Beneath the blood-red sky stretched a wilderness littered with devastation.
The battlefield that had erupted earlier had shifted elsewhere, leaving countless corpses behind. Fierce clashes and spell duels thundered in the distant sky, their magical radiance illuminating the crashed Flying Device again and again. Its cabin was pitch-black, its lighting system destroyed, with only a few red and green indicator lights still glowing. Footsteps sounded within, followed by a Snake Demon tumbling out of the cabin. She appeared to be a female Snake Demon, her breastplate stained crimson, shattered magical artifact fragments piercing through her chest. Perhaps because beasts possessed greater vitality, she could still barely move, but her injuries were too severe; she was already at the end of her tether.
Her exquisite armor was caked in mud. The Snake Demon lying on the ground used every ounce of her strength to turn over.
She tilted her head and glanced toward the battlefield.
The eyes behind her transparent visor had lost all color of life...
A hazy phantom identical to the Snake Demon rose from her corpse, enveloped by a faint Light Pillar. The phantom followed the light upward...
After a while.
A head covered in tattered cloth emerged from behind the corpse of a massive armored war elephant, bone artifacts hanging all over its body as it cautiously looked around.
Only after seeing no movement in the surroundings did it hunch over and sneak toward the freshly dead corpse. Eight arms extended from beneath its cloak—some old and shriveled like an elder's arms, some smooth-skinned like a woman's, and others muscular and powerful. The mismatched arms formed a hand seal to cast a spell as it muttered garbled incantations and drew out the blood remaining in the corpse. Red blood wriggled out through the gaps in the armor,