While Dayanara fell into her trial, the other portal—the one that swallowed the top rankers pulsed faintly with a sinister glow.
A heavy silence stretched across the barren field, broken only by the soft crackle of scorched earth and the occasional flutter of ash drifting in the air like dying fireflies.
The land was flat, lifeless. No trees, no wind whispered across the plains. The only thing that covered the soil were the dismembered corpses of monsters thousands of them layered like discarded fabric, rotting in grotesque stillness.
Some still twitched.
Among the piles, broken blades and snapped staves jutted from the ground like forgotten grave markers, many still clenched in the bone hands of those who once wielded them.
Cracked skulls peeked from beneath armored chests, and the occasional glint of a polished ranker badge reflected the pale moonlight, half-buried beneath a mound of flesh and blood.
