CORG Central Headquarters — Underground Level 7.
05:23.
— Eclipse — Aldren continued — was not a powerful being in the conventional sense.
It was not an extreme-grade Xudo.
It was not an amplified Ghoj.
It was something fundamentally different.
According to the fragments we managed to reconstruct, it referred to itself as the concept of existence.
— He paused.
— Not the existence of something specific.
Existence itself.
The fact that things are.
Dumas Rei, who until then had not spoken, said: — What did it want?
— The Pink and White Diamond.
Vorath made a low sound.
It was not surprise.
It was recognition.
— Everyone in this room knows about the Diamond.
— Aldren looked around the table.
— I will not explain what it is, because that belongs to a separate archive with separate access protocols.
What matters is what Eclipse believed about it: that it was a relic whose balance sustained the structure of existence itself.
And that by obtaining it, it could reshape that structure according to its own will.
— What happened when nobody could stop it?
— asked the feline Hybrid.
Her voice was soft.
Precise.
Aldren advanced the slide.
Images.
Not photographs, but sketches, because the photographs had either never been taken or had not survived.
Angolan cities with collapsed architecture shaped in ways that defied structural physics.
Terrain fractured into patterns suggesting gravity had, at certain moments, forgotten which direction it was supposed to pull.
Witness testimonies, transcribed by hand, because the region’s digital records during that period were uniformly unreadable.
As if the data had been written into something the files themselves could no longer contain.
— Cities collapsed.
Local physical laws temporarily failed.
We recorded temporal fragmentation in three points across southern Angolan territory.
Time moving at different speeds in adjacent areas.
— Aldren said it with the same calmness as everything else.
Yet there was something in the way he breathed at the end of the sentence.
— The world was genuinely on the verge of existential collapse at that moment.
Not metaphorically.
— And no global power responded?
— said the Dwarven representative.
— We did.
— Dumas Rei’s voice cut through the room sharply.
— Every major power responded.
The United States sent three S-grade squadrons.
China sent two.
Russia activated its non-public assets.
We at CORG activated the Red Protocol, which most people in this room have never seen deployed, because it was created for scenarios we hoped would never exist.
Pause.
— Nothing came close.
Nothing was even relevant.
Silence.
— That was when they appeared, — Aldren said.
The screen changed.
Five silhouettes.
Unidentified.
Only outlines, because it was all CORG had managed to document consistently.
Each silhouette had a number beneath it.
I.
— II.
— III.
— IV.
— V.
— The Five Greats.
Katta Beshlik.
— Aldren stared at the silhouettes for a moment.
— We do not know how long they have existed.
We do not know how they met.
We do not know what binds them beyond what they did that day.
What we do know, what we managed to reconstruct from fragments, survivor testimonies, and equipment readings that partially survived the fragmentation of reality in that area, is what happened when they confronted Eclipse.
He paused.
— It was not a battle.
Not in the sense we use that word.
— He chose his words carefully, like someone describing something language itself was not built to contain.
— It was a collision between forces operating at a level where our measurement instruments simply stop having reference points.
Every impact produced temporal consequences.
Every decision made during that confrontation altered, in real time, the state of things existing outside of it.
As if the fight were not merely taking place in space, but in the fabric that keeps space coherent.
— And they won, — Yselith said.
It was not a question.
— They did.
— Aldren changed the slide.
— And that victory caused a consequence none of them had planned for, assuming they even had a plan.
Existence itself, damaged by the confrontation and structurally compromised by the scale of force exerted upon it, retreated.
— Retreated, — repeated the representative of the Lesser Entity classification.
Their voice carried a faintly unnatural resonance.
— Define retreated within the context you are using.
— Existence, — Aldren said, — reversed one year.
It returned to the state of 2028.
Before Eclipse appeared.
Before the conflict.
Before any damage.
— A pause.
— Eclipse ceased to exist.
It was not destroyed.
It was not imprisoned.
It was erased from reality as a consequence of reality repairing itself.
Silence filled the room.
A different silence than before.
Heavier.
— And the Five?
— Vorath asked.
— They retained their memories.
— Aldren looked at him.
— Only them.
