News of the demons' withdrawal spread across all seven theaters within an hour.
There were no cheers, no celebrations. The demon hunters merely checked their equipment in silence, counted their ammunition, looked at the demon-occupied zones on the map that had just changed from red to gray, then turned to their next targets.
Because the demons were gone, but the angels remained.
Wu Heng stood before the command center's main console, his fingers flying across the touchscreen as the global disaster map was relayered and relabeled:
Red marked Bartholomew Faction activity zones, yellow marked hiding places of moderate remnants, and blue marked confirmed Mad Angel crash sites. The three colors intertwined and overlapped like an abstract painting scribbled over by a child.
"Monitoring system. Status report." He did not look up.
Technical director Irene's voice came from the operations station. "Deployment has been completed at thirty-seven major nodes worldwide. Coverage has reached eighty-nine percent. Peripheral regions such as Siberia, the Amazon, and the Sahara will require at least another seventy-two hours for full coverage."
"The coverage is enough." Wu Heng brought up the monitoring system's real-time feedback interface. Countless tiny points of light flickered across the 3D map, each representing a detected fluctuation of angelic energy. The dense clusters resembled a starry sky, while sparse areas held only scattered islands of light.
"This is data from the past six hours." Irene enlarged a section covering the ruins of Chicago, once a major Bartholomew Faction stronghold. "Fluctuation density has dropped by sixty-two percent. They're withdrawing."
"Where to?"
Irene pulled up another set of data. "Large-scale energy transfer signals. Direction... southeast."
The map zoomed out further.
The moving points of light were like migrating birds, crossing the North American continent, traversing the Atlantic, and finally converging on a vast dark-yellow region.
Africa.