June 4th, 2032.
London, United Kingdom.
Buckingham Palace.
10:22 AM Buckingham Palace had survived many things.
Two world wars, including a second war that, in this reality, had been fought with both ordinary soldiers and Don-bearers in proportions that public history books still had not reached a consensus on how to describe.
The opening of the first European Rift in 1891, which had emerged three kilometers from the palace and which the British government had handled with the specific discretion of a monarchy that had learned, over centuries, that the best way to deal with the impossible was not to name it publicly.
The crisis of 2019, when an SS-grade dungeon had activated beneath the River Thames and the government had evacuated a two-kilometer radius under the cover of a supposed gas emergency.
The palace had survived.
It was a building that had existed long enough to develop, within its stones and corridors and architecture of accumulated power, a quality of permanence.
As though continuity itself were part of the construction material alongside limestone and marble.
At 10:22 AM on June 4th, 2032, that quality was tested.
The north wall gave way first.
It did not explode.
It yielded, which was different.
Explosion implied scattered violence, force fragmenting in multiple directions.
Yielding was more precise: the north wall of the palace recognized there was a force greater than its ability to resist and made the structural decision to become something else.
Security reacted.
They were the best the United Kingdom had for protecting high-value facilities.
Not merely conventional military force, but a specific mix that included A and B-grade Don-bearers, two S-grade Ghoj users, and a response protocol developed and refined over decades of existing in a world where threats were neither exclusively human nor conventional.
They saw him enter through the breach in the wall.
Wearing the cape of the Angolan flag.
Wearing the black, red, and yellow suit.
With the calm of someone who had entered through the front door.
Captain Angola did not go directly toward anyone.
He went for the rooms.
For the marble corridors lined with centuries-old paintings.
For the state chambers furnished with more history than most countries possessed.
For the archive systems the palace maintained in underground chambers.
Not the public archives.
Not the archives existing in digital databases.
The physical archives.
Manuscripts.
Maps.
Records accumulated by the British monarchy since 345 A.D., from the first year the world had changed its nature and those with the power to record had begun documenting what was never meant to be public.
He destroyed everything.
With precision.
With method.
With the kind of destruction that was not rage but decision.
Every room evaluated, every archive identified, every thing that should cease to exist transformed into a thing that no longer existed.
Palace personnel were moved out of the way.
Not gently, but with the minimum force necessary to ensure they were out of the way and not dead, which was a distinction Captain Angola maintained throughout the entire operation with a consistency that would later be identified as intentional.
No one died.
Many things were destroyed.
And Captain Angola continued.
The call reached global rank number six within seven minutes.
WORLD HERO CLASSIFICATION Global Position: #6 Name: Aldric Vorn Origin: United Kingdom Age: 38 Race: Human, Growth Variant Classification: SS Aldric Vorn stood two meters and ninety-seven centimeters tall.
Not the tallest height on record among global heroes.
There were Orcs, draconic hybrids, beings from categories that rendered human scale irrelevant.
But Aldric Vorn was human, or what CORG classified as human with a growth variant, and within human parameters, two meters and ninety-seven centimeters paired with the mass ratio accompanying that height was something different from merely being tall.
It was architecture.
Built across thirty-eight years of life and a physical amplification Don that did not merely increase strength, but increased the density and structural resistance of the body in ways A-grade Dungeon materials had been compared against and found insufficient.
His face possessed the construction of something meant to intimidate, and it did, not through expression, which was naturally calm, but through scale.
Brown eyes carrying a level of attentiveness that contrasted with what his silhouette suggested.
A voice that, at normal volume, produced a frequency that caused nearby objects to register vibration.
Polite.
Genuinely so.
The kind of politeness born not from protocol but conviction.
The belief that respect between beings formed the basis of any functional civilization.
Outside combat, most people consistently described him as surprisingly pleasant for someone who looked the way he did.
And he had an anger problem.
Not the anger of someone who lost control easily.
The anger of someone who maintained absolute control over it for a very long time and who, when the limit was reached, when something or someone crossed the specific point decades of discipline still had not managed to move, released something that education, protocol, and the seriousness of thirty-eight years as a globally ranked hero could no longer contain.
He reached the palace in four minutes.
By air.
His physical amplification Don included jumping capacity that rendered conventional flight redundant over short distances.
He landed in the main courtyard.
Looked at the breach in the north wall.
At the smoke rising from three upper-floor windows.
At palace personnel being evacuated through the side corridors.
He breathed.
Slowly.
With the control of decades.
“Where is he?” he asked the protocol agent who had run toward him the moment he landed.
“Second floor, east wing,” the agent replied.
“He’s in the royal chamber archives.” Aldric Vorn looked toward the east wing.
“Evacuate everyone remaining,” he said.
His voice emerged at its usual measured frequency, without elevation.
“No one within a three-hundred-meter radius.” “Sir, protocol says…” “Three hundred meters,” Aldric repeated.
This time with one millimeter more weight behind the words.
Not anger.
But the signal that the next repetition would carry a different kind of weight.
The agent left.
Aldric entered through the main courtyard.
Through the marble corridors.
Up the central staircase, each step making the marble register his weight.
Toward the east wing.
He found Captain Angola inside the second-floor archive chamber.
Which was no longer an archive chamber.
It was a space with walls and ceiling where an archive chamber had once existed, and where now remained only what was left after decision applied with absolute precision.
Captain Angola stood at the center of the room.
Wearing the cape of the Angolan flag.
He looked at Aldric Vorn as he entered.
With eyes that were in no hurry.
Aldric remained at the entrance.
He looked across the room.
At what had been destroyed.
Not with anger yet, because the anger was still controlled, but with the recognition of what he was seeing.
Three hundred years of archives.
Documents existing nowhere else.
Records beginning in 345 A.D., preserved by the British monarchy with a level of secrecy the word confidential could not adequately describe because the word had not been designed for things of this magnitude.
“Those archives,” Aldric Vorn said, voice measured, the active and visible control of someone working to maintain it, “belonged to the British people.” Captain Angola looked at him.
“They belonged,” he replied, “to the people who hid them from the British people.” Silence.
“Whatever was in there,” Aldric said, “it was not yours to destroy.” “No,” Captain Angola agreed.
“But it wasn’t theirs to keep either.” Aldric Vorn breathed.
Once.
Long.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, with the politeness of someone who believed in process even while that process was being tested at its limits.
“For the destruction of this property, damages to the palace, unauthorized entry into a national historical facility…” “No,” Captain Angola said.
Simply.
Without hostility.
With the quality of an answer that required no additional words because it already possessed all the ones it needed.
Aldric remained motionless for two seconds.
With the anger held against the boundary of decades of discipline.
Then that boundary reached the specific point decades of discipline still had not managed to move.
“Then,” Aldric Vorn said, his voice lowered half a tone, now vibrating at a frequency that made the remaining walls of the chamber register it, “you’ll come another way.”