Across the concrete expanse of the Kanto plains, civilization devolved into raw, primal pandemonium.
This was no conventional natural disaster; it was the total geological unraveling of an archipelago. The civil defense protocols drilled into the populace for generations became lethal ironies. Those who were the first to rush into deep underground bunkers and subway stations were the first to be crushed alive. As the tectonic foundation fractured and liquefied, the bedrock sheared apart. Thousands of commercial towers and residential complexes buckled at their foundations, collapsing inward like houses of cards.
Screams of unadulterated agony echoed between falling slabs of concrete. In the suffocating dust, millions ran blindly, trampling one another in a frantic, hopeless race against the opening earth.
Nobody stopped to pull the buried from the rubble. In the face of planetary extinction, every human instinct narrowed to a singular, desperate mandate: survive.
In Tokyo's Ministry of Defense, the grand war room that had been packed with generals and admirals only minutes prior was now completely abandoned. Papers scattered across the cracked tile floor, and abandoned monitors shrieked in unattended panic.
The war with the fish-men no longer mattered. National sovereignty was a meaningless abstraction.
The moment the Meteorological Agency broadcast the apocalyptic truth—that the tectonic plates supporting the nation had uncoupled and were sinking into the trench—every official shed their duty.
THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP.
Across the capital's private estates, executive helipads were swarmed as private aircraft roared into the sky. Corporate oligarchs and high-ranking politicians fled the crumbling city below, their flight paths converging on a single destination: Haneda and Narita international airports.
Looking down from the cabin of a helicopter while clutching crystal glasses of vintage wine, watching the screaming sea of humanity swallowed by fissures in the streets, an unearned sense of psychological superiority washed over the elites.
Yet reality cared nothing for private capital.
By the time the helicopters touched down at Haneda, the airport was already a shattered wasteland. The runways had buckled into jagged, impassable ridges of asphalt, severed by chasms dozens of feet wide. Heavy jetliners sat with broken landing gear, completely stripped of the physical runway length required for takeoff.
"Where is the flight crew?! Bring the pilot out immediately!"
"I will pay one hundred million yen! Two hundred million! Get me on an aircraft out of this country!"
"One billion! I'll wire one billion right now!!"
Billionaires and Cabinet ministers shoved through the terminal crowds, screaming frantically as they brandished checkbooks and platinum cards.
Nobody even turned to look at them. Amidst the roar of approaching tides and tearing steel, digital currency and paper bank notes held less value than dry dirt.
The catastrophic collapse swept simultaneously across Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku. The continental shelf slipped into the abyss, dragged down by the relentless harmonic pulse of the Continental Oscillator.
Floating upon the boiling surface of the ocean, Attuma stood tall atop his war-mount, his yellowed eyes fixed on the distant, falling skyline.
Around him, thousands of surviving Atlantean warriors breached the swells, watching the horizon collapse. Slow, predatory grins spread across their scarred faces.
"Drown..." Attuma whispered, his voice rising until it cracked into a manic, deafening roar. "DROWN!! Let the oceans claim every last stone of your wretched empire!!"
Attuma threw his head back, laughing with hysterical, unhinged ecstasy.
This was his triumph. This was his immortal legacy.
In a single stroke, he had accomplished what no sovereign in the ten-thousand-year history of Atlantis had ever dared to dream of—he had wiped an entire surface superpower from the face of the earth.
Beneath his victorious gaze, the islands fractured into jagged archipelagoes before sliding entirely beneath the foaming waves. Whirlpools miles wide roared as the Pacific rushed into the void, swallowing concrete, steel, and humanity whole.
Ninety-nine percent of the population vanished into the dark waters alongside their homeland.
The nation had been erased from the map.
[The World Security Council — Emergency Assembly]
The catastrophic telemetry plunged the global leadership into absolute, paralyzed terror.
"This species must be eradicated!" the representative of the United States roared, slamming his fist onto the circular assembly table, his face flushed with incandescent fury. "They possess directed-energy weaponry capable of destabilizing continental fault lines! This is an existential threat to every nation on Earth!"
Washington's fury was raw and immediate. Japan had been their primary geopolitical foothold in the Pacific, housing tens of thousands of American troops and advanced naval staging bases. In less than an hour, the Seventh Fleet's regional headquarters and every forward operating base had been dragged to the bottom of the trench.
Historically, Western rhetoric surrounding an "oceanic menace" had been met with skepticism from other council powers.
Today, however, not a single ambassador raised an objection.
Representatives from maritime nations—Britain, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines—sat in pale, shivering silence. Watching the total submergence of an industrialized archipelago was like gazing into the mirror of their own impending doom. If the subterranean humanoids could sink the Japanese shelf, leveling island nations with lower elevations would be a trivial afternoon exercise.
