Alright," Sol said, dropping his arms and standing up from the table. His tall, heavily muscled frame easily dominated the cramped space of the room. "Sitting in here listening to you two throw insults is entertaining, but it’s not getting anything done. Let’s go out. I want to see the actual situation of the tribe with my own eyes, last time it was just cursory look."

Kira immediately straightened her posture, her Vanguard discipline snapping back into place. "Of course. The inner rings are mostly stable, but the outer perimeter is still a mess. I can walk you through the damage details."

Zeyra didn’t argue either. She simply stood up, smoothing down the front of her sleek woven tunic with an elegant brush of her hands. "It would be beneficial for the people to see you walking around, Sol. Morale is... complicated right now."

Sol nodded, grabbing the heavy scabbard of the Dreadwing Blade from the corner. He strapped the weapon to his hip, the familiar, comforting weight settling against his thigh.

He stepped out of the room, pushing open the heavy timber door, with the Warchief’s daughter and the tribe’s most talented Layer 1 genius flanking him on either side. It was a massive, undeniable status symbol, and Sol didn’t miss the way the passing Vanguard guards in the Feline Spire corridors quickly stepped aside, bowing their heads respectfully as they walked past.

They left the spire and stepped out into the bright, harsh daylight of the main settlement.

The immediate aftermath of a war in the Great Orrath wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t quiet. The air was thick with a chaotic, suffocating mixture of smells: fresh sawdust, burning pitch, roasting meat, and the lingering, metallic copper stench of stale blood that had soaked too deeply into the mud to be washed away.

The tribe was in a state of frantic, organized overdrive.

Everywhere Sol looked, the Veynar people were moving. Teams of shirtless, heavily bandaged warriors were using thick, braided vine-ropes to haul massive timber logs toward the shattered eastern palisade. The rhythmic, deafening SLAM of heavy wooden hammers echoed off the longhouses as the architects desperately tried to reinforce the splintered main gates before nightfall.

But as Sol walked deeper into the settlement, moving past the heavy construction zones and into the residential rings, the true, brutal cost of the beast tide became glaringly obvious.

It wasn’t all celebration.

For every group of warriors sitting around a fire, drinking fermented fruits and laughing loudly about surviving the horde, there was a quiet, devastating pocket of grief.

Sol’s eyes caught a scene near the communal area. An older woman was sitting in the dirt, rocking back and forth, clutching a blood-stained Vanguard leather pauldron to her chest. She wasn’t wailing. She was just staring blankly at the mud, her face completely hollowed out by a grief too heavy to vocalize. Two younger girls sat beside her, silently weeping into their hands.

A few yards away, a line of bodies wrapped tightly in white coarse lay waiting to be moved to the funeral pyres. The line was tragically long.

Sol stopped walking. He stood in the middle of the dirt thoroughfare, his silver-crimson eyes scanning the rows of the dead.

"Casualties?" Sol asked quietly, eyes scanning around.

"Forty-seven confirmed dead," Kira answered, voice steady but heavy. "Another thirty wounded seriously enough that they may never fight at full strength again."

He had fought like a rabid dog. He had held the dead center of the line. He had shattered the skull of a Layer 3 Sovereign and derailed a walking mountain that would have flattened the inner sanctum. He had poured every single drop of his essence into the dirt to keep these people alive.

And even though he had tried his absolute best, he just wasn’t strong enough to save everyone. He couldn’t be everywhere at once. While he was holding the center, the flanks had buckled. The Omen-Blood beasts had breached the walls. The lesser apes had swarmed the reserve lines.

Casualties were an objective, unavoidable reality of war. Logically, he understood that. In a world this savage, a zero-death defense was a fairy tale.

But looking at the weeping families, a cold, heavy knot formed in Sol’s chest.

If I was stronger, Sol thought, his jaw clenching tight.

His mind instantly flashed back to the rotting ravine. He saw the massive, three-story Layer 4 Apex spider lunging at him, completely immune to his Layer 2 power. And then he saw Elyndra. The Levander-skinned alien girl who hadn’t even broken a sweat. With a single, casual tap of her pale finger, she had completely erased a tribe-ending threat from the physical plane. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

If he had possessed even a fraction of Elyndra’s absolute, reality-bending strength... there wouldn’t be a single body wrapped in linen today. He could have wiped the entire horde clean off the map without leaving a trace, without a single Vanguard warrior having to draw their sword.

The gap between his current strength and the true ceiling of this universe was a staggering, infinite chasm.

Sol slowly curled his hands into tight fists, his joints creaking loudly. He felt a brief, dark surge of frustration, but he ruthlessly crushed it down.

No use whining about it, Sol reminded himself coldly. He let out a long, slow exhale, forcing his muscles to relax. I’m not a god. Not yet. One step at a time. "Sol?" Kira’s voice broke through his thoughts. She had noticed him staring at the bodies, her own golden eyes dimming with sorrow. "Are you alright?"

"I’m fine," Sol said, pulling his gaze away from the dead and looking toward the massive, shattered timber gates in the distance. He forced his mind back to the practical, ruthless logistics of survival. "Just thinking about the cleanup. I saw the ash piles out in the clearing. What happened to the carcasses of the giant monsters? The Layer 3 Sovereigns?"

"Of course we got the bodies secured," Kira answered immediately, stepping back into her element. "The Vanguard dragged the remains of all the layer 3 beasts and of course, the Rockhorn Beetle you killed into the deep storage vaults beneath the High Hall. They are incredibly precious resources. The meat will feed the elite warriors for months, and the elder craftsmen are already treating the bones and chitin to forge new weapons and armor. It will help the tribe recover immensely."