The cleansing took hours.
It was slow, dirty work that no one wanted to rush. Drones scraped thick black residue from cracked stone while sealed engineering mechs pulled apart twisted metal frames and loaded them into reinforced containers for disposal.
Above them, carrier craft hovered in steady formation, releasing thin layers of Elowen's stabilizing compounds across the ruined plaza.
Every pass was carefully measured because no one wanted to risk disturbing whatever had been left behind.
Even with those precautions, several machines failed after getting too close to the crater.
Their control systems froze without warning or became trapped in endless command loops, forcing Eirenne to shut them down remotely before marking them for destruction.
Nobody argued with the decision. Losing a few machines was far better than allowing whatever was inside the crater to spread farther.
The residue reacted twice.
