While Stanley Snyder's elite unit launches the final assault on the Kingdom of Science's base after the destruction of their communication, the situation reaches its critical climax. Desperate attempts to delay the soldiers' advance fail and claim casualties. Simultaneously, the watchmaker Joel in Corn City achieves the decisive breakthrough: Based on Kaseki's findings about the necessary cleavage plane, he polishes a functioning diamond battery and activates a Medusa.

In this hopeless situation, Senku sets a radical plan in motion. Since a local deployment of the Medusa is no longer possible, he decides to petrify all of humanity – friend and foe alike – once again, in order to heal the dead and end the conflict. The trigger for this is as ingenious as it is ironic: Senku programs the Medusa to activate via the automatic radio signals of the "Why-Man" – those same signals that triggered the first global petrification 3,700 years ago. In a final act of science, the catastrophe of the past becomes the salvation of the present, as the petrification beam engulfs the entire planet and turns all those fighting into stone.