The next few hours were pandemonium, with millions of people frantically searching for answers across the entirety of the faction. As it turned out, one of the mercenaries who had come to Earth moonlighted as a xenobiologist, and knew quite a bit about Worldmaws. As a result, the captains had commissioned her services, in the form of a speech aired across the main city through a series of speakers, in an attempt to calm down the hysterical populace. Even though the people of Earth, those who had survived the apocalypse, were a hardy sort, facing something that could swallow the entire planet in a single bite was well beyond the norm.
The most traumatizing event up until this point had been the universal reset, triggered by Berrigious. Even then, all that had happened was a brief stint in a dark void, with everything back to normal a few hours later. This was different. The root of the danger was painfully visible in the sky, at all times.
The sound of a microphone clearing echoed across the city as the specialist, a woman by the name of Gia, began her spiel.
“I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting a Worldmaw until this point, but there are a few things you should know about them.” The calm delivery of this line seemed to quiet down the citizens, and many of them turned towards the nearest speakers, eager for more. “They are D Rank existences-” Gia was cut off by the fervor resuming, people panicking once more.
On the stage she was standing, Eduardo leaned in, whispering in her ear. “Perhaps you should just share the good news?”
“But that isn’t accurate!” Gia said, holding the microphone away. “Damn it! Fine.” She drew the microphone back. “Worldmaws are generally extremely slow, relative to their size. They can only move organically. No teleportation to speak of. This one, as the System said, will arrive in a month. With that said, there should be no major surprises.”
“What about weaknesses?” Jeffrey suggested, leaning into the mic. “How are we going to defeat it?”
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“It is a D Rank-” She began. “I mean, there tends to be a drop off in localized durability, the larger a monster becomes. That durability translates into what is essentially armor, rather than natural defence. A creature the size of a planet would shrug off an E Rank attack as if it were a bad burn, whereas the same amount of flesh on a humanoid would be hundreds of thousands of times their body size.”
“Is this a good thing?” Jeffrey whispered.
Gia continued, pretending to be oblivious to the man. “This means that high impact, piercing attacks are extremely potent against such beasts. Often, their internals mimic that of a planet, simply because of physics. Although D Rankers have no organs, they do zones of compression, and inflation. If a sufficiently powerful bomb could be delivered to the core of the monster, a chain reaction would begin.”
“So it’s not all hopeless?” Talnor asked, making sure to speak into the microphone.
“No. A sufficiently powerful D Rank bomb, if we could insert it into the monster’s body, would work.”
“Well, you hear that?” Jeffrey interrupted. “It’s not all hopeless. We can do this!”
“The odds are-” Gia tried to say, but Jeffrey quickly grabbed the microphone, shooting her a glare.
“I think the people have heard enough. We need to start working on a plan.”
The woman sighed, and nodded. “Sure.”
The Desolation Belt
As Sam came to learn, the Desolation Belt wasn’t anywhere near as desolate as he had originally thought. Outposts were scattered everywhere, with the servants of Abrinadus living within them. Many of them were not in the asteroids, but rather in shielded vessels flitting throughout the asteroid belt, cloaked in invisibility fields. There were thousands of them, but not that many E Rankers in comparison. Each ship only had four or five Enlightened cultivators, with around a thousand F Rankers. Sam wasn’t entirely sure how Abrinadus had convinced everyone to live out their lives in space, but that was hardly his mission here.
With him being marked by the dragonlord as a threat, many of those ships now tracked him down every few hours, firing off powerful weapons, and disgorging flocks of cultivators to kill him. They fought with a rabid fervor, as if not entirely in control over their own bodies. It was strange, but in line with what Sam had seen of the dragon’s Dao.
