Kara advanced alone along the eastern flank.
She did not run, nor did she seem in a hurry. She simply walked, pushing soldiers out of her path as if they were less an army and more a wall someone had forgotten to finish building.
The Blessed tried to stop her again and again.
Lances covered in divine light. Consecrated swords. Arrows imbued with sacred magic.
Nothing ever fully worked.
Some blows managed to reach her, but they barely managed to move her a little before she kept advancing again, as if her body had stopped reacting to pain a long time ago.
And when she responded, she did so without technique or elegance.
Only force.
A shield caved in along with the arm that held it. A soldier was sent flying down the slope after taking a blow to the chest. Another lost his sword before crashing into the rocks.
From different points, they began calling her traitor.
Kara did not even turn.
She no longer had the energy to argue with people who would never understand why she was there.
And that was precisely what troubled the Chosen the most.
Kara did not fight like someone corrupted.
She did not enjoy slaughter. She did not chase the wounded. She did not even finish off the fallen when she could avoid it.
But she also did not stop.
She kept advancing, leaving broken men behind her, soldiers who were still alive, though no longer able to return to the front.
There was no rage in her movements.
And that made everything worse.
The sacred spells that bounced off her body did not raise the soldiers' morale. They weakened it.
Because every attack that failed to stop her left the same question hanging among the ranks.
Why were the gods not punishing her?
Why did she still retain her power?
Why could a heroine turn her back on the sky… and still stand?
Little by little, doubt began to spread among the soldiers.
They still fought.
They still obeyed.
But they no longer looked at Kara with the same certainty as before.
Kara took another step.
Behind her lay shattered rocks, craters, and men crawling through blood.
Ahead of her, there were still thousands.
And none of them could make her stop.
Elsewhere, the air changed.
It was not wind nor an explosion.
It was something stranger.
Mana vanished all at once, as if someone had squeezed the world with a hand.
The dark elves felt it first. Their bows trembled in their fingers and several imbued arrows dissolved before they could even be released.
Further below, the herbivores raised their heads at the same time.
The carnivores felt it too.
And for the first time since the battle began, they hesitated.
It lasted only a second.
But sometimes that was enough to break an entire line.
Lusian stepped forward.
Shadow began spreading from his feet and descended down the mountain slowly, covering the rock like a black stain over clear water.
It did not move fast.
It did not need to.
The carnivores began retreating almost by instinct as the ground beneath them darkened.
Then it gave way.
Three lions became trapped up to their chests. They tried to escape desperately, clawing at a surface that no longer felt like earth or stone.
One managed to push himself back.
Lusian closed his hand.
Spear-like shadows appeared instantly in front of him.
They did not rise from the ground.
They did not fall from the sky.
They were simply there.
They pierced the creatures from side to side without resistance.
The bodies hung still for a moment, suspended in the air as if they still did not understand they were dead.
Then the shadows consumed them.
No blood remained.
No screams.
Only silence.
Lusian looked forward.
—Advance.
He did not need to raise his voice.
The herbivores wrapped themselves in mana and began charging down the mountain.
Thunder neighed behind him.
It was an ancient sound, like storms that had not yet been born.
The clouds above the mountain twisted.
Elizabeth raised both hands.
The lightning struck.
Not one.
But a net.
The discharge spread through the air as if the sky had decided to close over the earth. White and blue lightning bolts leapt from body to body, chaining through fangs, bone, and exposed flesh. Muscles tensed until they tore from within, and hearts burst inside blackened chests.
Some remained suspended mid-jump, frozen in the air.
And then they fell.
Empty.
The smell of burned flesh spread across the slope.
The sky roared.
And then…
something changed.
From the carnivore rear lines, the survivors began regrouping.
They did not flee.
They retreated in formation. If they scattered, they would be annihilated.
As if instinct had been replaced by something colder.
They formed an impossible defensive arc for beasts.
Lusian had not only entered the war.
For the first time, the war walked with him.
