Sixty-nine breaths later, the woman in armor finally stirred.
"Hm…" she murmured faintly, a soft sound escaping her lips as her consciousness slowly returned to her.
Her eyelids fluttered open, heavy and reluctant, as if they were weighed down by centuries of exhaustion.
At first, she saw nothing but darkness… an endless void stretching in all directions, silent and empty.
No burning wreckage. No shattered machines. No swirling debris.
No signs of the battlefield that had consumed her moments before she had lost consciousness.
For a fleeting moment, she wondered if everything had been nothing more than an illusion created by her dying mind.
Then the voices flooded in.
Urgent transmissions. Emergency signals.
Overlapping communications from command centers, orbital stations, and distant outposts… all pouring into her mind at once.
The chaos of sound was overwhelming, but it was real. Tangible. Alive.
The war was over.
The world still existed.
