"Let's dance."
The words left Haru's lips with the weight of a death sentence, and the battlefield responded accordingly. The air around him shimmered with elemental energy as his aura exploded outward, turning the night into something that belonged in legends.
The hilichurl army hesitated—just for a moment—but that moment was all the opening he needed.
Ice erupted from the ground in crystalline spears, each one finding its mark with surgical precision. Stone flowed like water, creating barriers and weapons and crushing force wherever it was needed. The elements themselves seemed to bend to his will, reality warping around his presence until he stood at the center of a maelstrom of destruction that was both beautiful and terrifying.
"You wanted to play war games?" His voice carried across the battlefield, cutting through the chaos like a blade. "Let me show you what war really looks like."
For ten minutes, Haru was unstoppable. Untouchable. The legendary warrior everyone believed him to be made manifest in ice and stone and absolute, overwhelming power.
Then the reinforcements arrived.
Back in Mondstadt, the explosions lighting up the eastern horizon were visible even from the city walls. Amber lowered her telescope, her face pale in the moonlight.
"That's not normal combat," she said quietly. "Those explosions... they're too big, too frequent."
Bennett nodded grimly. "Something's gone wrong out there."
Eula's expression was carved from stone. "The diversionary force here was meant to keep us from sending aid. They knew this was going to happen."
As if summoned by her words, the scattered hilichurls around Mondstadt suddenly coordinated their attack, pressing forward with renewed vigor. But their hearts weren't in it—they were going through the motions, buying time for something else.
"We need to go," Amber said, but even as she spoke, they all knew it was too late. By the time they could organize a relief force and reach the eastern hills, whatever was happening would be over.
All they could do was watch the lights on the horizon and pray.
The battle had been going for over an hour, and Haru's legendary stamina was finally reaching its limits. His movements were still precise, still devastatingly effective, but the constant expenditure of elemental energy was taking its toll.
"Haru!" Lumine's voice cut through the melee, strained with exhaustion. "There are too many of them!"
She was right. For every hilichurl they cut down, two more seemed to take its place. The enemy force wasn't just large—it was seemingly endless, a tide of crude weapons and brutal efficiency that just kept coming.
Jean was down, clutching a wound in her side that was bleeding too freely. Kaeya was still fighting, but his movements had slowed, and there were too many cuts on his arms and face. Half the knights were dead or dying, their bodies scattered across the churned earth like broken dolls.
"We need to retreat," Haru called out, but even as he said it, he knew it was impossible. They were surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of options.
That's when the real horror began.
The hilichurls stopped attacking.
All at once, across the entire battlefield, the enemy force simply... stopped. They didn't retreat, didn't celebrate, didn't do anything except stand there and wait.
"What are they doing?" Lumine whispered, her sword still raised but her eyes wide with confusion.
The answer came in the form of war horns—deep, resonant sounds that echoed across the hills like the voice of some primordial beast. And then, cresting the ridge like a wave of nightmares, came the main force.
Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands.
"Oh," Paimon said in a very small voice. "Oh no."
The sight of them was enough to break the spirit of even the most hardened warrior. An endless sea of torches and weapons, moving with the coordinated precision of a professional army. These weren't the crude tribal forces they'd been fighting—this was a military machine, organized and equipped and led by something with genuine tactical intelligence.
"We're going to die here," someone whispered.
For a moment, the terrible truth of it settled over the survivors like a funeral shroud. They were exhausted, outnumbered, and facing an enemy that had clearly been planning this for months.
Then Haru stepped forward, his red eyes blazing with something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite desperation, but was wholly terrifying.
"No," he said, and his voice carried absolute authority. "We're not."
His aura shifted, became something crystalline and sharp and utterly implacable. The air around him began to hum with power that made the hair on everyone's arms stand up.
"Everyone behind me. Now."
What followed wasn't a battle. It was an exhibition of what happened when someone with his level of power stopped holding back.
The first wave of enemies didn't just die—they were unmade. Ice and stone combined in ways that defied physics, creating a zone of absolute destruction that expanded outward from Haru's position like a slow-motion explosion. The very ground beneath the hilichurls turned against them, stone flowing like liquid to swallow entire formations while ice created killing fields that no living thing could cross.
"You want to know what fear looks like?" Haru's voice echoed across the battlefield as he walked forward, each step creating ripples of elemental destruction. "Let me show you."
The enemy army tried to flee. Some of them made it.
When the immediate threat was over, when the last of the hilichurls had either died or scattered to the winds, Haru stood in the center of a transformed landscape. Where there had once been hills and grassland, now there was a maze of ice and stone that looked like the work of an angry god.
"Haru," Lumine said softly, approaching him with careful steps. "It's over."
He turned to look at her, and she could see the exhaustion in his eyes. The confidence, the overwhelming presence—it was all still there, but underneath it was a young man who had just killed hundreds of people and wasn't sure how to feel about it.
"Is everyone okay?" he asked, his voice rough.
"The survivors are," Jean answered, limping over with Kaeya's support. "Thanks to you."