Sweat ran down his forehead as he advanced. He no longer clearly remembered when violence had stopped being something foreign. In his original world, it would have been unthinkable. Unreal. Beyond any logic.
But not here.
In this world, where many wanted him dead, killing stopped being a moral choice and became a response.
Whoever came for his life… lost theirs.
He was looking it straight in the face.
On another front, the first herbivore line fell.
Something strange was happening with the carnivorous semihumans. Despite being outnumbered, they kept advancing.
The carnivores overwhelmed them like a tide of fangs.Torn bodies.Broken horns.Ripped hooves.
The line broke.
For a heartbeat…
everything seemed lost.
When the bodies hit the ground…
Dayana smiled.
There was no joy in that expression. Only recognition. The exact moment when the balance no longer matters.
Red mana flowed from her hands and fell over the still-warm corpses, spreading through them as if answering an ancient command that had never truly disappeared.
The energy moved through the fallen bodies. Fractured bones held again, torn muscles regained tension, exposed organs resumed a forced pulse, alien to life.
And the bodies rose.
Antelopes with their throats torn open.Hyenas without jaws.Buffaloes with exposed hearts, still forced to function.
They did not breathe.They did not feel.
But they moved.
Their wounds did not bleed. They shone with a faint, uncomfortable glow, as if death itself were being held against its will.
The red mana did not heal them. It sustained them.
The carnivores hesitated.
For the first time.
Not fear yet. Something worse: the feeling that the rules of the battlefield were no longer reliable.
A lion crushed an antelope's skull… and the body kept moving without stopping.
A hyena bit into what remained of another… and became trapped under the weight of a corpse that would not fall.
That broke something in the formation.
The second herbivore line charged.
Alive. Whole. Irreversible.
The clash closed the front.
The carnivores were trapped between two impossible truths:
what would not die…and what would not retreat.
Dayana raised her hand.
The bodies responded instantly, accelerating.
No words. No clear signal.
Only movement.
As if something invisible had decided for them.
And somewhere in the field, between clash and noise, the predators understood it too late.
They were not fighting an army.
They were being dragged by something that no longer distinguished between life and death.
Death was no longer an end.
It was an intermediate state that kept moving.
In the middle of the chaos, in one of their gazes, a brief, almost human thought appeared, absurd in that moment:
Morgana… wait for me.
In the rear, war had another face.
Emily did not look up. Her hands worked without pause, closing wounds, sealing cuts, pushing bodies to the edge of something that could barely be called stability. They were covered in blood. It no longer mattered whose.
The light around her was no longer stable. It broke with every attempt, as if sustaining so many lives at once was wearing down something without a name.
Orders mixed with screams.
—Get him off the front!—Don't move him, he's still breathing!
There was no time to think. Only to decide. And mistakes meant someone did not get back up.
Isabella held the wind over the field.
It was not a storm. It was precision.
Invisible currents pulled bodies away from the front just before the next strike, deflected spears by centimeters, opened space where there was none. Small corrections in the middle of chaos. Enough for someone to keep breathing a little longer.
Centimeters. Nothing more. And yet, everything.
Kara remained at the front.
She did not fight like the others.
She broke.
Each impact erased something from the field. Each step made the ground feel unstable, as if the mountain itself was unsure it could hold her.
She chose no targets. She did not hesitate. She simply advanced.
Always advanced.
But the ground did not stop trembling.
It was not only the battle.
Something else was beneath it.
More carnivores kept emerging from the savanna.
New waves, constant, relentless.
And beneath all of it, something responded.
Lusian Douglas de Mondring felt it before he understood it.
It was not a tremor.
It was a reaction.
The mountain had stopped resisting.
It was beginning to calculate.
It was not hunger advancing from the savanna.
It was method.
As if war was no longer chaos… but a problem being solved step by step.
The mountain endured.
The savanna bled.
And war, for the first time, no longer felt like an idea.
It was learning how to kill.
And it had no intention of stopping.