Departure was scheduled for about a week later. Salomon had set the timetable, believing that no dangerous incident was likely to occur before then. Of course, Laura Croft knew nothing about these so-called dangerous incidents. She had no idea that, just months before they had dined at the restaurant, a nuclear submarine force, several ocean-going frigates, and several low-orbit satellite missile pods had aimed weapons of mass destruction at a small cabin in the Norwegian countryside without most people knowing. The security department aboard Sky Sword Space Station had also turned its attention to that pasture of black mountains, snow, and hot springs, awaiting the order to deploy nuclear weapons at any moment.
Such tension was not without cause. The Feathered Serpent God incident had triggered massive geological activity across the world. Movement between tectonic plates had caused numerous volcanic eruptions, and volcanic ash in the atmosphere had blocked much of the sunlight. Southern Hemisphere warm currents and warm air that should have been heated by the sun failed to reach their proper temperatures, causing ocean temperatures worldwide to fall and the air to turn sharply colder.
That made winters in the British Isles especially difficult, so Salomon's proposal to spend the winter on an isolated Southern Hemisphere island near the equator was not strange at all. To ordinary people, this was merely a natural phenomenon. But Kamar-Taj's observations of the Sea of Souls showed that fragments of timelines, metaphors, and prophecies all indicated that Fimbulwinter had arrived. Widespread global cooling was now inevitable. Salomon himself had walked through the prophetic illusion of Fimbulwinter, making him even more certain that Odin's death was near. When that time came, Hela, who ruled two dead planets, would inevitably travel through Yggdrasil's interstellar transit system to Asgard—or worse, to Midgard—to take revenge on