But the cost had been high. Of the original expedition, less than half remained. Good people, brave people, who had trusted in their mission and their leadership and had paid the ultimate price for it.
"We need to find the prisoners," Lumine said quietly. "That's why we came here."
Haru nodded, pushing down the weight of what had just happened. There would be time to process it later. Right now, there were still people who needed saving.
The hilichurl camp was a sprawling collection of crude structures and defensive positions built into the natural terrain of the eastern hills. Under normal circumstances, it would have been heavily guarded, but most of the defenders were now part of the frozen wasteland Haru had created.
"Stay close," he whispered to Lumine as they approached the perimeter. "Something feels wrong about this place."
She nodded, her own instincts screaming warnings. The camp was too quiet, too still. There should have been sentries, patrols, some sign of life. Instead, there was only an oppressive silence that made every step feel like walking through a graveyard.
They found the first body near the outer ring of huts.
It was an adventurer—or had been. The crude spear through his chest suggested he'd been killed trying to escape, but the condition of the body suggested he'd been dead for days.
"They're not keeping prisoners," Lumine realized, her voice barely above a whisper. "They never were."
They moved deeper into the camp, finding more evidence of the horrible truth. Bodies in various states of decay, some still wearing the tattered remains of adventurer gear. The missing people hadn't been captured—they'd been slaughtered.
But it was what they found in the central area of the camp that broke something inside both of them.
The hilichurls had been celebrating. There were the remains of a feast scattered around a large fire pit, crude decorations hanging from poles, and evidence of recent revelry.
And at the center of it all, partially consumed and arranged like a trophy, were the remains of what had once been a person.
Lumine made a sound that was part sob, part retch, and turned away from the sight. Her whole body was shaking, and when Haru reached for her, she collapsed against him like a puppet with cut strings.
"They were eating them," she whispered against his chest, her voice breaking. "They were... oh gods, they were eating them."
Haru held her tightly, his own stomach churning with revulsion and rage. The casual cruelty of it, the celebration, the way the hilichurls had turned murder into a festival—it was beyond anything he'd imagined possible.
"I'm sorry," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "I'm so sorry you had to see this."
She was crying now, harsh sobs that shook her entire frame. "Those people trusted us. They trusted the Guild, trusted the Knights, trusted that someone would come for them. And we failed them. We failed them all."
"No," Haru said firmly, tilting her chin up so she could see his eyes. "We didn't fail them. The people who did this—they're the ones who failed. They chose to be monsters."
"But we were supposed to save them."
"We couldn't save them because they were already dead before we even knew they were missing. That's not failure—that's tragedy."
He held her as she cried, his own heart breaking for the pain she was feeling. Lumine had such a pure heart, such genuine compassion for others. Seeing this level of cruelty was like poison to someone like her.
"Come on," he said gently when her sobs had quieted to sniffles. "Let's get out of here. There's nothing more we can do for them now."
As they turned to leave, Haru took one last look at the grisly scene and made a silent promise. The hiličurls responsible for this atrocity were scattered now, but he would remember. He would find them.
And when he did, they would learn that some acts of evil demanded a very personal response.
Behind them, the abandoned camp stood as a monument to casual cruelty and the price of being too late. In the distance, the lights of Mondstadt twinkled like stars, a reminder that there was still good in the world.
They just had to be strong enough to protect it.
High above on a rocky outcropping overlooking the camp, a figure watched the two young heroes make their way back toward Mondstadt. The bard's silhouette was barely visible against the starlit sky, his form seeming to blend with the wind itself.
Venti's usual cheerful demeanor was nowhere to be seen. His aqua eyes held an ancient sadness as he observed Haru and Lumine supporting each other through their grief and trauma. The wind carried their whispered words to him—words of comfort, of shared pain, of promises to be stronger.
"Such heavy burdens for such young shoulders," he murmured to himself, his voice barely a whisper in the night breeze.
The Anemo Archon had felt the disturbance in the elemental flows when Haru had unleashed his full power. That kind of raw, unrestrained force didn't go unnoticed by one who commanded the winds themselves. But it wasn't the power that concerned him—it was the pain that had driven it.
He'd watched civilizations rise and fall, seen heroes born and broken, witnessed the eternal cycle of hope and despair that defined mortal existence. Yet something about these two struck him as... significant. The way they cared for each other, the way they refused to let the darkness consume them despite everything they'd seen.
"The winds of change are stirring," Venti said softly, adjusting his lyre on his back. "And you two are at the center of it all."
As Haru and Lumine disappeared into the darkness, heading home to safety and warmth and the promise of tomorrow, the bard remained on his vigil. Watching. Waiting. Ready to intervene if the winds of fate blew too harshly against the young heroes who had already endured so much.
After all, even the wind itself sometimes needed to be gentle with those who carried the weight of the world on their shoulders.
With a final glance at the ruined camp below, Venti faded into the night breeze, leaving only the whisper of wind through the hills and the faint echo of a lyre's strings on the air.