The next morning, the camp was dead quiet. Every single body on the ground was dead.
All eighty thousand of them.
They were laid across the campsite in ugly clusters and long scattered rows, exactly where sleep had left them. There were no signs of a struggle or defensive wounds. It was almost obscene in its neatness. They looked as if they'd simply fallen asleep and forgot to wake up. The only thing that gave them away was the faint blue sheen in their bodies if anyone looked close enough. Their internal organs had turned to from the inside out.
Astaraela and Bio walked through the camp together, checking every tent, every cot, every fire pit, every pile of blankets and every body. There were no survivors. ruin. Bio kept looking, probably more out of reflex than hope, but the answer never changed.
Astaraela finally exhaled in relief.
"Good."
Bio stopped walking.
"Good?"
"I'm glad they're all dead."
The realization was so slow at first and shen it hit her, she was shocked.
"You... you killed them all?"
Astaraela didn't even try to deny it. "Yes."
"All eighty thousand?"
"Yes."
Bio just stood there. She had seen her do horrible things before. She had watched her slice through armies, crystallize bodies, harvest souls and walk across battlefields confidently but this was different. This was a deliberate culling of an entire camp. So Bio asked the only question left.
"Why?"
Astaraela kept walking.
"I was experimenting."
"You murdered eighty thousand people to test something?"
"Yeah. You seem to forget who I am."
Bio stared at her like she was trying to decide whether to be offended, horrified or impressed. Astaraela finally stopped and turned her head to face her.
"This is a Time Trial. I have no information about it. I don't know why I'm here, who I'm fighting or what the end condition is. The war is among immortals but I'm not given the structure of it. So I tested the structure myself. If I killed everyone in the camp and the war ended, then the enemy would win if they charged. That would mean the trial was about this battlefield specifically. It would mean the camp mattered. It would mean I had failed or succeeded in a way I could measure."
Bio was speechless listening to her take.
"But if the trial is still ongoing, then this isn't the main battlefield. Which means one of two things. Either these two factions aren't fighting for territory and the leaders are using the war as a controlled test for their forces before a real conflict, or they're toying with immortals for sport and endurance. In either case, this camp wasn't the center of the trial. It was a disposable point."
Bio went quiet. She had killed the camp to answer the question the war refused to answer. Even worse, it made sense.
If the war ended when the camp died, then the camp was the point. If the war didn't end, then the camp was merely one moving piece in a larger structure. Either way, the result told her something useful. Astaraela had not been guessing. She'd been testing hypotheses with an army as the sample size.
Bio slowly looked back at the bodies. She remembered who her master was then, and that made the whole thing feel even more obscene in hindsight.
This was the same person who had killed eight hundred thousand just to bring back a woman he loved. This was the same person who had spent ten years being broken down, denied and reshaped by war until death itself stopped being the worst thing that could happen. Of course she would kill seventy thousand soldiers without flinching if it gave her an answer. Of course she would use desperation as bait. Obviously she would win their trust for weeks, let them eat her food, let them laugh around her fire and then use that trust to get exactly what she needed.
That was the part that made her dangerous.
If she had done this from the beginning, nobody would've touched the food. They would have suspected poison immediately. They would've watched her, questioned her, blocked her access and forced her into open conflict before she'd learned anything useful. Instead, she had fed them, helped them, healed with them, laughed with them and made herself look like the camp's savior. She had waited until they were desperate and careless enough to stop inspecting the thing that kept them alive.
Then she used that exact trust against them.
Bio stared at Astaraela in a long, silent stretch of understanding. Her master was a conniving bastard... bitch?
"You're insane."
Astaraela didn't even look offended.
"Yes. I'm a monster, not evil. "
"You poisoned all of them."
"No."
"Then what did you do?"
Astaraela lifted one hand and a tiny shard of sapphire shimmered between her fingers before dissolving into powder.
"I ground sapphire into dust and put it in the food. It entered their bodies with the meal. Their internal organs crystallized from within. It was fast so I'm sure they didn't suffer."
Bio looked at the dead again. There really hadn't been any visible suffering.
"You say that like it's comforting."
"It is, in a way. They'd already accepted me. They trusted me enough to eat. They trusted me enough to let their guard down. So I used that trust to obtain certainty."
Bio gulped and glanced around at the bodies one more time. The scale of it was so enormous it stopped feeling like a number. Eighty thousand wasn't abstract now. All of them were gone by morning just because her master wanted proof.
"You really don't care?"
Astaraela's answer came at once. "I care about the end result."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know, but my answer is the same. If this was the main battlefield, then I've just decided the war. If it wasn't, then I've removed a layer of noise and proven that the whole thing is larger than this camp. Either way, I've learned something. That's enough."
Bio stood there in silence. There was no clean argument against that kind of logic. It was monstrous, yes. It was ruthless, yes. It was exactly the sort of thing that a person who had survived ten years of forced suffering, lost an identity, rebuilt herself and then chosen to become a weapon would do.
She hadn't rushed them. She hadn't scared them off. She had let them think she was useful enough to be safe. Then she used the exact same desperation that made them eat anything placed in front of them.
Bio looked at her master again and understood something else too.
"You really are a monster."