While Hel was busy subduing the half-blood goblins, the teams sent to clean up the battlefield gradually returned one after another.
The first to come back were Arwin and the skeletal berserker captain. They had successfully located the Snow Elf Assassin Queen and brought her back.
However, her condition was… far from ideal.
Not only did she have a gaping hole in her chest from an ice spear, but there was also a deep gash across her neck that nearly severed her head.
In short—she was very much dead.
"So I'm just not meant to have any living subordinates, huh?"
Hel sighed helplessly. After all that effort to recruit the Snow Elf Queen, and she ended up dead anyway.
Who was she supposed to complain to about that?
Fortunately, as a Death Witch, she didn't particularly care about the life or death of her followers.
If it were someone else, they might have flown into a rage already.
Left with no other choice, Hel began thinking about how to bring her back.
Revenant, skeleton, or wraith—those were the most common resurrection options.
The rarer types included blood-born undead like vampires, or the mighty death knights.
In Hel's plans, turning the Snow Elf into a Blood Elf would have been the ideal outcome.
Unfortunately, she lacked the special reagents required for that conversion at the moment.
So she simply stored the Assassin Queen's body in her necrotic space, to be processed later together with the other snow elf corpses she had collected.
Aside from that, the battlefield was now littered with the dried husks of massive beasts—creatures drained of life.
Hel had no plans to waste those either. Their bones would make perfect raw material for undead draconic beasts.
Under her direction, three Tier 5 Bone Drakes were successfully crafted.
Each boasted a combat power of 470, easily outclassing the Flame Arbiter.
And so, the Flame Arbiter's social standing dropped once again—
-1, -1, -1.
At this rate, it seemed his destiny was to end up as someone's mount.
With that, the battlefield cleanup was finally nearing completion.
The only thing left to deal with were the half-blood goblins who had been thrown from their mechs at the start of the battle.
However, most of them had perished from the aftershocks of the fighting.
Their bodies were shattered and mangled—though, compared to the limbless pilots, they were at least "mostly intact."
At least they had a full corpse.
For Hel, body damage wasn't a big deal.
Once cleaned up, even broken corpses could still be "recycled and reused."
Yet during the recovery process, Hel noticed something strange.
Each of these half-blood goblins had extremely fragmented souls—
as if a single soul had been divided into dozens of pieces and evenly distributed among them.
Following her rule of "if you don't understand, ask," Hel turned to the Ascended Brain and voiced her doubts.
The Ascended Brain quickly explained,
"All half-blood goblins below Tier 4 were artificially synthesized through machinery.
Only those at Tier 4 or higher were born from the Mother Tree.
Though they share the same bloodline, they are not truly of the same race.
To put it simply—one type is nothing more than a soulless killing machine,
while the other possesses true intelligence and the ability to learn and think."
"Right… mass-producing cannon fodder really is a goblin specialty," Hel muttered, shrugging helplessly.
She ordered her subordinates to collect the corpses and store them in her necrotic space for later use.
And indeed, their numbers lived up to the title of cannon fodder—
there were five hundred of them.
Her undead and golem troops had to dig through rubble and debris for quite a while before recovering them all.
By the end, the undead were exhausted—if that term even applied.
But as the ruthless capitalist she was, Hel didn't allow them to rest.
After all, undead and golems didn't need rest.
Besides, corpse recovery was just the smallest part of this operation's gains.
The real prize lay in the city itself.
For starters, the goblins had built every structure out of red copper—a level of luxury that could only be described as obscene.
With that kind of extravagance, one could only imagine the value of the treasures hidden within their vaults.
So, Hel ordered Sebas and the others to start tearing down the residential blocks first.
The red copper from those buildings could later be used to forge equipment—or simply sold for a hefty profit.
And when it came to demolitions, none could match the Flame Arbiter and his crew.
Mechanical spiders moved in first to dismantle the structures,
while the Flame Arbiter himself used his blazing power to melt the metal into uniform copper ingots—
perfect for transport and storage.
Watching her wealth pile up before her eyes, Hel crossed her arms proudly and said,
"Heh heh… now this is the beauty of scavenging.
Who said dumpster diving doesn't pay? Look at me—I just struck gold!"
"Scavenging?"
"That's right," Hel grinned. "This is the art of the trash collector.
Turning garbage into treasure—that's our creed."
"Amazing," the Ascended Brain replied sincerely.
"Back in my previous life, I started with nothing but a dog," Hel said smugly,
"and from there I—"
And so, chatting idly about her past life, Hel and the Ascended Brain made their way to the city's central laboratory and storage area.
Although the Ascended Brain had already deployed nearly all her forces during the battle,
the laboratory still held a few hidden reserves.
For example—
Hel stared at the stasis pod before her, her expression unreadable.
Inside lay a small goblin—red-skinned, black-haired, sharp-eared, and long-nosed.
He resembled a human in some ways, but shorter—and far less attractive, especially compared to elves.
"These," the Ascended Brain said softly, "are the last remaining goblins of this city after the Age of Annihilation began."
There were one hundred such pods in the room.
"They survived by using stasis technology to preserve their bodies.
But because of the curse, the moment they leave the pods, their bodies will disintegrate into ash.
The city's leaders hoped this method would allow the flame of civilization to endure—
that one day, in a distant future, someone would find a cure for the curse.
But twelve thousand centuries have passed…
and we are still no closer to a solution."
"They're already dead," Hel said quietly, gazing into the pod.
She could clearly sense that the goblin inside no longer possessed a spark of life.
The stasis pod was nothing more than a cage trapping what remained of his soul inside a lifeless body.
"It's time to let them rest," Hel said after a pause. "Do you want me to resurrect them for you?"
The Ascended Brain was silent for a while before shaking her head slowly.
"Thank you for your kindness, but they no longer belong to this era.
Even if they were brought back… what would it change?"
With that, she pressed one of her tentacles against the pod's surface.
With a soft click, the pod began to open.
At that moment, the Ascended Brain had only one thought—
to bid farewell to her past once and for all.
From now on, she would belong only to Hel.
As the stasis pod opened, the remaining nutrient fluid drained away.
The goblin's body came into contact with the air of this new age.
But the instant it did, time seemed to catch up to him all at once.
His body aged rapidly—visibly—before crumbling from top to bottom into dust.
Watching the scene, Hel felt an eerie sense of déjà vu.
This death resembled Youming's—the girl who had been drained of life when her body failed to contain the divine fragments of a god.
So what caused this goblin's death? Was it also related to a divine fragment?
No. To be precise—this was divine punishment.
Hel could faintly sense a trace of divine energy lingering in the goblin's remains.
This wasn't a curse born of magic—it was the wrath of a god.
Perhaps the goblins had once obtained a god's fragment,
and in their attempts to study it, brought ruin upon themselves.
But after one hundred and twenty thousand years, who could possibly know the truth?
Hel certainly didn't care enough to find out.
After all, she was a pragmatic woman—and she knew full well that curiosity kills the cat.