Shadow Slave

Sunny remained silent for a few moments, then scowled.

"What do you mean, good luck? Aren't you going to be there to mediate the negotiations?"

Master Jet took a sip of her coffee, then shook her head.

"No. While the government often serves as a neutral party and the connective tissue between the Great Clans, this is not one of those cases. Besides… I simply can't. I am being transferred out of the city. This is my last day here, for a while."

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

Master Jet… was not going to be around anymore? Sunny suddenly felt a pang of discomfort. He had grown accustomed to her being present out there somewhere... not exactly close to him, but at the same time within reach.

Noticing the expression on his face, she sighed.

"Actually, that is the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. The bad news."

Soul Reaper casually looked around, then summoned a Memory that looked like a music box. Immediately, a dome of silence appeared around them, cutting off all outside noises. Sunny frowned, confused by the need for secrecy.

She had seemed to be perfectly fine discussing private matters of a great clan in the public. What could have been more sensitive than that?

Master Jet lingered for a moment, then said:

"To be honest, Sunny, I was not going to have this conversation with you… at least not yet. But since the situation changed, and the things we are going to talk about can affect the decisions you will make tomorrow, I decided that there is no point in postponing it."

He shifted uncomfortably.

"That is… very suspenseful. What is the matter?"

She smiled, then activated her communicator and summoned a projection. It showed a map of something that looked like a big chunk of the Dream Realm. Sunny saw a lot of water and several large landmasses, each no smaller than the Forgotten Shore by the looks of it. However, no matter how he looked, he could not find the familiar landmarks — the Hollow Mountains, Bastion, Ravenheart… either he was not as proficient at reading maps as he had thought, or he had never seen this land.

Slightly confused, he glanced at Master Jet and asked:

"Is that a previously unexplored region of the Dream Realm?"

She looked at him with a strange expression, then coughed.

"...No. That is planet Earth, you dummy."

Sunny froze in embarrassment, then looked at the image again.

'Oh… right. I am an idiot.'

Soul Reaper grinned.

"Sunny… are you one of those Awakened that know more about the Dream Realm than about the waking world?"

He cleared his throat.

"Well… it's not like I spent a lot of time in school, you know."

Her grin dimmed a little.

"Right. Sorry. Sometimes I forget how young you are… it took me a while to cover the basics after leaving the outskirts, as well."

Master Jet sighed, then pointed to the map.

"In any case, this is our world. As you can see, it is not in great shape. A few centuries ago, it looked very different… there were around twelve billion people living across it. A few million even found their way to the moon, eventually."

She sighed, then added:

"But now, there's barely three billion of us left. And we only populate four of the seven continents. Do you know which continent we are currently on? What our city is called?"

Sunny looked at her with a dark expression.

"I am not a complete fool, you know. We are in… Asia? And the city is called… wait, it has a name? I just thought it's called… uh… the city."

She rolled her eyes.

"Well, you are half-right. We are indeed in Asia, which is one of the four populated continents and one that shelters the most people. The city we live in is the largest and most populous city left on Earth. It is also the industrial, military, and administrative heart of humanity. Around one-tenth of all humans live here… that is why while it is technically called the Northern Quadrant Siege Capital, or NQSC, people usually just refer to it as the City."

Master Jet hesitated for a moment, then said with a hint of darkness in her voice:

"Most of the surface of the planet is either uninhabitable or overrun by Nightmare Creatures, so megacities are the most convenient way to sustain a large population. However… even with spelltech and modern science, they are not capable of sustaining everyone. Hence the outskirts, where around twenty percent of the total city population is offloaded to slowly die out, out of the sight of the rest of humanity. But that is neither here nor there."

She sighed, and then pointed to a continent directly connected to Asia:

"This pit of desolation used to be known as Europe. It was turned completely unsuited for human life long before the Spell appeared."

Her finger trailed across a large body of water.

"This is North America. We lost it not long before you were born, when a Category Five Gate opened there. That was… a big disaster. Because of its proximity to the Gate, South America was mostly abandoned, as well. Now, we only maintain a small presence in its southernmost part. Those settlements are incredibly important, however, because that is where most of our food is produced."

Master Jet hesitated for a bit, and then gestured to a large archipelago situated below South America.

"This is Antarctica, the second most populated continent after Asia and the logistical link between the rest of the continents, connecting both hemispheres together. Believe it or not, before the Dark Times, it was covered in ice. Actually, the melting of all that ice was one of the reasons that caused the Dark Times."

She sighed.

"The sea levels across the planet rose, drowning many cities and displacing billions of people. The percentage of the landmass that was devoured by water was not too radical, but the problem was that many civilization centers were situated along the coasts. With all of them gone and billions of refugees seeking shelter, the global infrastructure collapsed. It did not happen in an instant, of course, but quite fast. That is the danger of building a deeply interconnected society. Lack of self-sufficiency is perfectly fine and even beneficial during the good times, but makes civilizations vulnerable to cascade failure."

Soul Reaper looked at him with a grim expression.

"Which was exactly what happened. The worse things got, the more chaos there was, and the more chaos there was, the worse things got. Endless natural disasters, destruction of global infrastructure, and resource starvation led to an escalating series of wars. Orbital kinetic strikes, nuclear warfare, chemical warfare, biowarfare… in the end, everything was being used. The planet was already in bad shape, and this was almost the last straw. In the end, the terribly reduced population achieved some form of stability… and that was the Nightmare Spell appeared."

Master Jet shook her head.

"...Ah, but am I getting off-topic. The point is, almost all of humanity resides around the Indian Ocean today. Asia, Antarctica, Africa, and Australia are the four remaining bastions of our civilization, forming the Northern, Southern, Western, and Eastern quadrants."

Sunny listened to the impromptu lecture with interest. He knew bits and pieces of human history, of course, but mostly from them being referenced in popular culture and government propaganda… which were more often than not one and the same. Out there in the outskirts, people did not need to know a lot about the world, because their world started and ended in the outskirts.

Even the city proper seemed like a distant land. He would have had more general knowledge, of course, if he had attended school, but Sunny's formal education more or less ended when he was seven. Honestly, the fact that he knew that people lived on the outside of the planet as opposed to on the inside was already an achievement.

He had managed to become a teacher despite all that, had he not?

'Still… I probably should start educating myself on matters not having to do with the Nightmare Spell, now that I have the chance. There are plenty of people as ignorant as me, of course, but still… this is kind of embarrassing…'

Sunny looked at Jet and shifted slightly.

"Uh… thanks for the history lesson, Master Jet. But what does it have to do with anything?"

She leaned back, smiled calmly, and answered in a relaxed tone:

"Oh, it's very simple, really. These four bastions of humanity I mentioned? They're about to become three..."