Quinlan pulled his fingers from Ayame's hair and let the warmth of the moment drain with them, because the field he was standing on was still a warzone.
The laughter had bought everyone a few minutes.
Now those minutes were over, and the list of problems waiting for him stretched longer than the beastkin columns disappearing on the horizon.
Bodies carpeted the ground in overlapping layers, feral undead from the Covenant's shattered horde still stumbling into clusters of wounded soldiers.
The dwarven king sat frozen in a block of ice with no one quite sure what to do with him, and somewhere behind the elven lines, the Fujimori prisoners needed to be secured before they became four different kinds of headache.
He didn't need to say a word.
The tension that had been winding tighter since Skarn first snarled at him was unwinding now, and with it came the part his girls were best at: the work nobody thanked you for.
