The rain was gone by morning, and the sky had the washed quality it always had after — very blue, very clean, the kind of clarity that made the Pacific look like something out of a painting.
Leon took off.
He’d flown this route once before, so the geography was already indexed.
A few minutes of sustained flight at the appropriate altitude put him above the Afghan interior, moving fast enough that the passenger jets below him were briefly curiosities — long white tubes at high altitude, descending relative to his own vector before they were behind him.
He leveled off in the cloud ceiling above the region and let his sight work.
His eyes moved independently of any need to turn his head — adjusting range, scanning each quadrant in sequence, each pass more precise than any tracking system the ground below could have fielded.
It was night over Afghanistan.
Most of the larger Ten Rings bases had shifted into a low operational status: sentries posted, sleeping lodgings occupied, the baseline vigilance of an organization that expected to still exist in the morning.
But some of them were still at work.
He found them across three separate locations in the first pass: armed men moving through civilian streets at the late hours, when darkness gave cover and the families inside the houses had nowhere to go.
He picked the closest pair first — two men, rifles, approaching a residential door with the stance of people who had done this before.
He came down.
The bio-force field turned his descent into silence — no whisper of air, no warning of any kind, no sound at all until he was close enough that the landing itself became the announcement.
He dispersed the field on contact, and the ground under his feet cracked outward in every direction at once, a spider-web of fracture lines spreading across the packed earth, the impact making a sound like something heavy dropped into quiet water.
The two men spun around with weapons raised.
“Dari?” Leon said, in their language.
“Are you Tajik, or Iranian?”
They answered in the same language — answering in the specific way that involved cursing and pointing firearms at his head, which Leon noted provided some useful information about the conversation’s potential direction.
“Doesn’t seem like you want to talk,” he said.
His hands moved.
The motion was the same as everything Leon did at speed — effectively invisible to anyone watching.
Two grips, simultaneous, around two throats, both men lifted.
A single, precise rotation of each hand.
Two sharp sounds, very close together.
He set them down.
The family inside had pressed themselves into the far corner of the room — an older man with a full beard and the cracked, weathered face and had spent decades outdoors, a woman beside him, two daughters both kept close and partially hidden behind their parents’ arms.
All of them looking at Leon with the controlled fear of people who had learned not to make sudden movements.
Leon turned toward them and switched languages.
“Don’t worry about what happens because of these two,” he said, in Pashto.
“It’s late.
Go back to sleep.
When you wake up tomorrow morning, the people who have been doing this to you — all of them — will be gone.”
He turned to leave.
“Please.”
The voice was small.
It came from somewhere behind the mother’s arm.
Leon stopped.
The younger of the two daughters — maybe seven years old, maybe eight — had been trying to see around her mother’s grip for the past several seconds.
Now she was looking at Leon directly, because her mother’s hand had slipped just enough.
She was wearing the Pashtun dress that both girls had on — brown and orange, the family’s colors — and her eyes were enormous.
“Are you Superman?”
A sort of amusement struck Leon as he realized just how far Hollywood’s shadow stretched.
Decades of exported American culture had traveled all this way just to surface in this room, at this exact moment, spoken by a kid who had been utterly terrified only moments before. Get faster updates on novelping dot com.
He thought about Afghanistan before the last few decades.
A country with a long history of ordinary life, of entertainment and celebration and children watching movies.
The suffering was recent.
The children who loved Superman were not.
“I’m not,” he said.
He crouched down, which brought him closer to eye level.
“But it’s okay if you want to call me that.”
He looked at the parents.
“I’ll be leaving soon.
And so will they.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of wherever the rest of the Ten Rings’ local operation was headquartered.
“All of them.”
The girl had taken a step forward during this exchange, which her mother’s arms acknowledged by tightening and then, failing to stop the movement, gradually releasing.
“So you’re here to help us?” She was visibly adjusting her assessment of the situation.
“Like the way you beat up the bad guys on TV?”
Leon was quiet for a moment.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m here to make sure they don’t come back.”
“Superman!” She closed the remaining distance and grabbed his knee with both hands, which was what was available to her at her height.
“You’re so cool!”
