"The Dutiful Son Chronicle" (A Ten-Thousand-Word Chapter, Please Subscribe)

There was no doubt that Hydra's fleet directly destroying London and issuing a public declaration of military coup had affected the entire Earth in every possible way.

The most obvious sign was that many once-crowded major cities now saw wealthy people and the middle class fleeing in droves with their families.

They could not be sure whether the city they lived in would become a target for the space fleet once war broke out, only to vanish in an instant like London's nearly ten million residents, with neither escape nor hiding in the subway of any use.

After all, energy weapons were not nuclear bombs. The shockwaves, heat, and radiation produced by nuclear explosions could be blocked and absorbed by the ground and reinforced concrete buildings, but energy weapons could easily penetrate hundreds or even thousands of meters of material.

That meant the civil defense structures designed to survive nuclear war, especially basements and subway systems, were basically incapable of stopping the orbital weapon arrays of space battleships.

If people did not want to be caught up in it, the only option was to leave major cities and head for relatively sparsely populated, scattered rural areas.

The direct result of wealthy people fleeing cities in large numbers was the instant collapse of the real estate market. Villas and mansions once worth tens or even hundreds of millions were now discounted to a tenth or even a twentieth of their former value, yet no one wanted them.

All sorts of upscale apartment complexes and townhouse communities were hit just as hard. Even land prices and rents on the busiest commercial streets and in shopping centers plummeted to rock bottom.

It was as though prosperous cities with abundant public infrastructure had been abandoned overnight, while the far less convenient countryside became more