In the entire world, only five beings remember a year that technically never happened.
A threat that technically never existed.
A battle that technically appears nowhere in any record.
— Except yours, — Dumas said.
— Except ours.
Fragments.
Incomplete.
Obtained through methods I would rather not detail at this moment.
— Aldren closed the slides.
— Enough to know it happened.
Not enough to truly understand it.
He placed both hands on the table.
— We attempted to access Angola’s archives.
Three times.
Through three different methods, across three different years, using three separate teams unaware of each other’s existence.
— A deliberate pause.
— Nothing.
Not in the sense that we found encryption we could not break.
In the sense that there was nothing there to break.
The records that should exist simply do not.
As if Angola, as a state, had decided that the best way to hide information was to never record it at all.
— Or, — Yselith said, — someone made that decision for Angola.
— That is one of the hypotheses.
Yes.
— What is the core issue?
— the feline Hybrid asked directly.
— They defeated a §-class entity and vanished.
That alone does not make them a threat.
— No.
— Aldren looked at her.
— What makes them a concern is this: the code 3€21# was generated in 2029.
It is connected to the Eclipse event and to Katta Beshlik.
It was designed with a level of protection our systems struggled to even locate.
And it was the last data transmitted by a dying agent after our X-class base was destroyed in thirty-eight minutes by a single individual.
He looked around the table.
At all fifteen members, one by one.
— This does not mean Katta Beshlik destroyed Base 121.
We do not have that confirmation.
What we have is a thread.
A thread that begins in 2029, in Angola, with five beings who defeated the impossible…
and ends, for now, in the North Pole, last night, with a man in a black, red, and yellow suit destroying one of our facilities as though it were a warm-up exercise.
Silence.
— They, — he said, using the word aloud for the first time, with deliberate weight, — have started reacting.
To something.
We do not know what.
We do not know why now.
We do not know whether we are on the same side.
Vorath spoke slowly: — And if we are not?
Aldren Mous looked at him.
— Then we have a problem for which this organization has no protocol.
The room fell silent for a long moment.
Then Dumas Rei spoke with the flat tone of a man converting an abstract problem into an operational one: — We need to know who they are.
Individually.
Not silhouettes.
Names.
Histories.
Real capabilities.
— Agreed, — Aldren said.
— And we need to know what the man from last night wanted that was inside Base 121.
— Or what he wanted removed from Base 121, — Yselith said without inflection.
The distinction was small.
And it changed everything.
Aldren Mous shut down the screen.
The room returned to its usual dimness.
Fifteen individuals.
A round table without a head seat beneath a light that illuminated without comforting.
— By the next meeting, — he said, — I want three things.
— First: identification of the individual from Base 121.
Not by the code.
By the suit.
The cape.
Whatever the equipment recorded before failing.
Someone built that outfit, and builders leave signatures.
— Second: I want a direct line established with the Angolan government.
Not official.
Not diplomatic.
Direct.
I want to know whether Angola understands what exists within its borders, and if it does, I want to know why they never told us anything.
— Third.
— A pause.
— I want to know what the Pink and White Diamond truly is.
The complete archive.
Not the executive summary.
The archive itself.
Because if Eclipse wanted it, and Katta Beshlik fought over it, and now something or someone is reacting…
then it is the center of all this.
And we still do not understand why.
He stood.
The others did the same in silence, with the unspoken formality of people who understood that what had just happened in that room would define what happened outside it over the coming weeks.
— One last thing, — Aldren said, already standing, before anyone moved toward the exit.
He looked at the darkened screen.
At the place where the § symbol had been.
— Eclipse was classified as §.
And it was defeated by five beings whose true capabilities remain unknown.
— His voice came out quiet.
— What that implies about the correct classification for each of them is something I would rather not put on paper yet.
No one answered.
Because there was no comfortable answer to that.
Aldren Mous walked toward the exit.
Outside, Paris was slowly waking up.
The Tower of Claptulum stood there, as always.
Motionless.
Impassive.
Guarding whatever it had guarded for nearly two thousand years.
And somewhere in the world, somewhere no CORG system could locate, five people knew things the world had forgotten.
And one of them had just sent a message.