The pressure was physical, a weight on the chest of every surviving Republican. The air no longer smelled just of gunpowder and wet earth, but of the bittersweet stench of the end: the sweat of desperation, blood flowing freely into the mud, and the metallic reek of fear that soaked their clothes and clung to their throats. The cries of the wounded were a constant chorus, punctuated by the triumphant roars of the bandeirantes who felt the noose tightening. Pedro, his arms heavy and numb from conjuring ice to the point of exhaustion, saw Isabela collapse beside him, spent, the magical umbrella slipping from her limp fingers with a soft thump in the mud. He tried to raise his dagger once more, but his muscles only trembled in protest, a throbbing agony climbing from his elbow to his shoulder. The cold he commanded now lived in his own bones, an internal ice no sun could dispel.

  This is it. We’re going to die in this stinking creek bed, with the smell of our own defeat filling our nostrils.

  That’s when the sound changed.

  Amid the deafening chaos – the distant CRACK! of Whisper, the sporadic POW! of muskets, the screams – a new rhythm imposed itself.

  TATATATATATA!

  It was faster, sharper, more mechanical. It sounded like controlled fury, an electric saw slicing the air in short, brutal bursts. It came not from one point, but from several at once: from the edges of the denser jungle behind them, from the flanks where the enemy tried to encircle them, from places where there should only be forest.

  Stunned, Pedro forced his head to turn, his smoke-burned eyes searching for the source. The weak, diffuse late afternoon light settled on silhouettes moving with frightening precision. The nearest bandeirantes also hesitated; their battle roars died in their throats, replaced by grunts of confusion.

  And then, he saw.

  From the shadows of the jatoba trees on the right, figures emerged. Not in a disordered charge, but in a tactical advance, in small groups of three moving like parts of a single machine. They were green, a deep, matte moss green that made them almost disappear against the damp foliage. And in their hands, they carried not muskets, but rifles. Weapons of dark angelim wood and blued metal, with longer, sinister barrels, and curved magazines under the bolt that gleamed with oil.

  The new weapons. The weapons that Carlos, Nia, and the grease-stained engineers from the arsenal had promised in meetings that sounded like fairy tales. The cavalry, in the most modern and terrible sense of the word, had finally arrived.

  The first wave of green soldiers knelt at the edge of the clearing, with almost no cover. There was no need for an earth barrier, no protective mist. There was only the new order of battle, cold and efficient.

  A sergeant, his face impassive under a leather helmet reinforced with metal strips, raised a clenched fist and then pointed two fingers forward. His voice cut the distance, dry as the snap of a twig:

  "Suppressing fire. Advance lines Alpha and Beta. Fire."

  What followed was not a massacre. It was an industrial harvest.

  The sound TATATATATATA! became a continuous, interwoven roar, a sawing of the air itself. The repeating rifles didn't need thirty seconds to reload. A soldier, his face a mask of absolute concentration, pulled the bolt back and forth in a quick, trained motion—clunk-clack—ejecting the still-smoking brass cartridge and inserting a new one in the blink of an eye. The cycle—fire, reload, fire—was so fast it seemed there was no interval, just a constant, lethal hail.

  The bandeirantes on the front line, those who seconds ago had been advancing with machetes raised and bloodshot eyes, were reaped like wheat. A man in a leather jerkin, mid-charge, was stopped in the air by multiple impacts that made his body spasm grotesquely before he fell in a shapeless blur. Others, taking cover behind logs, saw the wood beside them shredded into splinters, an unrelenting rain of lead piercing their refuge. A bolder pyromancer tried to raise his gloved hands to hurl a fireball at the new green line; a short burst of three shots pierced his chest in a near-perfect triangle before flames could even flicker on his fingers.

  The numerical advantage, so overwhelming and arrogant moments before, dissolved into pure panic. The battle cries turned into animal shrieks of terror. The enemy advance line, once compact and threatening like a tide, disintegrated into terrified individuals. Men threw themselves to the ground, rolling in the bloody mud, seeking any dip, any protruding root for cover. Others, in a more basic reflex, simply turned and ran, abandoning comrades, weapons, and any shred of courage. The iron, silent discipline of the green soldiers was, in contrast, terrifying. They advanced in small teams, one team covering another's advance with constant, coordinated fire, moving to flank, to encircle those who still resisted. It was a choreography of efficient death, where the only voices were the rhythmic crack of rifles and the occasional guttural command.

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  From the other side, other green soldiers, carrying different weapons—short-barreled shotguns with pistol grips—advanced through the flanks like Shadows, clearing the bushes and thickets where archers and lesser gem adepts were hiding. The low, hollow BOOM of these weapons, followed by the distinct sound of an ejected shell, echoed, and then came only silence or a sudden, muffled moan.

  Seeing the battle turn so brutally, suddenly, and unilaterally, the surviving Republicans huddled in the creek bed were at first paralyzed. Hope, a flame so faint and distant minutes before, arrived with the force of a tide, flooding them and nearly knocking them over from the shock.

