The scent of burning mana and scorched wood had become a constant, cloying companion across the shattered battlefield. The wind, when it stirred, carried not the scent of pine and damp earth, but the distant, metallic tang of steel, the crackling echo of broken spells, and the faint, ghostly cries of warriors on both sides who were still locked in desperate, brutal combat. Above it all, a reddish haze filtered through the skeletal branches of the remaining trees—the residual flame dust from the Phoenix's earlier wrath. Nature itself seemed to be holding its breath, a silent, unwilling witness to our self-destruction.
In the heart of it, Seraphina moved like a blade through water—silent, fluid, and lethally sharp.
