Volume 3: Global Vanguard & The Advanced Pinnacle
Late at night in Venice, a city of ancient stone bridges and winding canals, an eerie, bone-chilling stillness settled over the streets.
Just hours earlier, after the semifinal draw concluded at the magnificent Doge’s Palace, the entire city had been immersed in festival revelry. Across squares large and small, tens of thousands of tourists and supporters from all corners of the globe gathered to drink, sing, and wave the flags of the four strongest nations left standing in the tournament’s Final Four: China, the British Empire, the United States, and Greece. The bars lining the Grand Canal played lively music, glasses clinking sharply beneath the colorful glow of magical lanterns.
Yet, as the clock on St. Mark’s Campanile chimed past eleven, the atmosphere shifted bizarrely.
The sea breeze carrying the briny tang of the Venetian gulf suddenly died down completely. In its place, an unusually chilling, damp air mass rolled heavily inland from the deep Adriatic. Fog rose with astonishing speed. At first, it appeared only as wispy strips drifting across the water’s surface, but within half an hour, dense, opaque banks of white fog like thick milk had completely blanketed the city.