The endless stream of monsters that had clashed fiercely against the Fox Guild and the Blue Purgator masters for days suddenly stood frozen in their spots.
The abrupt change in their behaviour took all the masters by surprise; a hollow, terrifying silence replaced the chaos of the battlefield. Then, sothing unbelievable happened.
As if an invisible hand had pulled the plug on their ntal control, the monsters stood paralysed for a full minute. Then, they suddenly freaked out. The hive mind that had directed them with brutality for many days shattered into a million pieces of raw panic.
They didn't just stop attacking; they scrambled in every direction they could find, any direction except the one that led toward the spirit masters. It felt as if these monsters could finally sense how scary and deadly those humans truly were. Instinctively, they ran as fast as their limbs could carry them, desperate to escape the slaughter.
Watching this unfold after non-stop, spirit-crushing fighting for days was a serene, almost surreal sight for the weary masters. They stood with blood-stained blades lowered, watching as the area around them emptied in re minutes.
The vacuum of the monsters' retreat kept escalating and growing as the creatures raced to get back to the lower-realm gates they had initially erged from.
After almost half an hour, the world around them looked desolate, a graveyard of grey dust and cooling monster ichor.
Except for the scattered, lumbering forms of Scarlet Bears in the distance, who seed less affected by the ntal snap, and a few remaining Fox clones who kept lurking in the shadows of the retreating tide, the world was suddenly empty.
Those clones, their eyes darting with a frantic, residual malice, were still looking for any weak spot to run through, any crack in the tight defence to reach William.
"Kill them!" The Blue Purgator leader was the first to snap out of the imnse shock. The mont he spotted those black-eyed Fox clones, his blood and spirit boiled, screaming for revenge.
For a long ti, the Blue Purgators had been stressed and suppressed, pushed to the very edge of their endurance. Since the mont they had fallen into this deadly trap, they had been moving while counting their breaths, waiting for the inevitable collapse.
Now, they finally had the opening they had been praying for. The sudden change in the vast battlefield was t with a fierce, vengeful counterattack from the Purgators, and William's masters were not far behind.
"It's his doing, for sure!" Berry laughed, her voice bright with relief as she wiped a streak of sweat and dirt from her forehead. "He's done it! Let's not waste this chance!"
"I don't know if this change will last forever, but let's not bet our lives on it being permanent," Anjie added, her eyes shining brighter while considering the near future. "Let's attack with everything we have and finish the cleanup here! Once the periter is secure, we can return to the worlds we ca from and continue the mission he entrusted us with!"
Even though they had all converged here to support and reinforce William, they still held their initial task close to their hearts. As the girls and the different faction leaders t on this gore-streaked battlefield, they quickly reached a new consensus.
They would use this window of the monsters' withdrawal to push back through the gates, invade the monsters' ho territories, and make sure they wouldn't, or couldn't, ever co back here.
Their initial distribution of forces had been based on the expectation of eting formidable resistance behind each gate.
However, after experiencing the destruction left in the lower realms they had already visited, and seeing the sheer scale of the monsters fleeing from other realms they hadn't touched yet, a new reality beca clear.
They didn't need thousands of elite masters for each individual world anymore. The monsters were broken; their spirit was gone.
Instead, they agreed to thin out their numbers by at least ten tis per world. This would enable them to expand their presence into ten tis as many worlds simultaneously.
Furthermore, they agreed that once they gathered enough of the local inhabitants around the Fox Guild banner, they would leave only a small administrative group behind, exit, and imdiately spread to new, unexplored worlds.
Seeing how their guild master was in a visible haste to finish his control over the dium World, the faction leaders were infected with the sa type of productive impatience. They wanted to match his pace in the lower realms, turning the farming grounds of the Fox into a grand network of their own.
Fighting and killing scared, retreating monsters proved to be incredibly easy. In less than a day, the entire world stabilised. The monsters were either dead or had successfully retreated to the depths of their own realms.
Before the Purgator leader and his fellow masters could even begin to celebrate their grand victory, they watched in awe as the Fox Guild masters efficiently rearranged their scattered groups and headed back toward the gates.
"Hmm, I believe Bernard told they only went to a few dozen gates," the leader muttered, following their movents out of pure curiosity.
He watched as the Fox Guild's army split into hundreds of smaller, highly organised units. They weren't just returning to the initial gates; they were fanning out, entering far more monster gates than Bernard had ever ntioned.
Seeing this made the Purgator leader inwardly smile, a genuine sense of respect warming his tired spirit. "The new generation is truly destined to take over the older ones," he whispered to himself. He realised that while the Purgators were an elite force of the past, the Fox Guild was the force of the future, adaptive, relentless, and infinitely scalable.
He turned his gaze toward a certain direction in the centre of the valley. There, William sat motionless, his body a silent statue amidst the swirling dust. Though he appeared to be doing nothing, the leader knew better.
William was currently fighting his own invisible war against the Fox, a battle of wills occurring deep within the planet's core that would determine the fate of this dium World.
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