After that, Void Realm creatures kept pouring into Earth. Fighting erupted everywhere across the globe.

And the clashes weren’t just between humans and Void Realm invaders anymore.

Void Realm creatures fought each other even more often.

After the apocalypse, there weren’t many humans left on Earth. Most of what these invaders ran into were zombies—or other creatures that had come through other rifts.

Earth had become a battlefield where countless races competed and slaughtered each other.

And humans, stuck at the center of the storm, had nowhere to run.

After Heartland City compound and Goldcrest City compound fell, Clearford City compound ultimately couldn’t escape the Void Realm’s grip either. It was occupied by a race with fire-type abilities.

In a single day, three of the Atlas Federation’s five major compounds collapsed.

Only Atlas City compound and Fallen Star City were still standing.

Fallen Star City held because its strength was real.

Atlas City compound... survived with a lot more luck. They ran into several waves of Void Realm creatures that weren’t that strong. Atlas City wasn’t weak either, so they managed to barely hold the line—though their losses were still heavy.

Outside the Atlas Federation, things were even worse.

Other countries had started with fewer survivors to begin with. Now, most of them had effectively been wiped off the map.

In just one day, Earth’s situation flipped upside down.

The species that had once been the planet’s owner—humans—were reduced to prisoners, hunted and butchered at will.

Only now did humanity truly understand it.

This was the real apocalypse.

Despair. Fear. Helplessness.

Night fell, and the fighting finally eased—just a little.

Atlas City compound.

Maxwell had just finished a meeting. He returned to his quarters exhausted, shoulders heavy, mind buzzing.

Then the satellite phone he always carried started ringing.

Maxwell glanced at the caller ID—General Adrian Cross.

He snatched it up immediately.

"General Kane..." Cross’s voice came out rough, strangled, nothing like his usual calm. "I—I can’t take it anymore. I want to fight them. I want to go all in!"

"Adrian," Maxwell said sharply, forcing his own voice steady. "Don’t do anything stupid. Right now, we have to stay calm."

"But I can’t!" Cross snapped, and the sound of it cracked halfway through.

"Those monsters don’t even see us as people. Today they demanded to know how humans can awaken abilities from other systems. We don’t have an answer—because there is no damn method we’re hiding."

His breathing hitched.

"But just because we couldn’t give them what they wanted... they burned thousands of our people alive right in front of us!"

"That was thousands of lives," Cross said, voice shaking. "Burned alive. Right in front of me. The looks on their faces—pain, terror, begging—"

He swallowed hard, like it physically hurt.

"I’ll never forget it."

"If they’d died on the battlefield, I wouldn’t even blink. But dying like that... it’s choking me to death!"

A raw tremor ran through his words.

"I can’t accept it. Clearford City has no cowards. If I give the order, tens of millions of Clearford citizens—old people, kids, everyone—will pick up weapons and fight these beasts!"

"Fight?" Maxwell’s voice dropped, heavy as iron. "With what?"

"Even if you throw every single one of those tens of millions of lives into the grinder, how many of them do you think you’ll actually kill?"

"Adrian," Maxwell said, slower now, forcing each word into place. "I understand your pain. I do. But that’s exactly why you can’t lose your head."

"You have tens of millions behind you. You don’t get to act on impulse."

Silence on the other end.

Cross was trying to breathe it down. Trying to stuff the grief back into a box he could carry.

A long time passed before he spoke again, and when he did, the anger had drained into something worse.

Uncertainty.

"Do we... do we really still have hope?"

"We do." Maxwell didn’t hesitate. "We still have Fallen Star City. We still have the Fallen Star Squad."

His voice hardened, like he was nailing the words into the world.

"You know what they’re capable of better than anyone, don’t you?"

"Right... Fallen Star Squad." Cross sounded like he’d grabbed a rope over a cliff. "We still have them."

"Hold your position. Keep things steady. Don’t do anything reckless," Maxwell said. "Wait for Fallen Star City’s news."

"And our revenge?" His jaw could be heard in his voice.

"We’ll get it," Maxwell said, absolute. "We will."

"I understand."

The call ended.

