Mars knelt on the ground.
His hands braced against the floor, his face deathly pale, his lips trembled as he murmured,
"Great Xia... all of this... was a trap..."
His voice was faint and his eyes unfocused. He stared at the floor but saw nothing.
His mind was blank.
He could not understand.
He truly could not understand.
How had Great Xia, which Eagle Country had always bullied and the whole world had suppressed, suddenly become so uncompromising?
How had it suddenly dared to overturn the table?
How had it suddenly dared to take the entire world down with it?
Inside the command center, the chaos continued.
Piercing alarms blared, and red lights flashed incessantly.
Technicians hammered frantically at their keyboards, cold sweat streaming down their foreheads and pattering onto the keys.
Shouts rose one after another.
"The satellite guidance system is down!"
"The communications system is under attack!"
"Interceptor missiles failed to launch!"
But Mars could no longer hear them.
He simply knelt there, motionless.
Like a shell that had lost its soul.
It was over.
Everything was over.
Eagle Country was not ready yet.
The underground cities were still under construction, and the stockpiles were nowhere near enough to last twenty years.
But Great Xia was building underground cities too. Why had they dared to do this?
Mars could not understand.
What he did not know was that the main structures of Great Xia's underground cities were already complete.
Thirty-six underground cities, with enough supplies stockpiled to last twenty years.
Meanwhile, Eagle Country was still bickering, still fighting over control of resource allocation, still reserving privileged spaces for the plutocrats.
At that moment, within Blue Star's Arctic Circle.
"Boom!!!"
The first nuclear bombs launched by Great Xia reached several countries that were also in the Arctic.
Terrifying mushroom