At the northern border, in New Port City.
The sky was no longer visible.
A colossal hurricane cloud over a hundred kilometers across pressed down on the city.
Lightning tore through the darkness inside it, and thunder pounded painfully against eardrums.
Gales hurled the port's container cranes away like toys. Wind blades sliced through buildings more than ten stories tall, leaving cuts as clean as a knife's.
Seawater surged into the streets. Murky waves battered the buildings, and half the city was already underwater.
"All anti-aircraft guns, open fire! Bring that thing down!"
Inside an army command vehicle, the commander shouted himself hoarse.
Hundreds of anti-aircraft guns fired wildly at the cloud, while missiles streaked into the hurricane trailing flames.
But the moment they entered the cloud, violent currents knocked the missiles off course and detonated them in midair.
The anti-aircraft shells fared even worse. Before they could reach the cloud's edge, the wind tore them apart.
Useless.
Completely useless.
This was no ordinary storm.
It was the Sky-Submerging Vortex Emperor.
The third calamity to spill out of the Dark Continent.
It was the embodiment of the storm itself.
The entire cloud was its body.
It moved through the clouds, sealing off the airspace wherever it went. Anything that flew into it was torn apart.
Three days earlier, all twelve of Beyond's aircraft had crashed in this airspace. No one had survived.
"Help! Somebody help!"
In the flooded streets, someone clung to a piece of driftwood and struggled against the waves.
A boat carrying dozens of refugees capsized, throwing everyone into the water.
Just then.
A silver-white bolt of lightning raced in from the distance.
It moved too fast for the naked eye to follow.
The lightning darted through the flood, plucking people from the water one after another and