The signal of Arthur Vance’s expedition logs hit the human great realms of the post-Cataclysm world like a sun-hot blast.
Within ten minutes of Arthur’s satellite handshake, the unencrypted tracking data package—complete with multi-spectral video feeds of Ymir-Chimaera’s anatomy, ground-shaking stress analyses of the eighty-four-thousand-ton cryo-cannon strike, and tiny scans of the 2082 Splicer cover-up—bypassed military firewalls and spilled onto the open civilian network.
In the glittering high-sky spires of the Vanguard Federation Capital, air-raid sirens wailed as emergency ministerial sessions were convened.
For over a century, the elite corporate tamer cartels—Sterling Bio-Tech, Apex Genetics, and the Northern Conglomerate—had kept their iron grip on global governance by peddling a terrifying lie. That the deep-sea rifts were unbeatable natural disasters that could only be managed through endless military spending and corporate genetic harvesting.
Arthur’s logs shattered that myth in an instant.
The public watched in stunned, breathless awe as the high-resolution feeds revealed the truth. That the extinction-grade terror of the southern pole was not an act of nature. But the monstrous byproduct of corporate greed, born from discarded toxic waste and illegal mantle drilling.
And more miraculously, they watched a young commoner tamer from Cull Pen 09, leading a squad of five ordinary, discarded beasts, dismantle a two-hundred-meter titan with the cold, careful elegance of a frontline trauma surgeon.
