With Odin's words, "I humbly request to join," Hela's power was sealed on the spot. This sudden turmoil seemed, for the moment, to have come to an end.
The smoke over New York had yet to fully disperse. The surviving human resistance forces and the terrified civilians, still processing their narrow escape from death, watched the blue steel giants silently and efficiently clear the battlefield.
After their initial shock and fear had slightly subsided, a trace of irrepressible human greed quietly began to stir among the leaders of the United States and even the world, who had been closely monitoring the scene from behind shelters or through remote observation equipment.
Those alien invaders had been terrifying, but the weapons, vehicles, and perhaps even fragments of biotechnology they had left behind undoubtedly represented technology far beyond Earth's current level!
If they could acquire and study those spoils of war, perhaps they could greatly increase their own strength. Maybe... was there even a chance they could luckily obtain even a single piece of equipment inadvertently left behind by those blue giants?
Yet that faint hope, like a bubble beneath the sunlight, had barely surfaced before a greater, more despairing reality ruthlessly burst it.
The sky darkened again without warning.
It was not because clouds had gathered, nor because night had arrived early, but because of a purer, more terrifying "occlusion"—as though an invisible giant hand were slowly wiping away the sun's Glory.
"What's happening?!"
"Why is it getting dark again?!"
"Is it an eclipse? No! Look up there!"
On the ground, the panic that had yet to settle spread once more with even greater ferocity.
People raised their heads in terror, only to see the sky, which should have been azure blue, covered by an endless, slowly moving colossal shadow.
The outline