Chapter 393: The War of Attrition and Slaughter
The war between the Eastern Prefecture and the Western Prefecture had entered its second, agonizing month. The Central Plains, once a vibrant tapestry of emerald grass and rolling hills, had been pulverized into a chaotic, nightmarish expanse of deep mud trenches, shattered bedrock, and vast, glittering craters of vitrified glass. The sheer volume of Battle Aura expended daily by tens of thousands of martialists had permanently altered the climate. The sky was a perpetual, suffocating swirl of evaporated sea water and abrasive desert dust, blocking out the sun and casting the battlefield in a grim, twilight haze.
Inside a dimly lit, heavy canvas war tent positioned at the rear of the desert vanguard, Qin Wu sat at the head of a rugged stone table. The Soul Eater looked ragged. His dark, heavy iron sword rested against his chair, its wide blade chipped and stained with dried blood. His Battle Aura, normally a vibrant, terrifyingly dense black, flickered slightly, betraying his deep physical exhaustion.
Around the table stood his surviving strategists and commanders. ’Mad Sand’ Tuoba, the towering, bald warlord whose chest was crisscrossed with fresh, livid scars, slammed his massive fist onto the stone map table.
"We are bleeding out, Lord Qin!" Tuoba roared, his voice a grinding rasp of frustration. "Conventional warfare is resulting in a bloody, pointless stalemate. We cannot match their numbers head-on, and those cursed sea beasts they transport through the inland rivers are breaking our heavy infantry lines!"
"It is not just their numbers, Commander Tuoba," interjected Gu Yan, an elderly desert array master whose robes were singed from a recent clash. "It is their resources. The Eastern Prefecture is rich in aquatic alchemy. Their forces are supplied with ’Deep-Sea Pearl Pellets’. Those unique healing pellets knit flesh and mend minor meridian tears in a matter of breaths. They stitch their wounds on the battlefield while our men bleed out into the mud!"
Tuoba spat on the ground. "We have the ’Blood-Boiling Berserker Pills’ and the ’Crimson Tiger Bone-Strengthening Pills’! Our men can fight with shattered ribs and severed arms! We have the raw strength!"
"Raw strength means nothing if the body eventually gives out from blood loss," Qin Wu stated, his voice a low, commanding baritone that instantly silenced the tent. He leaned forward, resting his scarred hands on the map. "We have a limited supply of high-grade healing pellets. The badlands do not yield the gentle herbs required for restorative alchemy. We are cultivators of extreme environments. We are built to endure, but we are currently fighting an ocean of endless vitality."
Qin Wu’s dark eyes swept over the map, taking in the intricate markers that represented the massive, shifting battle formations of the Eastern forces.
"We cannot match their attrition rate," Qin Wu finalized, his jaw tightening. The image of Mu Qing, her beautiful face pale and terrified as she was dragged away by the Sea Devil, flashed through his mind, fueling the dark artifact embedded within his soul. "Therefore, we change the rules of engagement. I will no longer fight against Long Chen in these pointless, grand skirmishes. We will cut the head off the snake by bleeding its neck."
"What do you propose, Lord Qin?" Gu Yan asked cautiously.
"I will target their commanders, their array masters, and their strategists," Qin Wu declared, a manic, lethal intensity igniting in his eyes. "With my ’Phantom Step of the Void Walker’ movement technique, I can bypass their frontline heavy infantry. I can infiltrate their camps, strike their command structure, and retreat into the dust before Long Chen can even sense my Battle Aura. I will leave their armies blind, leaderless, and utterly disorganized."
Tuoba grinned, a feral baring of teeth. "An assassination campaign. Let the Sea Devil command an army of headless chickens."
That very night, the dark shift in the war began.
Under the cover of a suffocating, starless night, Qin Wu moved through the desolate plains. He completely suppressed his Battle Aura, drawing the ambient dark Qi into his meridians to mask his presence. He was a ghost, a mere shadow flitting between the muddy craters and the rotting carcasses of fallen sea beasts.
He approached Sector Seven, a prominent Eastern supply camp heavily guarded by the elite disciples of the Azure Tide Sect. The camp was surrounded by a glowing, intricate boundary line—the ’Azure Leviathan Defense Array’.
