Sixty became fifty.

Forty.

Thirty.

Twenty.

Ten.

The last ten soldiers somehow maintained enough sanity to fight back. They formed a desperate circle, blessed weapons facing outward, eyes wild but still rational.

Satou respected their resilience.

He killed them with [VOID FANG].

His claws, coated in existence-erasing energy, swept through the defensive circle. Where soldiers had been standing, now there was simply... absence. Not corpses. Not blood. Not even empty air.

Just void. Reality deleted. Existence unmade.

The ten soldiers ceased to exist, their atoms scattered across non-being, their souls unable to even reach whatever afterlife they believed in because the very concept of "them" had been erased.

Northern sector: cleared.

Five hundred human soldiers dead in under eight minutes.

Satou stood alone in the nightmare realm, surrounded by absence and horror and the slowly dissolving forms of his shadow servants.

Through his enhanced perception, he could sense combat continuing in the western and central sectors. His people still fighting, still being overwhelmed by numerical superiority.

He teleported to the western sector.

======

[WESTERN SECTOR]

The serpentfolk commander fought with elegant efficiency, her spear flashing out to find gaps in human armor, her natural speed allowing her to strike and withdraw before retaliation.

Twenty-four serpentfolk warriors fought alongside her, using hit-and-run tactics that made them difficult targets despite being outnumbered twenty-to-one. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Four hundred eighty human soldiers pressed the attack, their numbers allowing them to maintain constant pressure despite the serpentfolk’s superior individual skill.

A blessed sword caught Vess’thara across the shoulder, cutting deep into scales and muscle. She hissed in pain, her spear strike taking the swordsman’s eye in retaliation.

Then reality shifted.

The temperature dropped twenty degrees in an instant. Frost formed on metal surfaces. Breath became visible as vapor.

Satou appeared in the center of the battlefield, his crimson Berserk aura contrasting sharply with the sudden cold.

"Lord Satou!" Vess’thara’s relief was evident in her serpentine features. "You’ve returned!"

"Pull your warriors back. I’m clearing this sector."

The serpentfolk disengaged with their characteristic speed, slithering away from human soldiers before the order had fully registered.

Satou faced four hundred eighty enemies.

[ICE/COLD MANIPULATION]

He channeled elemental cold into the ground beneath the human formation. Moisture in the soil crystallized instantly. The earth itself became super-cooled, frost spreading outward in a fifty-yard radius.

Then the frost became ice. Thick, solid ice that encased soldiers’ feet, locked their legs in place, trapped them where they stood.

Two hundred soldiers found themselves unable to move, frozen to the ground up to their knees.

[LIGHTNING MANIPULATION - MODERATE]

Satou raised both hands toward the sky. Storm clouds gathered with supernatural speed, dark and roiling with electrical potential. Thunder rumbled.

Then lightning came down.

Not random strikes. Not natural distribution. But perfectly aimed bolts that struck the two hundred frozen soldiers with devastating precision.

Electricity coursed through metal armor, through human bodies, cooking flesh from the inside out. The smell of burning meat and ozone filled the air. Soldiers screamed for the brief seconds before voltage stopped their hearts.

Two hundred dead in under ten seconds.

The remaining two hundred eighty soldiers, having witnessed their comrades flash-fried by divine wrath made manifest, broke and ran.

Satou couldn’t let them escape.

[METAL MANIPULATION - MODERATE]

Every soldier on this battlefield wore metal armor. Metal weapons. Metal helmets. Metal buckles and clasps and rivets.

Satou seized control of all of it simultaneously.

The running soldiers suddenly found their armor constricting. Metal plates that had fit properly moments ago now squeezed tight, crushing ribs, restricting breathing, cutting off circulation.

A soldier tried removing his helmet, hands scrabbling desperately at straps. The metal ignored his efforts, continuing to tighten around his skull like a vice. Bone cracked. Blood leaked from his ears. His skull imploded with a wet crunch.

Another soldier’s breastplate compressed inward, steel plates folding like paper, squeezing his torso until ribs snapped and organs ruptured. He coughed blood and died wheezing.

All across the battlefield, metal armor became iron maidens, crushing soldiers inside their own protective equipment.

One hundred soldiers died this way, their screams muffled by helmets that had sealed shut around their heads.

The remaining one hundred eighty had stripped off their armor despite the tactical vulnerability, preferring to fight in simple cloth rather than wear metal that could be weaponized against them.

Smart. It wouldn’t save them, but it was smart.

[WIND/AIR MANIPULATION]

Satou gestured and wind responded, gathering into a focused vortex centered on the unarmored soldiers.

The tornado formed in seconds, pulling soldiers off their feet and into its spinning embrace. Bodies tumbled through the air, colliding with each other, bones breaking from impacts.

At the center of the vortex, where wind speeds peaked, the air pressure dropped so low that blood boiled in veins. Soldiers trapped in the tornado’s eye experienced rapid decompression—their eyes burst, their eardrums ruptured, their lungs collapsed from the pressure differential.

They died screaming, their bodies tumbling through the funnel cloud like debris.

When Satou released the wind manipulation, one hundred eighty corpses fell from the sky, splattering across the battlefield in broken heaps.

Western sector: cleared.

Four hundred eighty human soldiers dead in under six minutes.

Satou teleported to the central sector, where Lyra was coordinating the final defensive positions.

[CENTRAL SECTOR]

The central sector held the settlement’s last intact defensive fortifications—actual walls, prepared kill zones, overlapping fields of fire. Six hundred settlement defenders held this position against one thousand human soldiers.

They were winning through superior tactics and defensive advantages, but "winning" meant holding ground rather than being overwhelmed, not actually driving the humans back.

Satou appeared on the wall beside Lyra.

Lyra spun at his sudden appearance, her tactical assessment faltering for just a moment before recognition hit.

"Satou." His name came out as half-whisper, half-prayer. "You’re here. You’re actually here."

He saw the exhaustion in her eyes, the weight she’d been carrying, the responsibility that had aged her beyond her years during this siege.

She’s been holding this together while I was gone, his mind recognized. She’s been making the impossible decisions, watching people die under her command, carrying the burden of leadership.