The world had fundamentally changed in the three months following the fall of the Union. Royal was no longer just a company or a faction—it was the world's nervous system. Deep beneath the headquarters, five kilometers under the bedrock, the twenty-four extracted nodes hummed with a terrifying, rhythmic pulse. They were the heart of Royal's mid-range jump platform, a trump card that made distance an obsolete concept.
With Crul's nodes deployed in black boxes across every continent, there was nowhere left to hide. The "Worm Queen" had grown bloated and divine, fed on a steady diet of Ethan's secret enemies. Every remnant of the old regime, every pocket of resistance that dared to whisper a word of rebellion, was met with a nightmare. The Queen's children would swarm out of the shadows, turning dissent into a feast.
