Hearing Chizuru's confession, spoken with lifeless, dejected eyes, the prisoner block broke.
It didn't happen all at once, but in pockets, clusters of soldiers arriving at the same realization in the same breath and processing it in whatever way their bodies would let them.
A grizzled samurai two rows from the front bent double and vomited onto the stone between his boots. "Lord Raijin..." he choked between heaves, and the name hit the soldiers around him harder than anything Chizuru had said, because it made the dead man real again.
"They murdered him!" A young officer three seats down was on her feet, shaking so hard her armor rattled. "Everything was a lie...? Everything we fought for, everything we believed, all of it?!"
Disgust twisted her face beyond recognition, and she threw herself at the nearest elite soul with her hands reaching for the dead soldier's blade.
The elite soul caught her by the wrists and held her still without drawing steel.
