On the evening of January 27, a torrential downpour suddenly struck Meteor City, catching everyone off guard.
The rain came down hard, pattering against roof tiles, wooden boards, plastic bags, and mountains of corpses.
Every corpse was a gruesome sight, its face twisted, countless arms and legs reaching skyward like black thorns.
Sheila stared grimly at the stinking mountain of corpses, which no one would be able to deal with until the following morning. After a long silence, she couldn't help sighing.
How had things come to this?
When she heard about the desperate state of the war Meteor City was facing, she had said goodbye to Kite and hurried back, traveling a thousand miles through wind and dust.
Unlike Gelman and Shizuku, no one in Meteor City knew what she had done, so she still counted as one of their own.
And Meteor City truly needed every able-bodied person it could get... no, a quarter of Meteor City needed her.
A surviving Elder controlled one quarter of Meteor City, while the remaining three quarters were in the hands of the terrifying Zaiiro.
Zaiiro...
Months of war had left even Meteor City's residents—once proud and utterly unyielding—confused and lost.
Every fighting force Meteor City possessed—the Elders, the Phantom Troupe, the combat units, and more—had been deployed, yet each had fallen to Zaiiro's forces in turn.
Worse still, those captured by Zaiiro's forces endured unimaginable torture.
The captives either ended up as food for the Chimera Ants or became something neither human nor ghost, joining the ranks of the man-eating Chimera Ants.
Having their flesh devoured was already horrific. Now even their freedom and independent will were taken from them. It was a devastating blow to Meteor City.
The fact they had managed to hold on to their last quarter of