Dark, icy space. Shattered warships. An occasional flash streaked through the darkness—the last scattered exchanges of fire in the remaining combat zones. The dark planet beneath our feet had completely disintegrated, leaving not even its dark red core behind. After collapsing, the Glory Starship, an artificially constructed entity, had not left behind a single trace of debris. Like a nightmare, it had vanished into cold reality. It was hard to imagine that just minutes ago, there had been a spaceborne entity thousands of kilometers across, composed of shattered stellar remains.
Harlan wore a tattered military uniform, and the wounds on his body had yet to heal. He simply stood in midair, his expression as calm as still water as he watched the scene in space. His gaze crossed a battlefield spanning hundreds of thousands of kilometers, taking in how eighty percent of his once-glorious and powerful army had now become scraps and fragments. Shattered starship wreckage and flashes from distant combat zones reflected in his dark eyes. The old emperor shrugged. "So, this is how it ends."
"Sorry, but we had no choice but to destroy most of them," Sandora replied through the Spiritual Connection. She rarely apologized to anyone, but facing this former colleague whose army had been nearly wiped out by the New Empire, she had to say it. "Shilin Soldiers are almost impossible to capture. The number of soldiers we can successfully seize and reverse-transform each time is extremely limited. Personally, I would have liked to save the minds of more of our compatriots, but that isn't realistic."
"It's all right. Being purified by psionic energy may not be a bad release for them," Harlan said calmly. "I have a lot of questions—what exactly did you do? Why did I suddenly 'recover'? How did you evade that