Catastrophe Deterrence

Terrifying tales of fission radiation weapons swept across the duchies like a hurricane.

Scholars who had witnessed the weapons' destructive power called them weapons capable of destroying the world. Before them, soldiers were like ants trying to stop a chariot.

At first, people were skeptical of these weapons.

Some scholars in pursuit of the truth ignored the dangerous exclusion zone marked off by the Grand Royal Academy of Natural Sciences and secretly ventured into the Gambu Desert. There, they saw the crater, more than three hundred meters in diameter, and were left speechless with shock.

The crater's interior had been fused into glass by the instant heat.

They could not imagine that a weapon capable of such destruction, according to those scholars, was merely a metal sphere about one meter in diameter.

For a time, the Solar Energy Laboratory became one of the most mysterious laboratories in scholars' eyes—and an object of admiration for many other laboratories. Its story was spun into legends of all kinds.

Wasn't developing a world-changing product through arduous experimentation and individual ingenuity the original goal of every doctoral scholar?

But the Solar Energy Laboratory's security was now almost as tight as that of the Grand Royal Academy of Natural Sciences. Outsiders hoping to steal the weapon's core secrets from the laboratory, according to its guards, might as well try building a time machine and going back ten years. That would be easier.

But if that were all, the terror of fission radiation weapons would have spread only among the upper echelons and scholars of the various duchies.

Their true horror lay in the hair-raising radiation contamination!

Lacking knowledge about radiation contamination, large numbers of scholars entered the central area of the explosion test site without taking any protective measures. They gathered information and, without realizing