Qin Wu crouched behind an overturned siege engine. He did not attempt to break the array by force. Instead, he observed the patrol routes, his eyes tracking the subtle fluctuations in the Water Qi that powered the barrier. Drawing upon the profound Sword Qi of the ’Nine-Desolations Sword Art’, he coated his body in a thin, vibrating layer of dark energy that perfectly matched the resonant frequency of the night air.
With a silent burst of speed, he slipped through a microscopic gap in the array’s fluctuation cycle, landing softly inside the encampment.
He moved with terrifying efficiency. His target was the central command tent, where the soft glow of a luminous pearl illuminated the silhouettes of several high-ranking Eastern officers hunched over battle maps.
Qin Wu bypassed the sentries, his dark iron sword drawn. He did not unleash wide, explosive arcs of Sword Qi; he kept his power concentrated entirely within the blade, rendering it a silent, absolute instrument of death.
He slipped into the tent. Before the four Eastern strategists could even draw their flexible swords or summon their Water Qi, Qin Wu struck. His heavy sword moved like a phantom. A single, horizontal sweep severed the heads of three officers in a spray of hot crimson.
The fourth officer, a prominent Array Master named Elder Ma, stumbled backward, his eyes wide with absolute terror. "Demon! Guards—!"
Qin Wu closed the distance instantly, his left hand shooting out to grasp Elder Ma by the throat. He lifted the sputtering array master off the ground.
"Abyssal Soul-Devouring Art," Qin Wu whispered, his voice resonating with a terrifying, demonic overlay.
The Abyssal Soul Bead within his Dantian flared violently. A vortex of pitch-black energy erupted from Qin Wu’s palm, plunging directly into Elder Ma’s chest. The array master convulsed violently, his eyes rolling back in his head as his very life force, his Battle Aura, and his spiritual essence were forcefully, brutally ripped from his meridians.
But Qin Wu did not just consume energy. He consumed the mind.
As the dark art ravaged Elder Ma’s Sea of Consciousness, fragments of the man’s memories flashed rapidly through Qin Wu’s own mind. He saw the intricate, glowing blueprints of the ’Azure Leviathan Defense Array’. He saw the supply routes leading back to the archipelago. He saw the exact shift schedules of the Eastern vanguard.
Qin Wu dropped the empty, desiccated husk of the array master to the floor. The man’s skin was entirely gray, his Dantian shattered, his soul utterly extinguished.
Qin Wu’s own Battle Aura surged, fortified by the stolen vitality. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, digesting the stolen memories. ’The third node of the Azure Leviathan array shifts its frequency every two hours,’ Qin Wu calculated internally. ’And their resupply of Deep-Sea Pearl Pellets arrives via the western river tributary at dawn. I will eat their knowledge, sever their lifelines, and leave them to starve in the mud.’
He vanished from the tent before the bodies even grew cold.
Over the next week, the loss of high-ranking allies sent ripples of absolute panic through the Eastern faction. Entire battalions found themselves without orders. Complex, multi-layered battle formations collapsed upon themselves because the array masters required to synchronize the Water Qi had been found dead in their tents, their bodies reduced to soulless, shriveled husks. The Eastern troop movements became sluggish, hesitant, and highly disorganized.
Long Chen arrived at the ruins of a slaughtered command camp just as the sun broke through the dust clouds. The Sea Devil’s face was a mask of cold, unyielding fury as he inspected the bodies. He knelt beside the husk of a trusted lieutenant from the Coral Island sect.
He placed two fingers against the corpse’s forehead, sending a pulse of probing Water Qi into the man’s meridians. He found absolutely nothing. The Dantian was dry; the Sea of Consciousness was an empty, echoing void.
Patriarch Zhao Hai of the Azure Tide Sect stood beside him, his fists trembling with rage. "This is not warfare, Lord Long Chen! This is butchery! He does not fight us; he hunts us in the dark like a cowardly beast! My best strategists are dead!"
Long Chen stood up, his ocean-blue eyes narrowing into dangerous, lethal slits. The dense, crushing pressure of his Battle Aura leaked into the air, causing the mud around his boots to freeze solid.
"He lacks the honor of a true warrior," Long Chen stated, his voice a terrifying, quiet rumble. "He fights like an assassin. But worse than that... he is stealing their minds."
Zhao Hai blinked in confusion. "Stealing their minds? How is that possible?"
