May 24th, 2032.
Paris, UES.
CORG Central Headquarters — Crisis Office, Level 2.
19:33 The broadcast had gone around the world in forty-seven minutes.
Not because NTV Angola was one of the biggest broadcasters on the planet — it wasn’t.
But because there were forty-two international journalists present on the Luanda Marginal covering the anniversary of peace, and forty-two international journalists with cameras rolling when a man looked directly into the lens and said I was the one responsible for your beloved base— that doesn’t need distribution.
It distributes itself.
In eighteen minutes it was on social media.
In twenty-three it was on tier-one news channels.
In forty-seven, the face of Captain Angola — with the Angolan flag cape and the SS-class Inhuman compressed behind him like punctuation — was on every screen in every country that had a CORG database facility on its territory.
Which was, essentially, all of them.
NTV Angola ran the story the way only a local broadcaster runs a story about its own country.
With pride.
The headline appeared at the bottom of the screen, in the large font they reserved for days when the country did something worthy of large font: KATTA BESHLIK HERO, CLASS B — CAPTAIN ANGOLA, GROUP LEADER AND CLASS A HERO — SAVES THE COUNTRY ONCE AGAIN.
LIVE, DURING THE MARGINAL EVENT.
The classification was wrong — or incomplete, which was the polite way of saying wrong.
Class A was the classification Angola had officially registered with CORG for Captain Angola, because it was the classification Angola had chosen to register.
What Nzinga Kalunga had filmed that afternoon was not Class A behavior.
But NTV Angola had no measurement system for whatever it was.
So it used what it had.
And the world used what NTV Angola gave it.
For now.
AREA 51 May 28th, 2032.
Nevada, USA.
CORG Base — Joint Installation Area 51 — Classification: EX 22:34 EX classification was the second highest on CORG’s installation scale.
Above X.
Below only a single category that existed in theory and that, until that week, had never been applied to a real event.
Area 51 was, to the general public, a convenient myth — the kind of place governments allow to become legend because legend works as camouflage.
While the world argued about whether or not extraterrestrials existed in secret hangars, what actually existed in secret hangars continued existing without inconvenient audiences.
What existed there, on the night of May twenty-eighth, was a facility whose internal dossier stated only: The destruction of this installation represents a permanent and irreversible alteration in the global strategic balance.
It was not institutional hyperbole.
It was a technical assessment.
22:34:07 The outer perimeter sensors registered the approach of an individual.
What was unusual was not the detection.
Area 51’s sensors detected birds, atmospheric fluctuations, pressure variations from three kilometers away.
What was unusual was the classification the system assigned to the detected individual.
[AUTOMATIC CLASSIFICATION — UNIDENTIFIED] Not as an unknown rank within the scale.
As something for which the scale had no column.
The alert that triggered was not one of the standard alerts.
It was an alert most technicians present had never seen activated outside simulations.
The dark red alert.
The system cannot evaluate what it is detecting.
The armed response mobilized in ninety seconds.
EX Protocol — the maximum available on continental American soil.
Eighty-six agents, twenty-three of them wielders of Grade A Ghoj or higher, four with S-rank classification, and one — the installation Commander, a hybrid of partially draconic origin, subtle scales across his cheekbones, SS-grade fire-command Don — who had survived four S-grade Rifts and had never encountered anything that made him retreat.
He encountered it that night.
Not immediately.
First came protocol.
Eighty-six agents in position.
Suppression systems activated.
Dungeon containment shields.
Weapons combining conventional technology with armaments extracted from SS-class Rifts.
And then — for the first and only time that night in which the systems operated within normal parameters — the perimeter cameras captured him.
He was walking.
Not running.
Not flying.
Not using any movement method the sensors could categorize.
Walking.
With the specific cadence of someone who is never in a hurry because hurry implies the possibility of arriving late — and that possibility was not part of his calculations.
The clothes were black, red, and yellow — but not the same kind of suit Captain Angola wore.
This was different.
Older in visual language.
Layers of dark fabric with red details running along the sleeves and hems like moving calligraphy, and yellow concentrated across the chest and back in patterns that could have been decorative or could have been something else.
The clothing of a monk.
The clothing of a warrior.
The clothing of something that had decided to be both at once and saw no contradiction in it.
On his head, a hat.
Round.
Wooden.
Wide-brimmed, flat-topped, with the unmoving patience of an object that had been in many places and had not been impressed by any of them.
In his right hand, a container.
A bowl of ramen.
With chopsticks.
He was eating.
The draconic Commander gave the order to halt.
The man did not stop.
He gave the order to fire.
Eighty-six agents fired simultaneously.
It was the volume of fire that internal facility simulations had calculated as sufficient to neutralize any SS-grade threat within a fifty-meter radius.
The man kept walking.
He raised no barrier.
Did not evade.
He simply continued eating the ramen with the calm attention of someone to whom the noise around him was completely irrelevant.
The projectiles reached a meter and a half from his body and stopped.
They were not blocked by any visible force.
They stopped — as though the space around that man had decided there was not enough urgency for those objects to continue along the path they had chosen.
Then they fell.
The draconic Commander activated his SS-grade fire Don.
The temperature at the perimeter rose one hundred and forty degrees in four seconds.
The kind of heat that melts Grade A containment structures.
The man looked at the flames.
With an expression that, on camera, seemed to be one of polite interest.
Then he continued walking.
What followed lasted thirty-eight minutes.
Exactly thirty-eight minutes.
The same duration as Base 121 in the North Pole.
23:12:44 The emergency cameras — autonomous systems with independent power sources, buried six meters beneath the foundation, designed to survive EX-class events — were still functioning.
They captured the following: Debris.
An EX-class installation that had existed for sixty-one years — that had witnessed more secrets than any history book could contain — reduced to rubble with the completeness only the absence of haste can produce.
Not the chaotic destruction of battle.
The ordered destruction of something dismantled methodically.
Fire.
Not the draconic Commander’s fire.
A different fire — calmer, older, with a color shifting between ordinary orange and a white the cameras struggled to record without distortion.
And at the center of all of it — Him.
Sitting.
On what had been, forty-five minutes earlier, the installation’s primary command center.
Sitting with the specific posture of someone who chose that position for comfort, not symbolism — legs crossed, back straight, the wooden hat still on his head, slightly tilted forward over the bowl of ramen that remained, somehow, warm.
He ate.
With chopsticks.
Carefully.
With the same tranquil attention with which he had walked into the installation.
And he sang.
Quietly.
To himself, or to the fire, or to what remained of sixty-one years of American secrets in ruins around him.
The camera had audio.
It captured the sound.
“If this street, if this street, belonged to me…” A song.
Old.
With the simple, direct melody of a hymn that needed no ornament to reach where it intended to go.
He was singing in Portuguese.