The mechanism for closing such a large volume of short sales has...

The mechanism for closing such a large volume of short sales has me intrigued and confused.

15M shorts are outstanding for Weebit, in round figures. Around 9M WBT shares changed hands last evening at end of day. So maybe this means the outstanding shorts have reduced to about 6M, but I guess we'll see in a few days when the reports from ASIC catch up. The curious thing is the share price only moved (dropped) by 13c on such a high daily volume.

In theory, in order to cover 9M short sales, the shorters need to purchase 9M shares and return them to the lenders, being mostly the index funds that lent them. But prior to such transactions we have a position where the index funds don't have the shares and the shorters don't have the shares because other parties bought those shares when they were sold short.

Let's suppose the shorters do a deal with the funds where they say, instead of buying all these shares on market to return them to you, how about we simply pay you an amount of $x per share and you then forgive the loan. If you do that, we will report that the shares are no longer categorised as ourstanding short sales. Thus it all gets netted off and no shares need to move.

If that last paragraph is feasible, why did 9M shares move last evening? That's why I'm confused. Is there anybody close to the action who may be able to clarify the position please?