"Look at the camp," Long Chen gestured to the untouched supply crates. "He did not take our Deep-Sea Pearl Pellets. He did not loot their spatial rings for gold or weapons. He only killed the officers who held the tactical layouts in their heads. I have fought bloodline cultivators who devour Qi, but this Desert Demon... he is reading their Sea of Consciousness before the spiritual imprint dissipates. He is eating their souls to learn our secrets."
Zhao Hai gasped, a profound horror washing over him. "Then our entire defensive network is compromised! He knows our troop movements! He knows the weaknesses in our array formations!"
"Yes," Long Chen said, his eyes scanning the desolate, ruined plains. "Which means we must turn his stolen knowledge into a noose."
Long Chen returned to his heavily fortified command flagship, a massive, levitating galleon anchored near a major river tributary. He immediately convened a secret council with his surviving, most trusted array masters.
"The Desert Demon believes he has the upper hand because he has stolen the blueprints of our defenses," Long Chen addressed the council, his tone pragmatic and uncompromising. "He will use those stolen memories to bypass our outer wards and strike at our vital supply depots. We will let him."
"Lord Long Chen, you cannot mean to leave the supply depots undefended!" an elder protested.
"I mean to change the locks," Long Chen countered. "You will maintain the outward appearance of the ’Azure Leviathan Defense Array’. Let the ambient Water Qi fluctuate exactly as the stolen memories dictate. But beneath the surface, you will weave the ’Abyssal Crush Sealing Formation’."
The array masters widened their eyes. The Abyssal Crush Sealing Formation was a deadly, localized trap designed to simulate the crushing atmospheric pressure of the deepest ocean trenches.
"Shift the structural nodes of the inner barrier three paces to the east every night," Long Chen commanded, tracing a line on the tactical map. "When Qin Wu strikes what his stolen memories tell him is a ’blind spot’ in our defenses, he will step directly into the core of the Abyssal Crush trap. And when the array triggers... I will be waiting."
Three nights later, the trap was sprung.
Qin Wu, moving with the silent, blurring speed of the ’Phantom Step of the Void Walker’, approached the Silver Wave Supply Depot. This depot held the majority of the Eastern faction’s high-grade healing pellets. Destroying it would cripple their sustained fighting capacity.
Drawing upon the memories he had devoured from Elder Ma, Qin Wu identified the precise fluctuation in the outer Water Qi barrier. He waited for the two-hour cycle to shift, entirely confident in his stolen knowledge. He coated himself in dark Sword Qi and slipped through the barrier, aiming directly for the seemingly unguarded gap between the patrol routes.
He stepped into the shadows of a large storage tent.
Instantly, the earth beneath his feet erupted with blinding, azure light.
"What—!" Qin Wu cursed, his instincts screaming.
The ambient moisture in the air instantly solidified, forming massive, ethereal chains of hyper-condensed Water Qi that lashed out from the mud, wrapping tightly around his ankles and wrists. The ’Abyssal Crush Sealing Formation’ activated with a deafening roar, plunging the localized area into a field of absolute, crushing gravitational pressure. It felt as though a mountain of solid iron had been dropped directly onto Qin Wu’s shoulders. His knees buckled, the bones groaning under the immense strain.
From the sky above, a terrifying, familiar Battle Aura descended.
Long Chen dropped from the clouds like a meteor of blue water. His Invulnerable Body glowed with maximum intensity, and he gripped his massive, ethereal aquatic halberd with both hands.
"Your stolen tricks end here, Demon!" Long Chen roared, his voice carrying the fury of the ocean.
Long Chen did not hold back. He channeled his entire Battle Aura into the weapon. "Oceanic Heavenly Halberd Art: Dragon Ascending the Waterfall!"
He thrust the halberd downward. A massive, roaring dragon composed of violently spinning, razor-sharp Water Qi erupted from the blade, spiraling downward with enough kinetic force to shatter a fortress.
Trapped by the crushing pressure of the array, Qin Wu had no room to evade. He ground his teeth together, blood leaking from his lips as he fought against the immense weight. The Abyssal Soul Bead within his Dantian thrummed violently, responding to the threat of imminent death.
Qin Wu forcibly ignited his own blood essence, sacrificing years of his lifespan to generate a massive, explosive surge of dark Battle Aura. The dark energy flared, shattering the ethereal water chains binding his wrists. He gripped his heavy dark iron sword with both hands, swinging it upward in a desperate, ferocious counter-attack.
