In the Far East, this desolate stretch of wasteland was especially bleak. It was as if the world had forgotten it. The earth lay bare, strange rocks jutted up everywhere, and everywhere the eye could see was barren. It was like a half-finished lament, silent and desolate.
The winter wind howled down from the far north, swept across the ravaged wasteland, and carried away every trace of life.
Here, the difference between day and night was extreme!
By day, even the northern winter winds could not cool the rocks, scorched and cracked by the sun. At night, those same rocks turned bitterly cold, able to freeze to death anyone foolish enough to come without protection!
And yet, the sky here was hauntingly beautiful.
When night fell, the stars above the Far East seemed like cracks in the universe, the Milky Way strewn across the heavens, brilliant yet distant... Those stars seemed to tell some ancient tale, while the silent, dark earth listened, solemn and mysterious.
This was Stafford, a forgotten wasteland.
Yet beneath the cracks between the stones, tiny lives endured, stubborn and unyielding. The stillness and vastness of the land, the brilliance and remoteness of the stars, wove together into a silent poem, depicting a world both desolate and beautiful.
The Organization's headquarters, Stafford, stood here, deep within a town that had long since become a ruin...
Whether the ruined town and the barren Far East had been made by human hands or shaped by nature's uncanny artistry remained unknown for now.
In any case!
In the deepest part of the fortress that resembled a ruin, inside a stone hall like a cavern, sparsely decorated, sat the same group of high-ranking Organization leaders. They were settled in rows of stone chairs, listening from above as several black-clad agents stood