Earth.
The sky began changing color at noon.
At first, it was only a few ominous streaks of dark red, slowly spreading across the edge of the heavens.
Then observatories and space monitoring stations in major cities around the world sounded their alarms at the same time. Ordinary people remained clueless, looking up at the deepening red. Some took pictures, some discussed it, and some felt a faint unease.
A few minutes later, the entire sky had turned into a sheet of deep crimson velvet.
It was not the warm orange-red of sunset, nor the dreamy green of an aurora.
It was a deeper, more oppressive red, like congealed blood, like the inside of an exposed wound, like the inner wall of some enormous creature's beating heart.
When sunlight passed through that red curtain and fell upon the earth, everything was stained with a sickly rust color.
The crowds on the streets began to panic.
Car horns, children crying, and people shouting as they shoved one another all blended together.
Social media was flooded with speculation—supervolcano eruption? Nuclear war? Alien invasion?
Then they saw it.
Deep within the dark red heavens, a "star" appeared.
It separated from the crimson backdrop and slowly approached Earth.
Air raid sirens around the world sounded at that instant.
The wail was shrill, prolonged, and despairing, echoing beneath the blood-red sky like the final lament of the planet.
Above synchronous orbit, the battlefield was already boiling over.
The Abyss gods, twisted and violent in form, were carrying out Sandora's orders.
The skeletal body of a death dragon stretched across thousands of kilometers. Every rib was like a mountain range, and dark green soul-fire burned within its hollow eye sockets.
At that moment, it opened jaws capable of devouring worlds and bit down on a fallen