A unanimous, grim consensus coalesced within minutes:
The Kingdom of Atlantis was an existential enemy of human civilization. Their civilization had to be dismantled—or at the absolute minimum, their continental superweapon hunted down and atomized.
Near the coordinates where the Nibelungen had collapsed, the dark water parted as an Atlantean vanguard surfaced, hauling the exhausted human strike team onto the swells.
The moment atmospheric air rushed into their lungs, the Avengers and the Execution Bureau operatives gasped violently, coughing up saltwater.
"Namor... we officially owe you one," Tony Stark wheezed, his armor floating in the swells as his suit diagnostics purged seawater from the intake vents. "Next time you need a favor, give me a call. I won't help with big things, and I hate small things, but hey... ring the bell anyway."
"Is surface humor always this tedious?" Namor grunted, treading water effortlessly beside him.
"Just a little post-drowning banter," Tony chuckled, shaking off the exhaustion. But as he looked out across the horizon, his tone shifted. "Though... where the hell did you bring us? And why is this water boiling hot?"
Tony scanned a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
Empty, open ocean.
He distinctly remembered their descent coordinates being less than a hundred nautical miles from the Japanese coastline. Even with limited visibility, the high-rise silhouette of the Kanto coast or coastal mountain ranges should have been plainly visible.
Namor frowned, swimming in a tight circle. "The currents are sluggish... filled with excessive mineral ash. Yet my navigators did not deviate from the ascent trench."
'What is happening here?' a silent, cold dread took root in Tony's chest.
Firing his auxiliary thrusters, Iron Man lifted into the sky, ascending several thousand feet to gain a vantage point.
Nothing. In every direction, to the absolute edge of the curved horizon, there was only endless, rolling blue water. The only anomalous feature was a jagged, volcanic reef jutting barely ten feet out of the waves half a mile away.
Tony signaled downward, and the Atlantean warriors dragged the exhausted agents and Dragon Slayers toward the rocky outcrop, hauling them up onto the dry stone.
Hovering five hundred feet up, Tony's comms array finally pierced the regional static.
"JARVIS," Tony ordered, his voice unusually sharp. "Triangulate satellite telemetry. Lock my coordinates right now, and transmit an emergency recovery beacon to S.H.I.E.L.D. We need immediate VTOL extraction."
"Welcome back, Sir," JARVIS's British accent crackled through the helmet speaker. "Telemetry locked. Your current positional fix is 35°42′32.5″ North latitude, 139°45′40″ East longitude."
Tony pulled up the global map on his HUD.
The color instantly drained from his face inside the gold-titanium helmet.
"JARVIS... run an error diagnostic on the GPS module," Tony whispered, his knuckles locking inside his gauntlets. "Check it again."
"The internal gyroscopes and orbital satellite arrays are fully operational, Sir," JARVIS replied calmly. "You are hovering directly over Tokyo Bay. Specifically, the central docks of Tokyo Port."
'Tokyo Port?' Tony's mind reeled in sheer, dizzying disbelief.
If this barren reef of crushed concrete and ash was Tokyo Port... where was the city?
Where was the land?
Down on the rocks, the surviving members of the coalition sat panting, wringing seawater from their coats. Seeing the humans safely ashore, King Namor stepped to the edge of the reef, preparing to dive back into the deep.
"My people suffered severe tremors before our descent," Namor said, looking back at Chisei Gen and the Avengers. "I must return to Atlantis and oversee the recovery of my kingdom."
Natasha, Clint, and Chisei nodded with quiet gratitude, raising their hands in a respectful farewell.
Only Iron Man remained suspended in the air, his golden faceplate unmoving, his digital optics locked onto Namor's retreating silhouette.
SPLASH.
Namor dived into the waves, the Atlantean vanguard following in his wake.
Only after the last ripple settled did Tony slowly cut his thrusters, his heavy boots slamming onto the volcanic rock.
"I have catastrophic news," Tony's voice sounded hollow and strained through the helmet speaker. "The allies who just saved our lives... are about to become the entire world's greatest enemies."
"Tony?" Natasha frowned, wiping wet hair from her eyes. "What are you talking about?"
Without a word, Tony raised his left gauntlet, projecting a massive, high-definition holographic feed into the misty ocean air.
Dozens of international news headlines, military emergency broadcasts, and satellite before-and-after scans flashed across the pale sky in blazing crimson:
> [GLOBAL EXTINCTION EVENT: JAPANESE ARCHIPELAGO FULLY SUBMERGED]
> [PENTAGON CONFIRMS: ATLANTEAN WEAPON DESTABILIZED ENTIRE TECTONIC SHELF]
> [WORLD SECURITY COUNCIL DECLARES TOTAL WAR ON THE UNDERSEA KINGDOM]
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Give me powerstones.
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