The battlefield was quiet.
Not truly quiet. The sound of cooling lava still hissed. Scattered screams and groans came from the distance. When the wind blew, it carried a strong smell of sulfur and burnt flesh.
But compared to before—compared to the "symphony of hell" from forty-five seconds ago, woven from continuous explosions, screams, and the sound of Rock shattering—this counted as quiet.
Yan stood at the edge of the sea of lava and glanced down at his feet.
The ground beneath him had changed color. It was a dark gray, glassy substance covered in fine cracks—the natural glass formed when sand and soil were melted by extreme heat, then cooled.
Just like that crater in the Land of Grass.
But this time, the area was much larger. It was not a single crater, but an entire expanse.
Yan raised his head and looked ahead.
The lava had not fully cooled. The orange-red surface was slowly solidifying, with one or two bubbles occasionally rising to the surface. Magma was still flowing in some places—like a glowing, sluggish river.
Black, irregularly shaped objects floated on the river's surface. They were metal—kunai, shuriken, ninja tools, armor. Steel had a lower melting point than magma, so it melted before people did. But once the temperature dropped, metal solidified before magma.
That was why those warped, twisted metal remnants were embedded in the surface of the cooling magma.
As for the people—
There were no people in sight. Not that they could not be seen, but that there was nothing humanoid left to see.
At five thousand degrees, the organic matter and moisture making up a human body took less than a second to go from contact to complete vaporization.
Yan ran that information through his mind, then shut down that line of thought.