City's Collapse
After the female player left, Xu Huo set a fire in Little River City. Once he had confirmed that flames and thick smoke were rising into the sky, he returned to the underground parking lot, took out the Life Core, and placed his hand on the filter.
The Life Core could destroy metal occupying a third of a city's spatial volume. For a city with buildings of varying heights and broad avenues, that was enough to strip away all the metal in the entire city.
In the past, he had used the Life Core on a small scale. If a city collapsed, tens of thousands, perhaps over a hundred thousand people might be affected. But there was obviously no need to worry about that in Little River City. Death was the best outcome for everyone there.
The metal filter didn't turn to powder immediately under the Life Core. Serving as a medium, it had already connected through the underground water pipes to the city's vast metal network: from underground pipes to cables, then to the metal framework inside buildings and the wiring in houses... A vast web rapidly spread from underground, reaching the farthest edge of the city. Then, from the edge, it began to draw everything back in—
Boom!
Before the players guarding the gate could turn back to check on the burning Commercial Building, the city's metal outer wall collapsed into a heap of powder before their eyes. Black ash blew from the city's edges toward the center like a storm of sand. The particles seemed to carry a strange weight; everywhere they fell, the city's long-neglected houses crumbled. Sinkholes appeared in buildings and on roads. Where taller buildings stood on either side, the metal used to reinforce their outer walls quickly turned to dust and