The complete balance of forces across the ridge had been violently upended by Jeanne and her soaring legion. Every combatant left standing on the field watched her with deep, burning caution, completely struck dumb by the sudden appearance of this mysterious armored girl.
Compared to the utter panic rippling through the ranks of the Military Commission, the remaining fighters under the Babel banner let out a massive, collective sigh of relief. Evaluating the immediate layout, it was beautifully obvious that this Saintess—who looked entirely foreign and out of place amidst the grim, blood-soaked dirt of Kazdel—was firmly on their side.
Scanning the forward lines, Jeanne quickly confirmed her instincts were dead accurate. Not only did she spot the distinctive, white-haired mercenary girl with the crimson-streaked locks lingering nearby, but she also caught sight of several standard Babel field uniforms clustered around the rear parapet.
Recognizing a few familiar faces among the survivors, Jeanne stepped across the scorched earth to greet them. The nearest field officer stared back at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes, his brain completely shutting down as he tried to process the reality of the situation.
"Uh... Lady Jeanne? It is truly you!" The officer swallowed hard, entirely aware that a smoking battlefield wasn't the ideal setting for casual pleasantries, yet completely unable to suppress his burning curiosity. "Where in the world did these colossal monsters come from...?"
Throughout his entire stint at the rear base, he had firmly believed this gentle woman—who spent her days tirelessly treating infected patients and soothing their pain—was merely an exceptionally talented physician. Sure, she possessed a bit more physical strength than the average medic, but Babel had never been short on robust, combat-capable doctors.
But this? Watching her systematically dismantle an entire army by commanding a flock of prehistoric predators was a display that completely shattered his worldview. Decades of surviving the harsh realities of the waste wars had left him entirely unprepared for a spectacle of this magnitude.
Does an individual truly possess the raw power to dictate the outcome of a campaign by her lonesome? he wondered, his mind spinning. He had always assumed that even if the Demon King herself marched onto the front lines, engineering this level of absolute destruction would require a monumental expenditure of lives and resources.
"It is indeed me," Jeanne replied with a reassuring smile, before her expression turned slightly sheepish. "And you are... forgive me, my memory has been thoroughly infected by the Doctor's habits recently, and I cannot seem to pull your name from my head. But as you can see, the strategist has officially delivered the reinforcements you requested."
Hearing her confirm her allegiance, the remaining mercenaries felt the crushing weight vanish from their chests. The suffocating terror that had gripped them a moment prior evaporated into thin air.
Suddenly, the underlying resentment they had harbored toward the high command completely vanished. They had spent the morning cursing the administration, unable to comprehend why the Demon King would demand they hold a broken ditch for twenty-four agonizing hours against impossible odds. Now, the answer was staring them in the face: Babel hadn't abandoned them to a dog's death; they were simply waiting for their ultimate trump card to descend from the clouds!
A wave of profound embarrassment rippled through the rough contract fighters. A few moments ago, they had been nursing dark, bitter thoughts toward their royal employer, and the sudden realization of their own short-sightedness left them burning with a quiet, lingering shame.
Jeanne, however, paid no attention to their internal shift. Her focus remained entirely anchored on gathering immediate field data from the Babel handler, eager to locate and purge whatever remaining hostile elements were lingering near the perimeter.
Yet, the nameless field officer simply stared out at the sky, watching the massive wyverns sweep across the ridge, raining brilliant fireballs onto the retreating formations and sending the Regent's mercenaries fleeing for their lives. He opened his mouth to deliver a tactical report, but found himself entirely at a loss for words.
Truth be told, there was absolutely nothing left for this delicate Saintess to do. Evaluating the scorched landscape and the shattered remnants of the opposing army, it was glaringly obvious that the conflict was already over.
Jeanne herself hadn't anticipated such a flawless outcome. She had fully prepared herself to endure a grueling, day-long siege across the trenches; it seemed she had vastly overestimated the enemy's structural resilience.
Seeing the crisis permanently resolved, the surrounding mercenaries immediately shifted their attention toward clearing the field. Squads began reverently gathering the bodies of their fallen comrades and applying field dressings to the severely wounded, completely shifting into a post-victory routine.
Standing near a broken barricade, W stared down at her massive hoard of customized, homemade explosives, her lower lip curling into a deep pout. She had been a mere heartbeat away from unleashing her unreleased prototypes into the fray—a rare, beautiful opportunity to gather live detonation data blown to absolute splinters!
Left with no other alternative, she unceremoniously dropped the lethal bundles into the dirt at her feet. Shifting her focus, she walked over to Hoederer's side, her crimson eyes locked onto Jeanne, the tiny Vouivres child clinging to her waist, and the massive, silver-scaled beast resting behind them with intense, unbridled fascination.
Watching her approach the dragon with that familiar, manic glint in her eye, Hoederer felt a sudden bead of cold sweat trace down his spine. He held his breath, terrified the unhinged girl might let her impulses win and attempt to "investigate" a apex predator that could reduce her to ash with a single breath.
