The battlefield did not stop all at once.
It kept moving for a while, out of habit, as if the war had not yet received word that it was over. A wounded beast dragged itself through a trench half-filled with blood and broken spears before a dwarf hammer caved its skull in. Farther east, two surviving drakes tried to lift themselves into the air, only for a line of imperial archers to pin one wing and send both crashing back into the churned earth. Smaller creatures ran in packs now, not charging, not organized, only trying to put distance between themselves and the place where their world had broken. Most did not make it far.
The great pressure was gone.
Everyone felt it before they understood it. The battlefield no longer carried that crushing sense of being one bad moment from collapse. What remained was cleanup. Hard, bloody, necessary. But cleanup all the same.
