After what Keido would call an "eventful ride", they finally made it to 34th Street. Heidi sighed as they got off the train, her phone finally connecting to a wifi signal again.
"I can't believe we were in there for a whole twenty minutes… Do these people go through this daily?"
She questioned as they walked up the stairs and out to the street. She took her phone out again and searched for the hotel they were headed to, and began walking in that direction with Keido and Kimsung following behind. They looked around the very bustling city, and all the different kinds of people. Some were walking quickly to work, others were walking at a more relaxed but still quick pace through the streets.
A couple of minutes later, Heidi stops in front of a building, looking up from her phone.
"Here we are, the New Yorker, or whatever it was."
Keido and Kimsung do not speak as they enter, and Kimsung handles the front desk, getting their room keys from the clerk and bringing their luggage to the elevator. The elevator ride is quiet as they go up, landing on the tenth floor, and going to their room. It was a family suite, with a living room and a bedroom with two beds, a computer desk, and two 32-inch flatscreen TVs.
During their time booking the room, Kimsung said the money wouldn't matter, since he himself already had a lot saved, even before the disasters hit. Not to mention, money wouldn't be much of an issue once the disasters hit, making currency obsolete in the face of monsters and dangers. Two weeks of staying at the hotel would be more than enough for them to tour the city, and review their plans better.
Keido lay down on his bed, thinking about Achilles, the very reason they came to New York in the first place. When he had been introduced in the story, it was only after the Fifth Disaster, when Shadow Samurai Jamal and the Lord of the Depths Armando had arrived from North America. Most readers always wanted to see a chapter dedicated to the situation in North America before, but when Jamal revealed the truth about it in the story, they finally understood why.
North America, with a population of nearly four hundred million people, was cut down to a little over a puny two million in just two years. Due to how the laws of the world's mythology factored in, North America was hit the hardest by the disasters every time, with millions of dungeons opening every disaster. Just two years later, that two million was cut down to under seven hundred thousand, a number only possible due to two men. The rumored Lord of the skies, David, and the Achilles of America. They saved hundreds of thousands of people all over North America by themselves, and built the strongest faction possible, with the weakest of their troops at High-Tier A rank.
The reason for this possible power was mythology itself. Mythology was all over the world, with so many different forms and names, with the least of it in North America. Mythology was not something that could be spread so easily, because its protective filtering only stayed in the land of its origin. This filter was the weakest in North America, and mainly in the U.S., because of the forced migration of Native Americans and the destruction of their culture.
Iran, for example, had Mesopotamian mythology. Japan had the Shinto, Russia had the Slavic, Africa had the Christian, Greece had the Greeks, and Meso-America had its multitude of mythological pantheons. These mythologies had set monsters, creatures that were meant to spawn in such lands, but North America did not. Instead of common monsters, like the Chupacabra or a Dragon, it instead had analog horrors, creatures of Nothing, beings that weren't meant to exist in the world so early on, and embodiments of several concepts. Later on, the weakest of these monsters would reach B rank, something the rest of the world considered creatures of ruin.
It was because of this that North America was doomed to be overrun. Such monsters would not die to the modern weapons that North America had in spades, and so they were rendered useless in the struggle. In only five years, out of nearly four hundred million humans living in the entire continent, only three survived. They were Armando, Jamal, and Achilles, the last and strongest of their faction, the Defiers.
Keido shivered. He planned to only stay in the U.S. for two years max, and then head to England so he could help Arthur with the Third Disaster. From Jamal's stories, for some odd reason, the entire continent, no matter where they went, was completely cut off from the rest of the world. It didn't matter what communication methods they used; it simply wasn't possible for them to communicate with anyone outside of the continent. If they were able to, perhaps more people would have survived.
'No thanks to the author of TTD again, I don't even know what the boss monster of the First Disaster even is! In Greece, it's the hydra. In England, it's the White Dragon. In India, it's Vritra. In Japan, it's Yamata-no-Orochi. In China, it's the Four Guardians and the Yellow Dragon. In Israel, it's Ars Goetia, one of seventy-two demons. In Australia, it's the Rainbow Serpent. In Egypt, it's the Ten Plagues, and finally, the Demon Queen and her army in Israel again!'
He groaned and rubbed his face, already feeling the mental exhaustion of how much he'll have to go through. However, to gain quite possibly the most broken character in TTD, he'd endure any kind of pressure. With Achilles, the Ten Disasters was an easy thing to beat. After all, Achilles had reached Z rank by the time it was the Seventh Disaster, so he had high hopes.