  "It's… it's the army…" a younger regular soldier named Marcos stammered beside Pedro, his voice trembling with absolute disbelief. He held a musket with a bent bayonet, his fingers white around the barrel.

  Another soldier, a veteran named Benício with a bloody arm bound in a torn piece of his own shirt, simply let his musket fall into the mud with a plop and collapsed into a sitting position, his whole body shaking convulsively. It was no longer a tremor of fear, but of relief so intense and sudden it manifested as a new pain, a nervous collapse. One of the earth adepts, Iara, with her shoulder pierced by shrapnel and her face pale as wax, began to cry silently, large, clean tears cutting trails through the dirt and dried blood on her face. Others hugged, weak, wordless, just staring at that green line that was now an impenetrable wall between them and the end.

  Pedro, for his part, did not throw himself to the ground. He did not let out a sigh of relief. He did not cry. The fierce adrenaline that had sustained every muscle, every decision, every order, drained away all at once, leaving behind a cold, heavy, and… calculating void. He slowly lowered the ice dagger, its tip sinking into the mud with a soft sound. His eyes, which moments ago had been frantically searching for the next enemy, the next pressure point, began to scan the terrain around him with a deliberate and terrible slowness.

  Relief for the living came, yes. A trapped sigh escaped his cracked lips. But it was instantly overshadowed, drowned by the expanded vision the pause brought: the vision of the dead.

  He saw them. One by one. The body of the young soldier, maybe seventeen, who had tried to face the wind adept and had been thrown like a rag over the barrier. Joana, the earth adept who always laughed during training, now lying on her back, her brown eyes open and glazed fixed on the gray sky, a dark red, thick lake growing under her neck where a blade had found her. Closer, the charred, contorted body of Lucas, the carpenter who had enlisted last month and who had tried to protect Isabela with his own body, his arms still in a defensive position, now black and brittle. Further on, near the shattered earth barrier, two young bodies—Emanuel and Rafael—embraced, as if they had tried to protect each other in the last instant, their blood mixed in the same pool.

  The clearing, which minutes before had been a battlefield where he gave orders, was now a mire of mud, congealed blood, twisted metal, and lives cut short abruptly and violently. The sweet, nauseating smell of death began to overpower all others.

  I brought them here. The thought came to his mind not as a whisper, but as a clear, poisonous, and inescapable declaration, like the ice he conjured. I chose this place. The creek for water, the high ground for a last-stand defense, the dense jungle on the flanks to hinder encirclement… It seemed right on the cloth map I studied with Matias. It seemed the smart option, a commander's decision. I led them to their deaths. Perhaps many of them have a child like me... who has now lost a father, a mother...

  His heavy gaze settled on Tainá. She was sitting on the ground, leaning against a smooth stone, holding her own dislocated shoulder with her good hand. Her face was a mixture of physical pain and a deep emptiness in her eyes, as if part of her had been left behind with Lívia. He saw Nzambi, a few steps ahead, trying with tired gestures to help Isabela sit up. The soldier's face was a mask of exhaustion so profound it bordered on expressionless, but in the corners of his eyes, Pedro thought he saw a reflection of his own guilt. And then, his gaze swept over the other dirty, bloodied, frightened faces that were gradually beginning to turn to him. They are looking… waiting. Waiting for what? A word of comfort? A smile of victory? An explanation?

  But look at the price, the voice in his head whispered, crueler and more persuasive now. They trusted my strategy. They followed my orders. And I positioned them here, in this muddy creek bed, to die. To hold the line. To "buy time." Every earth barrier Tainá raised, every musket volley Arlindo ordered, every drop of mana Isabela spent… was because I decided this was the place. If we had kept fleeing… if we had abandoned the more gravely wounded, the slower ones, to save the core… a brutal logic of total retreat… perhaps fewer faces would now be staring at a sky they cannot see. Perhaps Lívia would still…

  The logic of total retreat, merciless and coldly efficient, which he had rejected in the heat of the moment for being cowardly and inhuman, now presented itself to him in the calm after the storm with the seductive features of a sensible option. A physical knot of guilt, doubt, and deep anguish tightened his throat, so strong he choked. The sound of the green soldiers' rifles, which was a song of victory and salvation for the others, sounded to him like the rhythmic hammering of an implacable judge, marking every lost life, every grievous wound, as a miscalculation in his plan, a flaw in his command judgment.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, seeking a moment of darkness. But the images were etched behind his eyelids, more vivid than reality. The noise of the rifles seemed to echo inside his skull. When he opened them, his face was not that of a victor, nor of a relieved leader. It was the face of a young man who, for the first time, was counting the real cost of his decisions in human currency, blood, and interrupted dreams. And, looking at the battlefield he had chosen, he wondered, with a cold that came from the depths of his soul, if the exchange, no matter how necessary, was worth that specific price. The doubt settled within him, deep and silent like a crack in the ice.