The next day arrived quickly. After the first battle, the recruits did not engage with the monster horde, and the monsters also stopped advancing. It seemed that whatever creature was commanding them had stopped them. They just moved around with no sense of direction.
The morning after the battle began in stillness. Not peace—never that—but a quiet tension, the sort that hangs in the air like invisible wire, waiting to snap.
The city's northeast sector lay beneath a washed-out sky, where dust and smoke coiled in ghostly spirals above shattered rooftops and sun-bleached debris. The A.R.D. outpost stirred to life with quiet urgency. Recruits, their armour freshly patched and bandages still damp, stood in staggered formation. Their new gear—earned through blood and Contribution Points—gleamed faintly under the pale light, mirroring the dual edge of exhaustion and grim resolve.
Nearly four hundred soldiers stood ready, but not all would march the same path.
