93: Chapter 93 Global Live Broadcast: On one side, an empty city; on the other, corpses!

Morning light spread over Santa Monica.

Liu Yuyan stood up, leaning on the Sword of Judgment; the holy runes on her silver-white armor had completely dimmed.

Salt stains from the seawater remained on the metal surface, along with black scorch marks where the monster's bodily fluids had dried.

More than three hundred survivors knelt among the ruins.

Some were crying, some were laughing, and others had their hands clasped together, reciting prayers that could not be understood.

The morning light shone on their faces; each was dirty, each was battered, but each was alive.

Liu Yuyan did not look at them.

Her gaze passed over the kneeling crowd and landed further away.

On Palm Avenue, a yellow school bus lay overturned in the middle of the road.

The windows were shattered, and broken glass mixed with cartoon schoolbags was scattered all over the ground.

The Spider-Man pattern faced upward, its red and blue colors covered by a layer of dark red.

That was not rust.

Her gaze shifted two inches to the right.

On the beach, a pair of children's shoes.

Pink, with bows, the lace on the left shoe still tied.

Only the shoes.

Lin Xiaoman saw them too.

She turned her head away abruptly, biting her lip so hard that her teeth sank into the flesh, and the taste of rust instantly filled her mouth.

Her fists clenched inside her armored gauntlets.

Henry crouched down.

Lying in front of him was a seven or eight-year-old boy.

Golden curly hair, freckles, and traces of lollipop sugar still lingering at the corners of his mouth.

A bowl-sized hole had been corroded into his chest by black mist, the edges charred black, his ribs splayed outward.

Henry reached out his fingers and touched the boy's forehead.

Ice cold.

The spark within him flickered.

The Holy Healing Apostle's life perception gave an answer immediately:

Time of death: four hours and seventeen minutes.

All core organs had failed.

Incurable.

In his forty-year medical career, Henry Bernstein had seen too much death.

On operating tables, in hospital wards, and in field tents.

Every time, he had been able to fight for a chance using scalpels, medicine, and the medical skills he had spent half a lifetime mastering.

Now, he possessed power that transcended medicine.

The golden light of the Holy Healing Apostle could set bones, stop bleeding, and repair organs.

But it could not fix death.

"Let's go."

Liu Yuyan's voice came.

Two words, very soft.

Lin Xiaoman and Henry both understood what lay beneath them.

Become stronger.

Only by becoming stronger could they ensure these people wouldn't have to die.

Three pendants were activated simultaneously, silver light spilling from between their fingers and wrapping around the three figures.

A second later, three spots in the ruins were empty.

The survivors kneeling on the ground looked up in a daze.

The light had vanished.

The three armored saviors who had descended from the sky had left as abruptly as they arrived.

All that remained on the beach were grains of sand fused into glass by the holy light, and three sets of footprints of varying depths.

There was a deathly silence for about ten seconds.

Then, the collapse came like a bursting flood, surging up with a roar.

The first to make a sound was a middle-aged man.

He crawled out from behind the overturned pickup truck, holding half an arm in his embrace.

It was charred black, completely corroded into carbide from the elbow down, with a clean cross-section.

A silver bracelet was still worn on the wrist.

He recognized that bracelet.

He had bought it for their twelfth wedding anniversary.

She had complained it was too expensive, and he had said, "Nothing is more expensive than you."

"Ah——!!"

A howl tore from his throat, not a melody, not words,

just a pure lament that transcended the linguistic system.

A blonde girl stumbled through the pile of broken bricks.

She had survived, and the price was that her parents had taken the claw of a Shadow Erosion Beast for her.

Two corpses were tightly embraced.

The mother's body blocked the father, and the father's arm still maintained the posture of pushing a door.

The last words they said, "Run!",

cut through the black mist, cut through the screams, and chased her for three hundred meters.

The girl knelt down.

She did not cry out, her whole body trembling, fingers digging into the sand, digging into the blood.

Beside her, an old man sat blankly on the curb, the phone in his arms lit up.