Meanwhile, the scene across the valley was anything but casual. Jeanne had unleashed ten fully grown wyverns to scour the sector, and the Regent's mercenaries possessed zero tactical answers for countering an airborne assault.
They had been reduced to a singular, desperate goal: raw survival. It was a frantic race against the clock to see if their boots could carry them out of the impact zone before they were cooked alive, turned into dragon feed, or transformed into floating black ash beneath the relentless waves of fire.
"This... this defies every single briefing we were handed! Those arrogant bastards in high command never muttered a single word about prehistoric monsters joining the line! We were served up as blind sacrifices!"
Amidst the screaming chaos of the rout, an enemy mercenary captain completely lost his grip on reality, his voice cracking into a ragged shriek as he ran. He was entirely past the point of caring whether his frantic shouts drew the attention of the beasts circling above.
His entire world had been thoroughly dismantled. His veteran squads, his amassed supplies, and his expensive weapons cache had been permanently erased from the map by a single volley of dragon fire. Decades of brutal, painstaking survival in the wastelands had been rendered entirely meaningless in a matter of seconds.
The surrounding raiders offered no comfort, keeping their heads down as they sprinted across the flats with single-minded focus. None of them dared to slow their pace to silence him, though they weren't particularly worried about his screams betraying their position.
The reality was brutal: they were fleeing across an open, featureless plain. From the perspective of the sky, their dark shapes stood out like scattered sesame seeds on a white plate; if a hunting predator chose to lock onto them, concealment was a mathematical impossibility.
Sure enough, a massive shadow detached itself from the clouds, locking its gaze onto the small cluster of survivors before tilting its wings into a terrifying, vertical dive.
"If I had known this campaign would dissolve into a literal nightmare, I would have packed my gear and marched straight into the Sargon jungles to watch the crocodiles snap their jaws! Anything would be better than this... Curse you, Theresis! You absolute bastard, you set us up!"
The captain screamed his fury at the heavens, running until his lungs burned, when a sudden, violent shove from behind sent him crashing face-first into the dirt.
Before he could push himself back up, a pair of colossal, leathery talons clamped around his torso with bone-crushing force, yanking his frame violently into the sky. He looked down through the rushing air, catching the dark, twisted smiles of his former squadmates as they continued their frantic sprint, utterly thrilled that he had served as the perfect distraction to buy their escape.
"You Sarkaz expletive parasites! I knew not a single one of you possessed a shred of human decency!"
His curses echoed through the clouds, though no amount of profanity could alter the lethal trajectory of his descent. Similar scenes of absolute, unmitigated terror unfolded across every corner of the frontier, transforming the once-proud vanguard of the Military Commission into a literal living hell.
As for the disciplined regular soldiers directly answering to Theresis? The moment the silver wings had broken through the clouds, their officers had recognized the absolute futility of the defense. Utilizing the ensuing chaos as a shield, they had abandoned their auxiliary mercenary lines, piled into their heavy transport vehicles, and fled the sector before the firestorms could pin them down.
Presently, these surviving regulars stood within a temporary staging post miles away, their faces pale with residual terror as they gathered around a battered, clicking communications array, sweating as they awaited the judgment of their high command.
"...Repeat the dispatch. You are asserting that a species of massive, winged lizards utilizing bat-like wings initiated a direct assault on your positions?"
The high-ranking officer on the other end of the line fell into a prolonged, heavy silence after receiving the update. The unbelievable nature of the intelligence was carefully routed up through the chain of command, officially confirming that their vital border outposts had been permanently compromised.
"Yes, General! We swear on our lives there is zero exaggeration in this report!" The local squad leader's heart hammered against his ribs, terrified that the next words through the speaker would be a formal command to execute his squad for cowardice.
To his absolute bewilderment, the voice that returned through the static carried a tone of commendation. While surrendering the high ground was technically a severe failure, their immediate superior explicitly stated that the high command did not hold their unit responsible for the disaster.
Inside the central fortress of Kazdel, Theresis sat before a massive stone desk, reviewing the tactical update alongside the Confessarrii Leader. The atmosphere within the inner chambers had turned exceptionally cold; neither leader harbored a single illusion regarding the severity of this development.
"To think they managed to secure such a powerful foreign asset..." Theresis murmured, his fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic beat against the armrest. It was entirely transparent to his intellect that these mythical beasts answered exclusively to the command of the Saintess, and her official arrival on the battlefield boded incredibly ill for his long-term arrangements.
The Confessarrii Leader, having previously witnessed reports of Jeanne commanding these bizarre, supernatural predators, knew precisely what they were dealing with. If the Saintess had officially bound her strength to the banner of Babel, their own margins for a total victory had just shrunk to an incredibly razor-thin percentage.
Worse still, their newest adversary held absolute, uncontested dominion over the clouds. Across the entire expanse of Terra, there wasn't a single military division capable of mounting a viable threat against a force that commanded the open air.
"The sky, is it?"
Theresis's focus, however, detached itself from the immediate panic gripping his advisor. He slowly raised his gaze, staring up at the vaulted ceiling as if looking straight through the stone toward the infinite, empty heavens, his voice drifting into a thoughtful, ominous whisper.