Flashpoint World.
After the three-way war between Atlantis, Themyscira, and the humans who had been forcibly dragged into this global conflict, the Earth lay devastated.
Viewed from outer space, a pure white sphere of light—roughly one-fifteenth the volume of Earth—could be seen expanding outward like a malignant tumor parasitizing its host.
Along the edge where the sphere of light touched Earth's surface was a ring of bottomless cliffs.
Shock waves and gravitational fields relentlessly tore at the soil and rubble along the cliff edges. At the bottom of the cliffs, in the endless darkness, searing heat filled the air like a forbidden zone of life.
Deep underground, magma churned and roared.
It gave off the stench of sulfur and the smell of scorched air.
Yet even this hellish scene was inevitably swallowed by the constantly expanding gravitational field, ultimately becoming part of the sphere of light.
The spreading high-energy particles had already penetrated deep into Earth's core. In just five more seconds, the entire planet would be torn apart by that apocalyptic sphere of light.
Not far from the sphere of light, an instrument shaped like a spire continuously released a golden beam of light a hundred meters in diameter into the sky.
More than a thousand meters above the ground, the beam spread out, transforming into a golden magnetic field covering an area ten thousand li across.
Time within the magnetic field had been accelerated to more than twelve thousand times the normal rate.
To the people inside the magnetic field, the constantly expanding sphere of light outside seemed frozen in place, standing silently a thousand meters away as its blinding white radiance blotted out the sky.
The time difference of more than ten thousand times had given the Survivors inside the magnetic field fifteen final hours to struggle.