On the screen was his son's smiling face. He had pressed the dial button twenty-seven times, and each time it was the same mechanical female voice.

"The number you have dialed is powered off."

The twenty-eighth time.

"The number you have dialed——"

The phone was smashed hard onto the ground by him.

The screen shattered, glass pierced his palm, and blood seeped out from between his fingers.

He could not feel the pain.

The weeping connected into a chorus.

Fear, unwillingness, despair—all the emotions pushed to the limit by death burst forth simultaneously under the sunlight.

This was not a movie.

No director shouted "Cut,"

no one would stand up from the ground and brush off the dust.

These people were dead, and they were dead forever.

One hour later.

The sound of engines came from the direction of the interior.

Six armored vehicles, four military jeeps, two field ambulances,

and three broadcast vans with TV station logos rolled over the cracked asphalt road and stopped abruptly at the break in Palm Avenue.

The doors opened.

The moment the first batch of soldiers jumped down and saw the scene, they collectively froze.

The lieutenant in the lead held onto the car door, his hand shaking.

He had participated in rotation battles in the Middle East and had seen roadside bombs blow Humvees in half.

But this was different.

The way the road was torn looked as if something had used its hands to pry it open from underground.

The cross-sections of the buildings had been twisted off by some force, steel rebar and concrete alike.

The air was filled with a strange smell.

A mixture of burnt protein and rotting seawater, sweet and cloying, it wormed its way into the nasal cavity and wouldn't leave.

A young soldier couldn't hold it in and bent over to vomit.

"God..."

The lieutenant's lips moved, his voice half-swallowed by the sea breeze.

The reporters were faster than the soldiers.

A red-haired female reporter jumped off the broadcast van, and a cameraman carrying the equipment followed closely behind.

When she rushed to the edge of the beach and saw that pink child's shoe on the ground, the camera shook violently.

She forced herself to suppress her breathing.

The red light went on.

The livestream began.

When the feed was transmitted, the world was still immersed in the shock of China's "zero casualties."

Two images appeared side-by-side on everyone's screen.

Left: A screenshot of the official Chinese announcement.

Black text on a white background: "Casualties: Zero."

The accompanying image was an aerial view of the Hangzhou ruins, broken bridges, shattered buildings, and split overpasses.

Empty of people.

Right: The livestream feed from Santa Monica.

A shaky lens, an out-of-focus close-up, a middle-aged man's face, wailing as he held half a charred arm, filled the entire screen.

The same disaster.

The same day.

On one side, an empty city; on the other, corpses.

The comment feed vanished.

It wasn't that no one was posting; it was that everyone's fingers were hovering over their keyboards, typing a line, then deleting it. Typing again, deleting again.

The livestream continued.

The camera captured the scene of survivors rushing toward the military.

A man with a severed right arm limped toward the lieutenant, his only remaining left hand grabbing the collar of the other man's bulletproof vest.

"Why did you only come now! Why!"

His voice was hoarse and distorted, every word cracking.

"Two weeks! The Chinese told you two weeks ago! What did you do! What did you do!"

More people crowded around. The weeping and roaring mixed together, drowning out the sound of the waves.

Under extreme pressure, a young soldier instinctively drew his handgun.

The muzzle aimed at the crowd.

The lieutenant grabbed his wrist and growled in a low voice,

"Are you crazy!? Put it away!"

But the camera's red light remained on.

That half-second of the muzzle pointing at them was seen simultaneously by two billion viewers worldwide.

The comment section exploded.

But it wasn't mockery, it wasn't accusations.

It was just... silence.

Under that comment from two weeks ago that read, "What kind of fool would believe there's an earthquake here," which had received forty-seven thousand likes, a new reply was added.

"I was wrong."

It had received 1.2 million likes and was still rising.

Chinese netizens clicked into the livestream with the satisfaction of "slapping faces," and then fell silent.

The blood-stained Frozen princess schoolbag on the screen caused all feelings of schadenfreude to instantly solidify into a heavy lump of lead.

Someone typed a line and then deleted it.

In the end, they only posted a period.

A period.

Nothing was said.

Everything was said.