Primordial Life

Elorie finally understood what kind of disaster had struck Earth.

The enemy had been entrenched on the moon!

"Don't worry. Crystal Clusters take time to grow, so they didn't destroy human civilization in one blow," Nymph said slowly. "But every few years, another Crystal Cluster fell. They always targeted the secret warehouses and laboratories where various countries stored their masses of flesh."

As the death toll kept climbing on the holographic display, Elorie went numb. She could imagine how bleak those years had been for humanity. She had thought the disappearance of the Devils was wonderful news, but even if they had spent their entire lives at it, they could hardly have matched slaughter on this scale.

"It's not as though we never fought back," Raphael said. "We turned rockets into nuclear missiles and fired them at the moon. We deployed air defenses at predicted impact sites to intercept the falling Crystal Clusters... We tried everything we could think of, but achieved very little."

Elorie nodded silently. She knew little about technology, but humans had enough trouble just getting to the moon, let alone fighting an enemy on its home ground.

"No wonder you built underground cities..." she murmured.

"That wasn't the main reason, actually," Nymph said. "We discovered that although Crystal Clusters were hard to destroy, they had no propulsion of their own. The shock waves from successive thermonuclear explosions could shift their descent paths early enough to send them into uninhabited areas, or straight into the sea. We managed it fifteen years after the first city was destroyed."

"Alongside the Star-Slaying Project, we launched the Great Wall Project: building underground shelters and gradually moving people beneath the surface. If humanity hid deep enough, the Crystal Clusters couldn't penetrate that far. Later, we found that layers of rock, concrete,