The Day the Earth is Destroyed

The black projection that seemed to reign over all merely hovered silently above the Sky Dome, and boundless darkness began to spread.

Like a drop of ink falling into clear water, it irreversibly tainted the entire world.

Then, he raised one hand.

Tokyo, Shinjuku.

A white-collar worker who had just finished working overtime stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building Observatory, holding a can of coffee.

He had just spent half an hour arguing with a client over the phone. Now, he only wanted to look at the city's nightscape and let the river of light formed by countless neon signs and streams of traffic wash away his exhaustion.

He saw the crowd in the streets below suddenly stir, like an anthill that had been poked.

People pointed at the sky, their faces filled with incomprehensible terror.

He followed their fingers and looked up.

Then, he saw that hand.

That giant hand, composed of pure darkness and covering the entire sky, slowly pressed downward.

In an instant, the world lost all sound.

The coffee can in his hand began to deform—not from being crushed, but because the metal atoms that made it up were disintegrating.

The enormous floor-to-ceiling glass windows turned into countless specks of silver dust, drawn toward the sky by an invisible force of gravity.

He watched as the floor beneath his feet, the distant Tokyo Tower, and the entire cluster of skyscrapers in Shinjuku all broke apart in the same way, and vanished.

All matter was returning to its most primordial particle state.

A minute later, that land of ultimate prosperity, along with every person and object upon it, had disappeared.

It had become a gigantic crater----

After doing all this, the black projection spoke its first words.

"Forty-eight hours."

"Hand over Mebius,