The Crown Prince In Hiding

Mathema - Metropolis of Bayern

A tram rolled past overhead on the elevated bridge.

At the Paleontology Office.

Today was another busy day, as usual.

Thomasin Mayfield hadn't returned to Artheris in four months straight. She had practically become a permanent fixture at Mathema by now.

Amid the workers bustling past,

a pair of hands reached out from behind and casually picked up a white hard hat, putting it on before walking over and speaking.

"So this is the Warehouse."

'!'

The young woman froze stiff, slowly turning around, never expecting the project owner to show up on an ordinary day like this without any notice.

"Your Grace?!"

She had only submitted her report two days ago.

The only possible explanation was that the moment he'd opened it to read, he had packed his things and come straight here.

"So it's finished."

"The humidity systems are running at full capacity. We're currently in the process of moving specimens in for storage."

"...Excellent."

Workers stepped aside as Thomasin hurried to gather her notebook and follow behind the project owner.

"Your Grace, I had no idea you would be coming without advance notice."

"Well, I didn't give any, Senior Thomasin."

"Would you like me to send for Professor Pi'erre?"

"If he's busy, don't bother."

"Yes, sir."

Thomasin gave a quick nod and turned to run off.

"Beautiful, isn't it, Casca?"

He appeared to be speaking to thin air, but he wasn't. He was speaking to Casca, who had followed him using an [Advanced Invisibility] spell, visible to him only through reflections on glass surfaces.

The nature of his relationship with Casca remained undisclosed. He didn't trust Thomasin enough yet, and he saw no need to reveal it regardless.

<< This'll do nicely. >>

Casca turned her gaze toward the pristine white specimen storage stretching as far as the eye could see, watching researchers steadily placing specimen remains into trays within drawers before sliding them back into place.

Everything looked thoroughly modern, and it was obvious an enormous amount had been invested.

<< How many more of these are you planning to build?>>

"We've already started construction on another one at Diablo."

<< Oh.>>

"I really do owe Nora for this. If she hadn't helped, we'd have spent years just looking for a contractor."

Dan pressed his palm against the smooth white wall of the Warehouse, running it back and forth with pride.

At that same moment, Thomasin returned with Professor Pi'erre.

"Your Grace."

"Professor."

"You've traveled quite far. Would you like something to drink?"

"No need, Professor. I'm far more excited to see the Warehouse... I saw your published paper. It's on the basement level, correct?"

"That's correct."

Professor Pi'erre picked up a white hard hat and put it on, then led the way for Dan, with Thomasin following behind.

"I'd been quietly working on it for four years before that."

They descended down the passage connecting to the Warehouse's basement level.

The place where specialty-tier specimens were kept.

Specimens recently discovered, or still under study.

White lights flickered on, the air far colder than upstairs.

Countless strange specimens were arranged in zones, but the zone they arrived at

was the section containing the skull of an enormous creature.

Its eye sockets were wide enough for ten people to stand stacked comfortably. Its elongated jaw bristled with hundreds of sharp, stone-like teeth, each one towering over a human head. Estimating its full body proportions, this creature was at least fifty times larger and more massive than the dragon Iskaryx.

To put that in perspective, no land animal today came anywhere close to Iskaryx's size, let alone surpassed it.

"Before dragons, before humans, before even your own race... our work has just discovered that one era before ours, this world once belonged to 'giant creatures.'"

"Giant creatures like this one?"

"Giant creatures next to which our current-day monster beasts would be nothing more than insects."

'!'

Professor Pi'erre stroked the dark grey stone surface of the giant jaw with fascination.

"During the middle era of this world... the air was far richer in heat and oxygen than today. The continents were still joined as a single landmass. Forests grew so tall they pierced the sky, fueling life to its absolute peak. That era was not an age of magic, but an age when giant creatures ruled every square inch of the land."

"The air itself affected the size of living things?"

Long-necked giant creatures whose every step shook the ground like an earthquake. Giant winged creatures whose wingspans blotted out the sun, plunging the sky into darkness. And giant predators with enough crushing force to pulverize the bones of a modern-day dragon in a single bite.

Dan reached out to touch the icy-cold fossilized teeth. A certain feeling passed through the heart of the Prince of Diablo.

This world was ancient, vast, and had passed through the glory of giant creatures long, long before their own kind ever existed. The conflicts and attachments of the present era became nothing more than tiny specks of dust in history, compared to the immense span of time this giant skull's owner had slumbered through.

"Only one era before ours?"

"Truly just one era before ours. An era when mammals like us were still second-class citizens of this world."

"It was the era when life flourished at its absolute peak, and it lasted the longest of any era."

"How long?"

"Human civilization has spanned roughly 300,000 years so far... but these giant creatures, before they vanished from our world, roamed the earth for approximately 186 million years, Your Grace."

He paused, unable to process such an incomparable number.

"620 times longer than us?"

Thomasin raised her hand and drew a circle in the air, compressing the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the world into a single clock face:

Midnight (00:00): The world is born as a molten ball of rock.

1:36 AM: LUCA emerges rapidly. The world becomes home to life invisible to the naked eye.

8:48 PM: The first multicellular animals have just evolved.

11:40 PM: The giant creatures go extinct from this world.

11:59:54 PM (6 seconds before midnight): Humans have only just set foot upon this world.