"Nine-Desolations Sword Art: Third Ruin—Heaven Sundering Cleave!"
A massive, crescent arc of pitch-black Sword Qi, dense enough to warp the physical space around it, erupted upward to meet the descending water dragon.
The collision was apocalyptic.
The explosion of conflicting Qi shattered the ’Abyssal Crush Sealing Formation’ entirely. A shockwave of blue and black energy leveled the entire supply depot, atomizing the tents and sending crates of precious healing pellets flying into the mud.
Qin Wu was thrown backward by the concussive force, his body skipping across the muddy plains like a stone across a pond. He crashed into a jagged rock outcropping, coughing up a mouthful of black blood. His dark iron sword hummed, absorbing the residual ambient energy to keep him conscious.
Long Chen landed amidst the destruction, completely unscathed, his Invulnerable Body shrugging off the shockwave. The Blue-Silver Vine whipped out from his arm, shooting toward the downed Soul Eater to finish the job.
Qin Wu did not hesitate. He reached into his robes and pulled out a ’Blood-Boiling Berserker Pill’, a crimson, dangerous pill that forcefully stimulated the body’s hidden potential at the cost of severe internal damage. He swallowed it whole. His veins bulged, turning a dark, angry purple as his Battle Aura surged with frantic, unnatural heat.
With a roar of defiance, he executed the ’Phantom Step of the Void Walker’, his body blurring into a dozen afterimages as he retreated violently into the darkness of the plains, narrowly avoiding the lethal thorns of the spirit plant.
Long Chen watched him vanish into the dust, his jaw clenched tight. The trap had failed to kill him, but it had proven a point. The shadow war would not secure victory.
Incensed by the cowardly massacres of his allies and the relentless, exhausting guerrilla tactics of the desert forces, Long Chen completely abandoned his defensive, methodical posture. The Sea Devil decided it was time to show the West the true wrath of the ocean.
He commanded a massive, unprecedented counter-offensive.
Long Chen gathered his most elite fighters—the ’Tide-Rider Battalion’. These were highly specialized aquatic martialists who did not march on foot; they rode massive, heavily armored amphibious beasts capable of gliding over the earth by manipulating the moisture in the mud.
Under the cover of a torrential, summoned rainstorm, Long Chen led the Tide-Riders deep into the hostile, arid territories of the Western Prefecture. They bypassed the heavily entrenched main desert encampments on the central plains entirely, utilizing the vast, subterranean river networks to strike at the very heart of the enemy’s logistics.
Long Chen targeted the resource-rich oasis towns that served as the vital lifelines for Qin Wu’s advancing armies.
Their first target was the ’Sun-Dipped Oasis’, a massive, fortified settlement built around a sprawling, crystal-clear lake. The town was defended by high sandstone walls and a garrison of desert elders.
As the sun crested the dunes, the Tide-Rider Battalion erupted from the subterranean caverns beneath the oasis.
"Leave nothing but ashes and salt!" Long Chen ordered his men, his voice hard, uncompromising, and completely devoid of mercy. He stood atop a massive, armored sea-turtle, his Blue-Silver Vine lashing out to tear down the heavy wooden gates of the fortress.
The Eastern forces crashed into the oasis like a tidal wave of blood and steel. The desert elders, caught entirely by surprise, attempted to mount a defense. They channeled their Flame and Earth Qi, hurling massive boulders and spears of fire at the invaders.
But Long Chen was a force of nature. He leaped into the center of the town square, his halberd spinning. "Oceanic Heavenly Halberd Art: Whirlpool of the Deep!"
A massive, violent vortex of pressurized water erupted around him, acting like a giant, spinning sawblade. It shredded the defending desert martialists, severing limbs and shattering their defensive Earth Qi barriers.
The Eastern soldiers, fueled by vengeance for their assassinated commanders and the grueling conditions of the plains, showed no restraint. They looted the deep, subterranean treasuries of the desert sects. They seized vast, invaluable quantities of ’Earth-Marrow Crystals’ and ’Volcanic Fire-Cores’—the very resources the West used to fuel their explosive, aggressive arrays.
But the true devastation was strategic.
Long Chen directed his array masters to the central lake of the oasis. "Corrupt the source," he commanded coldly.
