Eschaton: the territory turns back into bleeding children

The scene's last inventory of the map is an inventory of injured kids: one flailing on his back with a leg bent "at an impossible angle," three of them bleeding. This is the real-bodies ending the whole Eschaton set-piece was built toward — the territory that couldn't feel the war reasserting itself, finally and literally, as flesh that bruises and breaks and bleeds. The most elaborate game of pure abstraction E.T.A. ever devised degenerates, inevitably, back into the one thing tennis is actually made of: children's bodies taking damage on a court.