Yuki was back beside March 7th before anyone even registered his movement.
Color violently bled back into the world. The clouds resumed their drift. The wind rustled the leaves, and the insects resumed their chirping.
Those on the battlefield blinked rapidly, shaking off the profound daze. Had they just imagined that fractured moment in time?
Then they looked at Shuhu.
A terrifying fissure split the colossal avatar perfectly from head to footnot a mere physical wound, but a dimensional chasm, as if space itself had cracked open to reveal the unknowable, starry void beyond.
His massive face was permanently frozen in absolute terror. His wooden lips moved, but the words came incredibly slow, dragged from a throat that barely functioned.
"You... who exactly are you?"
"How... how could a single sword strike... sever even my true body?"
The battlefield went dead silent.
A few heavy breaths passed. Then the horrifying realization hit everyone present. Shuhu's words meant his true form—wherever it was hiding in the cosmos—had also been cut down by that single swing.
Jingliu stared at Yuki, her mouth slightly parted in shock.
Killing an Emanator's localized avatar was one thing. But following the karmic and spatial thread across an unknowable cosmic distance to cleanly sever the origin itself? She had never heard of such a terrifying feat. Not once in her centuries of life.
The universe was infinitely vast. Finding Shuhu's true body—hidden somewhere among countless stars—should have been mathematically impossible.
Yuki had done it effortlessly with one sword. Physical distance simply didn't matter to him.
What kind of existence could do that? An Emanator? No. An Emanator absolutely couldn't. Above an Emanator, there was only one classification.
An Aeon.
The heavy thought settled over the battlefield like a suffocating shadow. The way the native resistance and the fanatic cultists looked at Yuki fundamentally changed. It wasn't casual anymore. It wasn't just respectful. It was something far deeper, bordering on absolute religious dread.
Himeko watched him with narrowed golden eyes.
She had known he was unfathomably strong. But this—this was something else entirely. She didn't think he was literally an Aeon. That didn't quite fit either. But whatever he was, he existed far beyond the rigid categories she understood.
Shuhu's colossal body finally crumbled. Dead, gray dust scattered on the wasteland wind. The jagged gash in reality that Yuki's sword had carved stayed permanently etched in the air where it was.
The Abundance army broke. Not slowly—all at once.
The resistance forces surged forward with a roar, cutting through the sudden chaos. Fanatic officers shouted desperate orders, but no one listened. The vanguard commander was dead. The Emanator was permanently dead. Whatever divine zeal had held them together was completely gone.
Highly advanced weapons clattered to the scorched ground. Trembling hands went up in surrender. The remaining Abundance officers looked at one another in despair. Then they looked nervously at Yuki.
They slowly put down their weapons. The rest of the army immediately followed suit.
By the end of the brief clash, the resistance had lost five hundred fighters. The Denizens of Abundance had lost fifty thousand troops—plus a high-commander and a literal Emanator.
"Hmph. That's it?" March sounded almost disappointed, lowering her bow.
"Wasn't that enough for you?" Yuki gently ruffled her pink hair. "You already did plenty."
He wasn't exaggerating in the slightest. Most of those fifty thousand immediate casualties were entirely from March's first orbital-strike arrow. The pure Imaginary Energy contained within it had done something the Denizens of Abundance's immortality simply couldn't overcome—it conceptualized and consumed their very life force.
It was exactly why she had managed to hold her own against an Emanator's avatar. It was why even Yaoshi's divine projection couldn't stop her arrows.
"Hehe. It was nothing." March rubbed her head, grinning brightly. The utterly smug look on her face said otherwise.
Himeko watched her with fond exasperation. The energetic girl had rapidly grown on her—much like a younger sister. She wasn't jealous of March's sudden, absurd strength. She was immensely proud.
Jingliu approached them, her expression incredibly complicated.
She had already known Yuki was impossibly strong. But March—this seemingly fragile, bubbly girl—had gone toe-to-toe with Shuhu's avatar and wounded it. And now this same monstrously powerful girl wanted to learn basic swordsmanship from her.
Calling her "master." The thought sat very strangely in her mind.
The three native resistance leaders detailed squads of their people to respectfully gather their dead and collect the Abundance army's discarded weapons. The alien weapons were centuries more advanced than anything they currently possessed. They couldn't afford a single ounce of waste. The fallen Abundance armaments—along with the massive stockpile surrendered by the prisoners—would comfortably rearm the entire global resistance.
The three leaders personally escorted Yuki's group back to their ruined camp. They spoke to Yuki with deeply bowed heads and incredibly careful, reverent words.
At the far edge of the battlefield, hidden in the treeline, Kafka watched the aftermath.
Her pink eyes traced Yuki's casual movements—something dangerous flickering behind her tinted sunglasses. Deep intrigue, maybe. Or something much sharper. Those who truly knew the Stellaron Hunter would have instantly recognized the predatory look.
"Kafka. Is it over?" Silver Wolf's voice buzzed in her ear.
"It's finished." Kafka paused, a small, elegant smile playing on her lips.
"I won't be rejoining you on the ship just yet, Silver Wolf. There is something I need to do here first."
The comms connection clicked closed.