But!
That was far from the end!
Aside from the visible changes—the demons' corpses, leaves, weeds, and everything else around Annie rapidly rotting, turning yellow, sprouting again, and blooming, while mushrooms began popping up all over the ground—something astonishing was also swelling and brewing beneath the surface, in the soil where no one could see it. The ground around them even began to bulge slightly in countless tiny, inconspicuous mounds, as if dung beetles, rabbits, mice, or something were shifting the soil and making nests underground.
But the truth was far more complicated!
"!!"
(_)
Seeing this, the troublesome little girl, who already knew something was happening below, grew even more excited.
"Hehe..."
(`)
So she pressed on. The entropy-energy spear in her hand sent out another series of visible streaks of light, spreading across the broad stretch of ground where things were stirring. Then she rapidly accelerated the passage of time in the area.
Immediately afterward, time and space around them seemed to freeze.
Time seemed to slow at that moment. Space and light, too, became halting and disjointed, as if a once-fluid picture had started skipping and stuttering.
Of course, it wasn't actually stuttering. It was merely an illusion caused by the abnormal transmission of light after time had been accelerated.
Because even as the scene grew distorted, the flowers and grass around them kept growing, blooming, and withering in rapid, endless cycles. The short shrubs rapidly grew taller and thicker, soon reaching several times a person's height. The vast stretch of land, once barren from being caught between the Astartes Space Marines and the Warp Daemons, had turned lush and green once more.
But none of that mattered. What mattered were the astonishing changes beneath the land, brought about by Annie accelerating time with that entropy-energy spear!