Leon laughed — involuntarily, briefly, before he could stop it.
He placed one hand gently on top of her head.
“What’s your name?”
“Shafiqa!” She looked up at him with absolute confidence now, the fear entirely replaced.
“Shafiqa Mazari!”
“Shafiqa.” Leon looked at her seriously.
“Here’s what I need you to do.
Go back to your room.
Get into bed.
Have a good dream.
When you wake up in the morning, the bad people will be gone.
Can you do that?”
She looked at him without moving.
“Are you leaving now, Superman?”
“Shafiqa.” He tapped her forehead once, lightly, with one finger.
“Don’t talk to strangers this easily.
And listen to your mother.”
He stood, stepped back into the open air, and went straight up.
From the ground, the family came out into the yard almost immediately.
Leon could see them clearly — the old father looking up into the dark sky, the mother with her daughters, all of them watching the place where he’d been.
He was already a kilometer up by the time the father raised his hands in a gesture of gratitude and said something that the translation in Leon’s mind rendered as a blessing. Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
Tomorrow, Leon thought, and moved on.
He worked through the remainder of the civilian harassment incidents in approximately ten minutes.
Each location: arrive, assess, act, leave.
The process was faster than any ground unit could manage and more thorough than any air strike could be without inflicting the casualties he was specifically there to prevent.
By the time he was finished, the people who had been walking through streets with rifles at this hour had stopped doing that.
Now he looked at the organizational infrastructure.
A rational campaign would have worked outward-in: smaller bases first, progressively weakening the organization’s capacity before addressing the hardened targets.
Reduce their ability to reinforce, cut off supply lines, push them toward the center before closing on the center itself.
Leon flew directly to the largest base.
He found it from altitude — 70 or more personnel on exterior patrol, another 4,000-odd in sleeping quarters, the whole layout visible to him the way a map was visible to someone standing over it.
He scanned methodically, cataloguing weapon positions, communication infrastructure, command locations.
And then his attention caught on a tent near the eastern perimeter, and he stayed there for a moment.
A Jericho missile.
One of Tony’s.
The specific design was unmistakable; Leon had seen the documentation.
Tony, he thought, with something between frustration and fondness.
The things your company put into the world.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“JARVIS,” he said quietly, “activate the camera and record everything.”
“Ready, Master Leon.”
“The Stark weapons especially.
I want every detail, every serial number if you can get it.
Send it to Tony after I’m done here.” He looked at the missile tent.
“He feels guilty enough already.
This might help that feeling serve a useful purpose.”
“Understood.”
Leon put the phone away.
He looked down at the base, at the 70+ men walking their patrol lines, at the 4,000 sleeping inside, at the Jericho missile, at the lights and the tents and the weapons that represented what the Ten Rings had assembled in this particular location.
Then he stopped being subtle.
He came down at speed, without the silence of the bio-force field, without any attempt at concealment — the kind of entry that created visible heat as the air compressed and the plasma corona formed around him.
A meteorite in reverse, falling from a clear sky into the middle of an armed camp.
The impact crater he made in the center of the base announced itself with a sound that the surrounding mountains returned in three echoes.
The alarm took approximately two seconds to activate.
Leon stood in the center of the camp and let his eyes work.
Every Ten Rings combatant who appeared in the open between the tents was eliminated by heat vision inside the time it took them to orient themselves toward the source of the impact.
The response moved outward from Leon’s position in a widening radius of silence: patrol, guards at weapon stations, rapid-response teams.
By the time the sleepers inside the barracks had processed that something was happening and were reaching for their equipment, half the camp’s active defenders had ceased to be a problem.
The ones who woke up and tried to run were brought back by Ten Rings discipline — their own people, enforcing the organization’s policy on desertion.
This told Leon something useful about the organization’s internal culture, though he was not particularly surprised.
The survivors, now pressed into cover behind whatever they could find, began producing everything they had: grenades, grenade launchers, rocket tubes, the heavier anti-armor systems, a tank somewhere toward the camp’s north end that was in the process of warming up.
And in the eastern tent, the sound of the Jericho missile’s launch sequence beginning.