1:07 p.m.
Prime Minister's Office conference room.
The prime minister sat at the head of the table, holding a cup of coffee as her gaze rested on the large screen on the wall. The standoff continued.
The ships on both sides remained dangerously close, while fighter jets continued circling overhead.
The lock-on signals from the fire-control radars were still woven into a net, but the image had remained frozen for a long time without any change, like a silent play trapped in a deadlock.
She took a small sip of coffee. It was slightly bitter, with a faint lingering sweetness.
Then, in that instant, the world lit up.
A brightness beyond description, beyond all imagination.
The light poured in through the windows, pierced the curtains, and illuminated the entire conference room as though it were inside the sun.
Some shadows vanished instantly. Every color was bleached away, leaving only an endless, blinding white.
The coffee cup in the prime minister's hand froze in midair.
She did not even have time to turn her head.
The door was violently shoved open. An assistant stumbled inside, his face twisted with terror, his mouth wide open as he shouted something.
"Prime Minister, hurry—"
Before the words could finish.
The light swallowed everything.
The Prime Minister's Office, the Combat Command Headquarters, Yasukuni Shrine.
Three spheres of light brighter than the sun ignited at the same moment, forming fireballs.
At temperatures of one hundred million degrees Celsius, the three fireballs expanded at hundreds of kilometers per second, drawing closer together.
In the end, they merged into one enormous, blazing sphere of fire.
The fireball touched the ground, and everything within a five-kilometer radius vaporized in the same instant.
The reinforced concrete walls of the Prime Minister's Office evaporated instantly, like ice meeting a red-hot iron.