kingdoms, who had spent a year fighting toward exactly this and had stopped quite believing it would come, let the year out of them all at once. Across the broken land, beneath a sky that had stopped being red, the cheering rose and did not stop for a long time.
Almond stood at the center of it, Lily on one side and Rudra on the other, Ainen behind them, the whole named leadership spread across the field, and he let himself, for the first time in months, simply breathe.
They had done it.
The reward came a moment later, and it came in pieces.
---