"These giant creatures... only appeared around 10 PM."

"Across all 24 hours since midnight... the first life form, which evolved beneath the sea, appeared at 9 PM? Then what about the 21 hours before that? What was happening then?"

"Trial and error, Prince Fury."

Professor Pi'erre said.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"The trial and error of the descendants who trace their line back to LUCA."

The Prince could no longer even begin to imagine it.

His mind could not comprehend a number of this magnitude.

The vastness he felt toward the era when life still existed underwater, the descendants of LUCA could feel that same vastness toward LUCA himself, nine times over.

"Our world spun in silence, with only the sun, storm winds, and invisible life in the water, for a full 21 hours straight... If the world were a thick book of a thousand pages, the entire history of giant creatures, of dragons, or of all human civilization, would be nothing more than a brief tale written in the final three hours before midnight."

The hand resting on the bone gradually lost its strength.

A demon who had weathered countless battlefields and life-or-death moments, yet nothing had ever left him feeling this hopeless before, faced with the sheer truth of nature.

If he had to feel that same feeling nine times over... then finding LUCA was truly an impossible task.

This universe was never built for us to comprehend its own timescale.

In that moment...

the image of that "clergyman" surfaced in Fury's mind.

<<All things change with time. Nothing endures forever, not even this universe itself.>>

"Prince Fury?"

Dan was pulled back to the present.

"Thank you so much, Senior Thomasin... this truly is an exciting discovery. So what was it that caused these giant creatures to go extinct?"

"We don't know for certain, but we have a theory."

"What's that, Professor?"

"A rock from beyond this world."

A storage cabinet slid open with a grinding sound. The air inside was bitterly cold and dry, thick with the scent of rock dust, dried minerals, and preservation chemicals.

Professor Pi'erre led Prince Fury to a long steel table in the center of the room. Atop it lay a clear glass rectangular case, over two meters long, containing a "stratigraphic core sample" that had been perfectly excavated and cut as a single slab from the dig site.

He saw the rock and sediment arranged clearly in distinct layers.

"Each layer represents accumulated soil from a different era, Your Grace."

"The higher up, the more recent, correct? Which means the topmost layer is our own era."

"Each layer takes millions of years to form per centimeter."

Then he began pointing at the sample.

"Take a look at the color changes across the layers in this glass core..."

The professor pointed,

"This lower section is dense limestone. It's saturated with bone fragments and specimens of giant creatures. The traces of life are so dense there's hardly any gap at all... but as your eyes move up to here..."

Pi'erre's finger stopped at a "solid black soot layer," only a few centimeters thick, forming a sharp, absolute divide between the ancient stratum and the layer above.

"This dark black band... is the exact point where all geological and biological activity appears to have been erased entirely."

"Erased?"

"The soil never lies, Your Grace."

Pi'erre leaned in, meeting Dan's eyes, his voice trembling with a mix of awe and dread.

"No giant creature bones. No shells. Not even plant spores or any trace of life. This isn't a gradual decline of natural attrition. It's as though something..."

He snapped his fingers.

"...wiped out all life on Earth entirely, within an incredibly short span of time."

"From analyzing the soil composition of this black band in the lab... we found soot and ash consistent with intense combustion, along with abnormally high concentrations of rare minerals. This mineral is almost nonexistent on Earth's surface... unless it came from one particular source."

"That source is 'beyond this world.'"

Professor Pi'erre continued, gazing at the core sample.

"A massive meteor from the dark void of space... on that day, 66 million years ago, a rock the size of a major city struck the Earth at a speed hundreds of times faster than sound. The impact released an unimaginable wave of heat, scorching the continents, and released dust and toxic particles that blotted out the sun, plunging the world into darkness and cold for years on end."

The hundred-meter-long giant creatures that had ruled this land for over 180 million years never even had time to react. They went extinct, reduced to nothing more than the ash compressed into that narrow black band in the glass tray before them.

Dan let a faint smile surface.

"Professor... this is exactly the thing that's been settling into my awareness for the past ten years... I never imagined this would come back around to reaffirm what a certain someone once told me."

It was a certain truth that Prince Fury found himself feeling once again.

No matter how great he might be... he was never greater than nature itself.

This was the shadow on Fury's cave wall from ten years ago.

"Could it be possible that it was a chunk of the moon that fell on us?"

Fury offered the thought sincerely.

His secretary suppressed a small smile, which made Prince Fury feel like he'd said something foolish.

"What? The moon is the closest rock to us."

"That's a good question, Your Grace. However, the size of the rock we believe this to be would need to be the size of an entire city. If something that size broke off from the moon, wouldn't the moon itself have needed to be struck by something incredibly powerful enough to shatter the whole thing apart?"

"...Hm... well..."

He tried to connect the pieces of knowledge, recalling the contents of an astronomy book from the library.

"You have a point... even though I've blown apart entire mountains before, I could never send something out beyond the world itself... it would have to be something far more powerful than anything I possess..."

"We have a team studying this matter, divided by era. But back to the point, the era we need to focus on, if our goal is LUCA, is the era when everything still lay beneath the water."

Professor Pi'erre said,

"Your Grace, there's one more thing I think might interest you."

"What's that?"

"A colleague of mine here is developing a submersible vessel. I believe it could greatly help our work."

"A submersible vessel?"