One Last System

"We can't hold them!" Castor screamed out right into Daniel's face.

The red lights flashed all over the room, introducing a gloomy atmosphere to the high command.

"We can hold them," Daniel replied with a calm look on his face. "Galean army is on the move. Give them two days and they will break through the front and reestablish the supply route to the city…"

Daniel had to cut his words short when a new message appeared on the main screen. And as if to spit right at the hopeful tone he raised, the message announced the annihilation of the entire Galean division that Daniel put so much hope in.

"Impossible…" Daniel muttered, refusing to believe the message and the video feed that followed.

"They are storming the outer ring!" A messenger from the local front arrived, bringing the news of the dire state of the city's defense.

The outer ring. The main body of the three-ringed city housed all the greatest minds and objects of cultural appreciation of all the civilizations that existed within the entirety of the world.

"Impossible…" Daniel muttered, repeating his words again.

Galean division consisted of nearly four hundred thousand people. It consisted of the elite storm divisions, the heaviest of the pancer units, and enough supplies to wage war against the entirety of the disunited world for years upon years.

And now, he was supposed to believe they were all gone… in a single instant?

"Impossible…" Daniel muttered for the third time. This time, however, he clenched his fists and raised his face. "Reestablish the contact with the units!" he ordered, sending the men within the communication corner of the room into a frenzy. "As for the situation at the outer ring…"

Daniel closed his eyes for a second. He then took a deep breath and raised his chin up.

"Open the gates," he suddenly ordered, causing everyone in the room to stop what they were doing.

In this single moment, despite the messy state of all the seventy-three ongoing battles that would decide the future of human civilization, the officers responsible for coordinating them all… dropped their tasks and simply stared at Daniel in disbelief.

"What good will this do?!" Castor freaked out. He opened up his eyes wide and simply stared at Daniel, refusing to believe what he just heard. "Do you want to let them all inside?! Did you go mad from an information overdose?!"

Daniel released a long sigh and shook his head. He then opened his eyes and looked right back at Castor's face.

"I don't mean to open the city gates. Why would I turn the barrier, our last line of defense, worthless?" he asked in a strangely calm voice. "I want you to open the floodgates."

There were thousands of little things that everyone in the room had to do. Some had to order more supplies to the fronts they were responsible for. Others had to give out new orders to the troops on the field to adapt to the changing situation of the battlefield.

Everyone should be busy. But upon hearing Daniel's order, they just couldn't break through the thick barrier of shock that descended upon their minds.

Opening the floodgates was the single most desperate thing Daniel could order.

In the short term, it would bring an end to the lush vegetation of the city gardens and destroy the canal transportation industry by allowing all the water stuck between the city rings to flow out into the main canal and then to the ocean.

But in the long term, it would remove the buffer that kept the ongoing climate change from affecting the farmlands all around the city.

"Do you wish to turn this place into a desert?!" Castor freaked out again.

"Just think about it," Daniel finally snapped. "There is only one way in which they could annihilate the Galean division!"

The silence from the communications corner proved that the message displayed on the huge screen mounted on the room's wall was no mistake nor an error.

"They could only ever achieve it with a thermonuclear strike," Daniel whispered as he clenched his fingers.

'And that means, I've failed to stop the development of nukes this time around,' he thought, gritting his teeth in a powerless fury.

The entire Atlanti was the perfected version of the civilization lost to the time that he originated from. A civilization lacking the downsides of the Cantian Council, far more tolerant to those who didn't wish to be a part of it.

But what he failed to change was human nature.

The greed pushed the outside forces to bite at the outskirts of the Atlanti-controlled domains, forcing them to invest more and more of their valuable manpower and resources to keep those lands safe.

'If only I had more time!' Daniel thought, ignoring the noise that soon filled the room as everyone got back to their jobs. 'With three, four hundred more years, I could absorb the rest of the major players and stop any opposition from ever appearing!'

This was the idea behind the Atlanti. All the lands and nations. The very core assumption is hidden within the very name of Daniel's civilization. Yet, even with all the technological breakthroughs that Daniel brought, implementing them on a large scale still required time.

And in the period where those who joined Atlanti became obscenely rich and prosperous while the outsiders had yet to get their chance to unite with them… some fucker actually went and invented the only tool that could stop Daniel in his tracks!

"Sir!" one of the officers suddenly shouted, forcing Daniel out of his daze. "We've calibrated the sensors for the launch detection," the middle-aged man reported.

But from the look on his face, Daniel could tell it wasn't all.

"And?" Daniel asked, prompting the man to swallow his saliva and stand at attention.

"We've detected multiple launches. And the trackers indicate…" the officer hesitated for a second before averting his eyes and lowering his head. "At least seven of the missiles are aimed right at the city!"

Daniel's vision started to fade once again, forcing all the emotions that he felt during the next few hours of the disaster to fill his soul all at once.

The stress of trying to salvage the situation. The anticipation he felt when he threw everything he could to stop the nuclear strikes. The desperation when the officers kidnapped him, forcing Daniel to escape into the deepest part of the city. Right into the vault that housed the ancient terminal to the quantum computer disguised as the planet closest to the fake sun.

And the endless grief when the terminal defenses forced all of those unregistered with it out of the vault, leaving them exposed to the nuclear fires of doom that then eradicated the city above, leaving Daniel as the last and lone survivor of yet another civilization that would be lost in time once the terminal's response would annihilate anything that was in any way or form connected to what endangered it.

Seven long years that Daniel was stuck in the vault all condensed into a single minute of extreme depression. And then, as this devastating feeling started to fade, announcing the proper end of the vision… Daniel finally could think again.

'There is only one more period of time to go through,' he thought, momentarily recalling the glorious days of his true homeland. His blood relatives that he didn't see in over ten thousand years. The family… whose graves he couldn't even visit.

'But once my memories from the Cantian era pass… what will happen then?'