“It doesn’t matter if you’re some lowly peasant or the king himself, before death, everyone's the same.” - Saying attributed to the Bone Lord.

While the conflagration started slowly and almost unnoticed, once the fire grew large, it quickly grew in an almost uncontrollable manner. In fact, were it not for the ring of fire retardant powder that enveloped the flames, it likely would have spread out and devoured the rest of the prairie and beyond in its endless hunger as well.

Fortunately, Egil’s platoon had taken the proper precautions to contain the fire. The fire retardant powder they spread sublimated once the heat of the flames got too close, and the gas releases smothered any nearby flames quickly. After the process happened several times, the grass near the powder ring had been consumed, and the fire no longer spread that way due to a lack of material to fuel itself.

Instead, the fire spread rapidly towards the inside of the ring, where the Southern Coalition army was. As the flames around them soared high to the sky, the soldiers began to panic, and not even the loudest exhortations from their commanders managed to restore order completely. Some of the soldiers ran back towards the way they came, unaware that the fire had also spread in that direction.

Yet others dropped to their knees, cried, and prayed to whatever god they worshiped. If the fire had started near the army, then it would have been an acceptable risk for them to attempt going through the fire before it could grow too large. Unfortunately, when it was set hours away from them, even the dumbest person understood that by the time the fire reached them it would be impassable, barring a miracle.

The creeping advent of the wall of fire all around them also gave the army a sense of dread and impending doom, which was only magnified further as the temperature around them rose. The air they inhaled smelled of smoke, which tickled their throats and lungs and made them want to cough. Some wild animals even ran into the army in their attempt to escape the encroaching flames.

Some of the smarter officers pooled the army’s mages together and attempted to make a firebreak, an earthen fortification with a moat next to it. Even from afar, Reinhardt and Estelle could easily tell that even if they managed to create a functional firebreak, chances were that they would either suffocate from the smoke or be cooked alive from the heat anyway.

Besides, even with the dozens of mages in the army working together, any structure they manage to create would be far too small to accommodate more than a tiny portion of the whole army.

As the fire crept closer and closer to the army, it became harder for those outside to see what happened inside the conflagration as the flames covered everything up. Some of the soldiers panicked and tried to rush through the fire in the vain hope of surviving the attempt. Others lost all hope and took their own lives to spare themselves the agony that approached them. The mages and the officers redoubled their attempt to create a firebreak which could shelter them.

Naturally, the sight of some of their numbers attempting to shelter themselves while ignoring the rest incensed many of the soldiers who were left outside the firebreak. As the wall of flames loomed ever closer, eventually those soldiers lost all restraint, and attempted to force their way into the shelter the mages and nobles built.

The resultant infighting saw thousands of soldiers – primarily former mercenaries and those considered second class citizens – turn their spears on the elites that the nobles and mages had with them inside the shelter. Blood spilled as tempers flared and the two sides fought each other despite being on the same side, all for the sake of survival.

In the end, however, their fighting ended because the flames had encroached near where the army was. The temperature soared to the extremes, and where the soldiers had at first sweated like crazy, they ended up unable to even do so, as their sweat evaporated rapidly from the heat. Their skins were parched and blistered, the heat literally cooking many of the soldiers alive in their armor.

Where the smoke was once simply suffocating, the smell emanated from it started to gain a semblance to that of pigs being roasted. Many of the soldiers from the Southern Coalition collapsed because they were unable to breathe, and even the moats outside the firebreak – filled by the effort of many water mages – boiled as the flames continued its relentless advent.

The prairie burned from the afternoon through the night, all the way to the next morning, where a drizzle eventually turned into a heavy downpour and extinguished the remnants of the conflagration at last. By the time the fire died out, a tragic sight was revealed to the Levain troops on their hill. The sight of blackened bones, armor, and weapons scattered all over the plains merely a few hours’ march away from them, as well as an earthen dome surrounded by a small moat, recently filled by the rain, where some of the Southern Coalition army had attempted to seek shelter from the flames.

There were no movements, however, and no sign of life to be seen from the prairie. Only burnt and blackened remnants and ashes that were washed off by the water and pooled in the lower regions of the prairie.

Reinhardt and Estelle exchanged a look with one another before the latter gave the order for part of the troop – five thousand strong – to advance. The cavalry also rode out and fanned to the sides, where they traced the borders of the conflagration to see if there were survivors or escapees from the enemy army. Everyone else went towards the pile of burnt metal and blackened bones that were the remains of the Southern Coalition army.

They still had no idea whether there were any survivors from the enemy side or not, after all, so the troops advanced with them as a precaution, just in case there were some survivors who somehow still had the strength to resist.