Late at night, at the London border.
The Command Center of the Unified Bureau's Central Decision Room was brightly lit, every exhausted face grave and solemn.
The shrill alarm from moments ago seemed to still echo in their ears, making everyone anxious as they stared tensely at the screens and waited for the result.
The attendees were still the same group. High-ranking Ascenders could go weeks without sleep or rest and at most just yawn, so they had barely felt sleepy at all.
As for the ordinary members who had worked overtime and stayed up until they dropped, they had mostly been dragged out of bed by the alarm, sitting in their seats disheveled and staring at one another.
Especially after seeing Natural Enemy Tyr leave through the side door, their nerves had become even more taut.
A Natural Enemy appeared at a time like this?
It carried an ominous scent...
"What happened?" one of the latecomers asked uneasily. "Did hell finally launch an attack? Which ruler wants to enter the border? Or is it a Destruction Factor?"
Yet those who had been waiting here were equally baffled.
Before Bronze Eye sent over a detection report, no one dared jump to conclusions.
But the border defense line remained as still as stagnant water, without the slightest ripple. There had not even been any friction or fires. So why had the security alarm suddenly gone off?
When Bronze Eye's preliminary report arrived, everyone was even more bewildered.
—An earthquake.
More precisely, a depth tremor.
Then came a terrifying storm that swept across all of Depth 10, inflicting unexpected heavy losses on the rulers' vanguard legions.
Moreover, the hell convergence caused by the Depth Tide, along with the connection of the Hell Ladder, magnified the earthquake that had originally been confined to