People trudged through the rubble, their steps heavy as they picked their way around mountains of debris.
At the front walked a man whose suit — normally kept pristine — was grimy with dust. Those who followed behind him looked just as haggard, the vitality drained from their faces.
Just the day before, they had been living in peace.
And then, on this day, it was gone in an instant.
Buildings toppled like felled trees. Roads overturned along with the very ground beneath them. The weapons that had fought to stop the destruction lay scattered about as scrap.
Amid this hellish panorama, one sight stood out in particular: a dragon, dead, its body jutting into a high-rise apartment building like a spear driven into its side.
Similar scenes were unfolding across the world.
Dragons had suddenly bared their fangs at humanity.
Before that overwhelming power, there was precious little humanity could do.
Even the weapons mass-produced using abundant MA energy, developed under
Weapons boasting performance leagues beyond anything that came before could do little more than stall the dragons for a brief window of time.
Still, that brief window did have meaning — it bought time to reduce the damage until
Those weapons were, of course, precisely what drew the dragons' ire.
People were gradually beginning to learn why the dragons had suddenly turned on them.
The truth about what the MA energy they had been using actually was.
Heard from no less a source than the mouth of the dragons themselves — the very instruments of the massacre.
At first, the upper echelons of the nations that had championed MA energy attempted to suppress the information.
But in a world with advanced communications networks, no gag order could hold for long.
Little by little, the truth spread.
Even so, people could not relinquish MA energy.
It was their only means of protecting themselves from the very threat of the dragons.
Before the power of the dragons, there was little humanity could do.
But little was not zero.
Ironically, even those few means required the use of MA energy.
And so they waited.
For salvation in the form of Sariel.
Alongside the truth about MA energy, people also learned of Sariel's existence and the fact that she would come to humanity's aid.
Sariel was the only one who could stand against the dragons.
And buying time until Sariel arrived — that was the only resistance humanity could mount.
Even so, the devastation was immense.
Countless cities were obliterated. Vast numbers of people perished. Those who survived had lost their homes.
They came to understand it viscerally.
The cruelty of the dragons — those incarnations of utterly irrational power.
The despair of knowing that humanity could never hope to resist.
There were two beings who stood against that despair.
One was Sariel.
The sole entity capable of confronting the dragons. Humanity's savior.
The other was Potimas Harifenas.
The discoverer of MA energy, and the very cause of this catastrophe.
For that very reason, he had anticipated this scenario and was already preparing countermeasures against the dragons.
Potimas knew exactly what MA energy truly was.
Including what would happen if it were used.
And he had predicted that the dragons or Sariel might move to deliver retribution.
For the eventuality of that, Potimas had been pushing forward with weapons development.
In between his original research into immortality, he disseminated weapon blueprints to nations across the globe.
Do that, and the nations would go ahead and build the weapons on their own.
Having obtained the inexhaustible energy source that was MA energy, nations raced to begin weapons production.
Each trying to stay one step ahead of the others.
Potimas was wanted internationally, but the knowledge that could be extracted from his intellect was invaluable.
That was precisely why nations secretly backed Potimas, receiving portions of his knowledge in return.
All the while dancing in the palm of his hand without realizing it.
And so the anti-divine defense network was forged.
Where Potimas miscalculated was that the dragons moved far sooner than he expected, and he had underestimated their fighting strength.
He had believed that even if his weapons could not defeat the dragons, they would at least put up a decent fight.
But when the dust settled, a decent fight was beyond them — barely stalling for time was the best they could manage.
And even that only had meaning because Sariel existed as backup.
Had Sariel not been on humanity's side, the result would have been nothing short of total annihilation.
If things continued like this, humanity would eventually be killed off by the dragons.
Driven by that sense of crisis, Potimas poured even more effort into his research than ever before.
It was not as though he had been slacking before.
But the encroaching terror of death unlocked the last vestiges of common sense that had still restrained him, and his methods grew ever more extreme, ever more grotesque.
And he arrived.
He arrived at it.
A forbidden art — the conversion of living organisms into MA energy.
Using the MA energy extracted through this method, Potimas evolved himself through Evolution experiments.
A different method from Evolution as it had existed before.
Through an Evolution method focused on extending lifespan, Potimas succeeded in gaining a lifespan far longer than anything achievable through the Evolution that came before.
In later ages, he would evolve into what came to be known as the Elf race.
But even with an extended lifespan, the looming threat of the dragons remained as formidable as ever.
Even if Sariel slew some of the dragons, humanity would be wiped out before she could kill them all.
Against the many dragons, Sariel stood alone.
When he finished that calculation, Potimas chose not to resist but to flee.
Evacuation to outer space.
He advanced preparations for that purpose with steady, methodical resolve.
But whether by fortune or misfortune, Potimas never made it off the planet.
Before he could, the dragons disappeared.
Having plundered the planet's MA energy down to the very last drop.