The entire nation of Sakura Prayer has been under martial law ever since the night of Guan Tong's assassination attempt on the Divine Son.
Before, the streets were patrolled by patrol cars from the Sheriff's Department. Now, they had been uniformly replaced by military armored vehicles, and thermal-imaging drones patrolled the skies 24/7.
According to some online insiders, the upper echelons of Sakura Prayer had purchased a batch of advanced weaponry from the Soloma Empire, and had also imported a significant number of Intelligent Robots.
Sakura Prayer's official line was that this was to counter the threat posed by Ascenders like Shadow, but anyone with a discerning eye could see it was just an excuse.
If they really wanted to deal with Shadow, hiring a group of individually powerful Ascenders would probably be more effective than all this military hardware.
