It's been six full days since the city fell and forty-two days since the Second Epoch Cycle started.
Time moves strangely during catastrophe. The first hour feels endless. The next day disappears in a blur of blood, smoke and exhaustion. And now that the fighting has finally stopped, the silence is worse.
I hovered above what used to be the capital of the Elves of Dynasty Mintheris and I barely recognize it. Before the attack, the population was eight hundred thousand. Now, forty percent are dead.
Three hundred and twenty thousand lives were erased in less than a week.
Half of those—one hundred and sixty thousand—didn't even die cleanly. They were infected by the K-Virus. They turned. Their bones warped. Their veins blackened. Their eyes hollowed out. They became Infected Krepsunas and had to be hunted down like rabid beasts.
It took four days to purge the infected Elves who, a week ago, were just survivors. It took two more days to finish off the actual Krepsunas.
The streets are quiet now. Ash still drifts through the air in lazy spirals. Entire streets are flattened. The outer residential ring looks like a hand reached down and crushed it between two fingers. The towers near the palace are cracked and scorched.
Down in the central plaza—what's left of it—rows upon rows of wrapped bodies lay in formation. White burial cloth were stained gray by smoke. Priests chanted until their voices crack. No one cried loudly anymore.
Mintheris had more than five hundred Divines teleported in the Second Epoch Cycle. Two hundred are dead.
Losing a Divine in Spheraphase is catastrophic. A single Divine can hold a defensive line against a Krepsuna swarm long enough to evacuate ten thousand civilians. Not all Divines were deployed to the Second Epoch Cycle. Some remained in Mintheris.
The loss of three hundred twenty thousand civilians is devastating. The loss of two hundred Divines is destabilizing.
I slowly drifted past a collapsed building where three surviving Divines sit in silence with their armor cracked. One of them lost an arm. Another has burn scars that won't fade, even with regeneration.
Every Divine lost in Spheraphase creates a gap in the defense web. You can't just "replace" a Divine. It takes centuries to cultivate one to that level and two hundred were gone in six days.
I passed through a temporary infirmary where healers move mechanically from bed to bed. There was not enough Nature Energy due to the corruption of the land or even enough supplies. There were too many amputations. Too many children survived but watched their families die.
An old Elf sat against a shattered column, clutching a broken ceremonial staff. He keeps muttering the same thing.
"We were supposed to be safe."
That was when the news spread that the Dynasty Monarchess was captured.
The first whispers started on the fourth day, when the battlefield cleared enough for proper reconnaissance. By the fifth day, confirmation spread among the Divines. By the sixth, everyone knew that their Monarchess had been taken by the enemy.
The Monarchess wasn't just a ruler. She was a symbol of continuity, especially after her pregnancy announcement. If she could be captured, what does that say about the rest of them?
Because if the Monarchess can fall, what chance do they have?
A mother in the refugee quarter whispered to her child, "It's temporary. She'll return."
But her voice didn't believe it. The Divines of Mintheris convened twice already in emergency councils but even that feels hollow. The psychological effects might be worse than the physical one.
Children flinch at loud sounds. Warriors overreact to shadows. Healers move like they're afraid the next scream is about to start.
I followed him to the last infirmary camp just before dusk. Of course, I was invisible to everyone but him.
The city was quiet in that exhausted, post-catastrophe way. Makeshift tents stretched across what used to be public squares and courtyards. Three thousand infirmary camps had been erected across the fallen capital in just two days. That number alone was obscene.
This one — the last one — had been set up inside the skeletal remains of a shattered plaza. Healers moved between rows of wounded laid out on platforms. When Veneri stepped inside, the healers noticed immediately.
Every single one of them bowed their heads. He didn't respond to the bows.
For the last two days, he's been moving from camp to camp without pause. He's the one who suggested the decentralized infirmary network. With the city in ruins and infection clusters everywhere, centralized healing would have been suicidal. So, they spread the wounded out to minimize mass casualties if another attack hit.
He had personally cleared twenty-five hundred of them today.
It didn't matter how strong he was. It was the sixth day, which is the first day without active battle. That alone felt unnatural.
He stepped into the center of the camp and closed his eyes. Soul Energy came out of from him, spreading across the entire camp in a smooth, controlled wave. It seeped into the wounded without resistance.
A young Elven soldier missing both legs gasped as bone reconstructed itself from nothing, muscle threading over it, nerves reconnecting in perfect alignment. A healer nearly dropped her instruments as an Elven woman's collapsed ribcage stabilized in seconds.
Some still died.
Two on the far end of the camp passed away before the Soul Energy reached them. Their bodies were too far gone. Veneri didn't flinch. There was nothing he could do about those. Even Divinity has limits when timing fails.
Within minutes, the camp transformed from a field hospital into something almost functional. The critically injured were stable. The amputees were whole again. The infected cases had already been 'dealt with' in previous days. The head healer approached him after the energy dissipated and she bowed.
"Thank you, Monarch."
He waved it off.
"It's nothing."
And he meant it.
Using Body Reconstruction on Elves barely registered as strain for him. Their physiology was stable. If the city hadn't been under constant siege for six days, if the infection hadn't spread so quickly, maybe more would have survived.
He stepped out of the camp and into the cooling evening air. The sky was bruised purple. I drifted beside him.
"That was the last camp."
He nodded once.
"Good. It's tragic seeing all this. Kind of reminds me of Earth."
That was all he said. It was the tone that unsettled me. He was calm and detached. I didn't mind that he wasn't outwardly emotional. I didn't expect him to collapse in grief or rage. That wasn't who he was.
But sometimes I wondered. In his last life, he experienced the apocalypse. In the First Epoch Cycle, he watched the Raukerai go extinct. He had personally killed hundreds of thousands of people to push Narisva into Divinity now he assessed the situation like a strategist reviewing battlefield statistics.
He wasn't heartless but he was… desensitized.
I floated slightly ahead of him, turning to face him mid-air.
"You don't see this as a big issue, do you?"
He glanced at me.
"It is an issue."
"That's not what I mean."
He didn't respond because he understood. Compared to an apocalypse that erased continents, compared to wars where he had personally experienced mass death, this was normal. That perspective was terrifying because if he got used to this, making him believe that catastrophic loss is just another manageable variable, hat would stop him from eventually ignoring the concept of grief entirely?
When emotions become inefficient, they become expendable. I'm afraid of that version of him. He would eventually become a being who has seen too much death and stops reacting to it.
He walked past a row of collapsed buildings when he faced me.
"You're overthinking."
"You could hear that?"
"Yes."
"Right..."
I forgot we literally share a Sapphire Bond. If he could, he can read my thoughts. He continued walking as he faced forward.
"I'm not ignoring it. I just don't indulge in it."
If the future kept demanding this level of loss, I didn't know what would be left inside him when it was over.
That possibility scared me far more than the Krepsunas ever did.