Chapter 604: Chapter 604 - Taming Presumptions Larissa adjusted the straps of her bag, something like her school backpack, for the third time... her hands trembling slightly from nerves about returning to the academy. María rolled her eyes. It wasn’t as if she needed to carry more things by hand when she had carriages full of "indispensable" items that would be transported from the castle... But perhaps it was her way of coping, so she didn’t insist on carrying it for her in the end. Her enormous room had been converted into the recovery chamber for the four girls from their group of twelve who needed rest. It was filled with expectant silence, broken only by the occasional whispers of maids monitoring the two unconscious guards and the soft hum of energy emanating from the procedure they were performing. In the center of the room, two beds had been positioned to allow Hana, with her evolved Venus Flytrap, to extend her beast’s thinner roots toward Mako and Shizu. The roots, which glowed with a dim light, were connected directly to the sleeping guards’ mana systems at specific points, while Kira and Hikari coordinated the injection of processed crystals using their specific cultivation methods directly into their beasts. It was a technique that Wei had been teaching publicly for the past few months, though all of them knew it had originally been developed by Ren. Like so many other innovations that had changed how the kingdom functioned, his genius had found a way to accelerate recovery and prevent lethargy periods from completely interrupting the cultivation process. Luna began to stir in her bed, her eyelids fluttering as she gradually emerged from the deep sleep that followed prolonged double fusions. Liora was already half-awake too, her eyes studying the ceiling with the thoughtful expression the mischievous girl adopted only when waking up. Of the three maids and six guards, only Mako and Shizu had needed recovery. Of the three "princesses", Luna and Liora had required rest due to their rough power usage. Larissa sighed, adjusting her ’backpack’ once more. Her own fusion had lasted less than five minutes, so she had avoided most of the lethargy side effects her cousins had experienced. But that minor advantage felt insignificant compared to the emotional weight of everything that had happened. In a way, she also felt exhausted... not physically, but in a deeper way that rest couldn’t easily cure. Luna looked directly at her from the bed when her eyes fully focused, and Larissa could see the familiar obstinacy that meant her friend wanted answers and no more sleep. And not the simple answers given in official reports, but the complete truth about how everything had ended on both battlefields and what had happened after the creatures retreated and they collapsed from exhaustion. The three maids approached to help Luna and Liora sit up, offering them water and checking their vital signs with the professional efficiency they had developed during the past years of managing the consequences of forcing double fusions. While they prepared them and helped them fully regain consciousness, Larissa organized her thoughts, trying to decide how to explain a sequence of events that she herself wasn’t sure how to process. Her mind tried to organize everything into a coherent picture. She had already been here in her room when Arturo’s message arrived about the resolution of the situation at Yino’s wall. That side, defended by Victor, hadn’t fared any better than Ren’s... ♢♢♢♢ The original wall had been partially destroyed and rebuilt several times, with temporary mineral sections filling gaps where original stone formations had been pulverized by impacts from the giant creature. The soldiers moved with the desperate urgency of people who had been fighting for their lives for hours. The creatures attacking were the same abominations they had faced on Yano’s side. Massive constructions that seemed to defy biological laws, combining organic elements and ancient artifacts that had evolved beyond simple corruption. Victor hadn’t been able to hold his position when the four artifacts in his sector had fused. The resulting creature had pushed the defenses backward, threatening to completely eliminate the defenders and allow hordes of lesser mutants to directly invade the city. The battle had been brutal, desperate. Victor’s fusion huge earth-based defenses, which had seemed so solid at the beginning, had crumbled like sandcastles before the tide of corrupted flesh and twisted metal. Arturo had been forced to leave logistics and intervene as a last resort, but that had been insufficient too. Even with his considerable power and tactical expertise, the fused creature had proven too strong. Until the Starweaver night faction used the Twin Stars... The two artifacts, one belonging to the Starweaver night faction and the other they had confiscated from Sirius’s Celestial Dawn faction during his departure, had been brought together and used to amplify a massive attack that had exploded and stopped the fused creature. The sight had been spectacular according to the reports. Twin beams of light and darkness had converged on the abomination, creating an explosion that had lit up the entire battlefield and sent shockwaves through the surrounding terrain. But "stopping" had turned out to be a relative term. The creature had completely regenerated shortly after the first attack. It had required two additional repetitions before it had finally ’decided’ to retreat, unearthing its component artifacts and disappearing into underground tunnels. The Starweavers and their opportunistic allied factions had claimed complete credit for that side’s victory, arguing that their family artifacts had been the only decisive difference between victory and total catastrophe. The soldiers who had witnessed the attacks had confirmed their effectiveness, and public consensus had been that the Starweaver night faction had saved the eastern sector, Yino. But the timing had been suspicious. The creatures in the western sector had begun their retreat at the exact same moment Ren had launched his massive attack against the four-artifact creature in the southern sector. Right when the creatures had decided to bury themselves after Ren connected to the network. But with limited communication systems that took several minutes to cross such large distances, it had been impossible to coordinate the timing of all reports with sufficient precision to determine the definitive causality. Selphira and Julius believed that Ren’s explosion had been the true cause of the general retreat. Their theory was that the energy pulse through the network had frightened all the corrupted creatures, or that Ren’s information had shown them what the boy had said... That there was no way for the mutants to get under the castle to reach what they wanted. But it had been impossible to prove the theory without revealing details about the exact nature of what Ren had done... information they had decided to keep classified for ’security reasons’. Meanwhile, the Starweavers’ success had had immediate political consequences. The faction that had ’confiscated’ Sirius’s artifacts had gained significant strength, arguing that their decision to act had saved lives. They had begun formal procedures to claim permanent control over the larger Starweaver and Yino territories, citing Sirius’s abandonment and their own heroism as justification. Luna would have to navigate those political waters even when she returned to classes, using her documented success in the northern sector as a counterargument to her uncles’ claims. But the legal battle promised to be as complex and dangerous as the physical battle they had just survived.