The Eastern array masters unleashed a specialized, high-tier ’Abyssal Salt Formation’. They drew upon the concentrated, highly saline water Qi stored within their spatial rings, infusing the pure, fresh water of the oasis with the toxic, undrinkable salt of the deep sea. The crystal-clear lake turned a murky, sickly green. The vital water reservoir, the lifeblood of the surrounding desert region, was permanently destroyed, the earth salted so heavily nothing would grow for a century.
The beautiful, sandstone buildings were torched using looted fire crystals. The remaining desert martialists were slaughtered without hesitation, their blood soaking into the drying sand as Long Chen exacted his brutal vengeance.
’If he wishes to fight in the shadows, I will burn his homes in the light,’ Long Chen resolved, his expression stony as he watched the Sun-Dipped Oasis collapse into roaring ruin.
The brutality of the Eastern forces escalated. Driven by the raw, unfettered adrenaline of the battlefield, Eastern mercenaries captured the women of the desert sects—healers, array assistants, and disciples. They carried them off bound in chains, claiming them as spoils of war alongside the plundered cultivation resources, leaving a trail of weeping and despair in their wake.
Long Chen unleashed his giant sea beasts upon the neighboring desert fortresses. Massive, multi-headed hydras and armored crustaceans the size of mansions crashed into the stone walls, their sheer physical mass crumbling the defenses, allowing the beasts to devour the defending elders whole.
Word of the catastrophic destruction rapidly reached Qin Wu at the front lines.
He stood in his command tent, gripping the hilt of his heavy sword until his knuckles turned entirely white, the metal groaning under the pressure of his grip. The loss of his bases severely hindered his supply lines. The Crimson Tiger Bone-Strengthening Pills and the Blood-Boiling Berserker Pills were no longer arriving. His men were fighting on empty stomachs and fading adrenaline.
"He burns our homes," Tuoba snarled, his massive fists trembling. "We must pull back and defend the oases!"
"No," Qin Wu refused, his eyes pitch black. "If we retreat, we concede the plains. We will starve on the march back. The Sea Devil has shown his hand. He is willing to massacre civilians to break my supply lines."
Despite Long Chen’s devastating raids, Qin Wu refused to alter his core strategy. He was simply much faster, much more elusive in his targeted assassinations. For every desert base Long Chen reduced to ash, Qin Wu slipped into an Eastern camp and severed the heads of three high-ranking officers, devouring their souls to learn the locations of the next supply shipments.
The war devolved into a brutally symmetric exchange of horrific atrocities. Neither protagonist was willing to back down. Their pride, their desperate love for their missing women, and their unyielding fury blinded them to all reason.
The captured resources were quickly and ruthlessly repurposed by both factions. Eastern array masters deployed massive, stolen Earth-Marrow Crystals to reinforce their forward trenches, while specialized water arrays were used to violently flood the subterranean tunnels the desert forces relied upon. Conversely, the desert martialists used looted Eastern water crystals to cool their overheated siege engines, while employing vast quantities of fire crystals to literally boil the water in the inland rivers, denying the Eastern sea beasts their vital aquatic mobility.
Long Chen’s massive retaliation caused staggering, potentially irreparable economic damage to the Western Prefecture, destroying generations of accumulated wealth. But Qin Wu’s relentless, ghost-like assassinations left the Eastern military command structure strategically crippled, forcing inexperienced lieutenants to lead complex, highly dangerous maneuvers.
The mutual destruction left both regions bleeding dry, their foundations crumbling under the sheer, unbearable weight of their relentless vendetta.
A grueling, maddening rhythm established itself upon the plains.
Every day, from the moment the sun attempted to pierce the dust clouds until the last fading light of dusk, the main armies engaged in explosive, horrific clashes. The days were filled with the terrifying, guttural roaring of giant sea beasts, the sharp, whistling slicing of concentrated wind blades, and the constant, deafening explosions of colliding Battle Aura.
Long Chen and Qin Wu met on the battlefield daily. They abandoned their stealth and their raids, drawn to each other by an irresistible, magnetic hatred. They fought in the mud, their weapons clashing thousands of times. They fought until their bodies were covered in deep, bleeding gashes, terrible burns, and shattered bones, continuously pushing the absolute limits of their respective cheats and bloodlines.