Maxwell didn’t sit down. He didn’t even take off his coat.

He immediately called Miles.

Ethan was often too busy to pick up in the middle of chaos, so Maxwell had gotten used to going through Miles instead.

They exchanged updates quickly. When Maxwell confirmed Fallen Star City was stable—safe, intact—his chest finally loosened by a fraction.

That was his worst fear.

If Fallen Star City fell too...

Then there really would be no hope left at all.

Late at night, the Nine-Star Dipper appeared again—but the Crimson Star didn’t.

That alone made everyone breathe easier.

At this point, just seeing the Crimson Star was enough to give people a reflexive chill. Like trauma carved straight into the nerves.

And with the Nine-Star Dipper’s return, Earth’s mysterious energy began to revive.

Only then did the Void Realm creatures on Earth realize something—this world’s mysterious energy was absurdly dense.

During the day, the mysterious energy had been hidden. So most of them had assumed Earth was a barren, low-energy world, and that was why the humans here were so weak.

But now?

Now they could feel it clearly.

This world’s mysterious energy was richer than the world they’d come from—by far.

That discovery immediately changed the mood. Some of the Void Realm creatures who’d only come to "check things out" suddenly started thinking about staying for good.

And that thought didn’t stay a thought for long.

The Nine-Star Dipper flared, pouring down a harsh, brilliant light—and across the planet, the hundreds of dimensional rifts began to close, slowly but undeniably.

Without the Crimson Star present, there was nothing resisting the shutdown.

Before long, every rift vanished completely.

By the next morning, a lot of Void Realm creatures were gearing up to go back and bring more of their people over...

Only to discover the rifts were gone.

That realization hit like a hammer.

They panicked.

Everything had been fine when they came in—so why the hell couldn’t they leave now?

They rushed to the spots where the rifts had been, attacking like mad. They blasted the air, tore up the ground, used every ability they had.

Nothing.

In the end, all they could do was stop, breathing hard, forced to accept the truth.

They were stuck.

The humans noticed just as quickly. For humanity, it might’ve been the first real piece of good news buried in an avalanche of bad ones.

Rifts closed meant no more fresh Void Realm creatures pouring in—at least not for now.

But that was all it changed.

It didn’t fix the current nightmare, because the Void Realm creatures already on Earth were still here.

Early that morning, Miles went straight to Ethan and told him what had happened.

The instant Ethan heard, he felt tension slip out of his chest.

For him, this was the best news he’d gotten since everything started.

His biggest fear had been the vanguard forces running back through the rifts and calling in reinforcements.

A few thousand? He could manage.

Too many? Even he wasn’t touching that.

Yesterday, when fifty thousand-plus Void Realm creatures had shown up at Fallen Star City, he’d only been able to shove the Azure Nereids out front and let their reputation do the heavy lifting.

If the Azure Nereids hadn’t backed them up, Fallen Star City might’ve already been drowning in blood.

Now that the dimensional rifts were closed, it was like cutting the invaders’ supply line.

No reinforcements.

For Ethan, that was a lifeline.

He exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing as the pieces clicked into place.

"Then my guess was right," he said quietly. "The Nine-Star Dipper really is protecting Earth. The Crimson Star’s power was just too strong for it to stop."

He looked up, as if he could see the sky through concrete.

"The moment the Crimson Star disappeared, the Nine-Star Dipper showed up and slammed the rifts shut."

Ethan didn’t know the exact rules behind the Nine-Star Dipper and the Crimson Star—but the pattern was getting harder and harder to deny.

The Nine-Star Dipper had been guarding Earth this whole time.

And the Crimson Star?

That thing was the root of the disaster.

The apocalypse itself had started when the Crimson Star appeared. And before that... the Crimson Star had been sitting where Polaris used to be.

Ethan could still vaguely remember what he’d seen that night when he was drunk—how the North Star had seemed to slip out of its place in the sky.

Then it vanished.

And the Crimson Star took its place.

Looking back now, it felt less like coincidence and more like Polaris had been holding something down from the beginning—suppressing it.

And when Polaris "fell"...

That suppression broke.

"So that thing really is a disaster star," Ethan murmured.