As the sun finally set, casting long, bloody shadows across the plains, a silent, entirely unspoken truce took effect.
The armies, completely depleted of Qi and physical stamina, retreated to their respective, heavily warded camps, simply too exhausted to continue the slaughter in the dark.
The nights were for resting, desperately healing, and the grim task of counting the dead. Healers from both sides worked frantically in blood-soaked tents, utilizing their dwindling supplies of pills to stitch severed limbs, purge corrosive dark Qi from wounds, and stabilize shattered Dantians.
In his opulent, yet heavily guarded command tent, Long Chen sat bare-chested on a stool. An elite healer carefully applied a glowing, fragrant poultice made of crushed sea-pearls to a deep, jagged sword cut that ran diagonally across his ribs—a gift from Qin Wu’s ’Nine-Desolations Sword Art’.
’I must conserve my Battle Aura,’ Long Chen thought, his jaw clenched against the burning sting of the medicine. He looked at a small, delicate seashell he kept on a table—a memento of Princess Hai Lan. ’His dark artifact devours my attacks. I cannot overwhelm him with wide-area Water Qi techniques. I must focus my strikes into single, impenetrable points of pressure. I will crush his blade tomorrow.’
Miles away, in a crude, mud-spattered lean-to, Qin Wu sat meditating in the dirt. He did not have a healer attending to him. He was covered in sweat and dried blood, a nasty, sluggishly healing burn mark on his shoulder from Long Chen’s pressurized water attacks.
He closed his eyes, forcing his Battle Aura to circulate, digesting the spiritual remnants of the three Eastern souls he had consumed that day. The stolen memories flashed behind his eyelids like a chaotic, violent fever dream.
’They are shifting the Azure Tide Phalanx to the left flank to compensate for the loss of their array masters,’ Qin Wu analyzed, his mind piecing together the fragmented tactical data. The image of Mu Qing’s pale, beautiful face drove him forward, ignoring the agonizing pain in his meridians. ’Tomorrow, I will break their defensive battle formation at its hinge. I will shatter their shield wall and expose the Sea Devil to the vanguard.’
The cycle was maddening. The commanders and their surviving strategists mapped out brilliant, complex new battle formations by candlelight, only to see those intricate plans destroyed by noon the next day as the sheer, chaotic brutality of the clash overrode all strategy.
Desperation crept deeply into the ranks of both armies. Soldiers fought with the manic, terrifying energy of men who fully expected to die before sunset. They abandoned complex, defensive maneuvers in favor of suicidal, all-out offensive strikes, hoping only to take an enemy down with them.
The sheer scale of the daily slaughter turned the central plains into a massive, open-air graveyard. Broken swords, rusted halberds, the rotting, colossal carcasses of sea beasts and sand wyrms, and the dried, flaking blood of cultivators formed a new, macabre topography.
Neither Long Chen nor Qin Wu managed to gain a decisive, war-ending advantage. Their incredible, protagonist-level luck, combined with their formidable cheats, ensured they constantly survived lethal, fatal blows that would have instantly killed ordinary, peak-level martialists.
The daily fights became an agonizing, drawn-out test of sheer endurance. Long Chen’s aquatic bloodline granted him immense, almost boundless physical stamina and rapid regeneration, allowing him to fight for days without tiring. Conversely, Qin Wu relied entirely on aggressively absorbing the energy and vitality from his victims, his dark artifact acting as an endless, vampiric battery that kept him swinging his heavy sword long after his muscles should have failed.
The surviving strategists and elders on both sides literally begged their commanders on their knees to reconsider the campaign. They pointed to the rapidly dwindling supplies of pills, the destroyed infrastructure back home, and the entirely decimated ranks of their elite disciples.
Both protagonists vehemently refused to yield an inch.
Their pride was entirely flared, burning hotter than a forge. The war had evolved far past a simple rescue mission for their abducted women; it had mutated into a deeply personal, uncompromising blood feud. To retreat now was to admit absolute defeat, to concede their respective Dao, and to accept that the other man was the superior cultivator.
As the third, grueling month drew to a close, the armies were exhausted beyond comprehension. Their numbers had been violently halved, their morale was non-existent, and their resources were scraped to the bone.
They were locked in an endless, bloody, inescapable stalemate, entirely ignorant of the fact that the true victor of the war had already won without ever drawing a blade.
