The city held its breath.
Kai floated twenty, maybe thirty feet above the manicured lawn of the Ellipse, a single dark human silhouette against a bruised sky. Behind him, the ten leviathan hulls hung like an iron halo over the National Mall — an impossible, silent armada. In front of him, humanity's instruments of coercion and order had closed in until they formed a cold, living ring.
Armored vehicles moved into position with the methodical calm of trained units executing a drill. Low-profile tank hulks — main-battle platforms, tracked and bristling with optics — formed staggered wedges on Constitution Avenue and across temporary chokepoints on Pennsylvania Avenue. Their barrels were trained but not elevated for fire; commanders in the vehicles exchanged terse, clipped radio calls about "ROE" and "weapons hold." Reflected in the polished steel, Kai's silhouette looked smaller, somehow more human, but also absolute.
Infantry dismounted and arrayed themselves in a cautious outer cordon. Kevlar helmets, plates, M-style rifles held at port arms, fingers hovering close to triggers but not squeezing. Squad leaders barked controlled orders through throat mics: "Sector left… medics forward… civilian flow—redirect." Snipers were placed on rooftops well beyond the public rings; overwatch teams watched the rooftop lines, not at Kai, but at the people watching Kai. Every soldier's breathing was measured. No one smiled.
A line of National Guard buses and MRAPs formed a protective spine between the public and the secure zones. Military police and uniformed Secret Service agents managed the crowd with flat, strict commands: "Step back. Move along." Their voices were calm but final — authority given through a tone, not volume. Where people balked, soldiers gently but firmly pushed.
Above, the air was a web of rotors and afterburner plumes. Attack and utility helicopters circled at holding patterns just above the Washington skyline: Black Hawks repositioned personnel, Apaches made low, growling orbits as if to say "we are here." Transport birds remained at standoff altitude, ready to evacuate dignitaries if command gave the word.
Fighter jets threaded the upper airspace in layered CAP — stealth assets and conventional fighters holding a slow, watchful patrol. Their presence was visible only through intermittent booms of compressed air when one banked; otherwise the sky above them was deceptively still. AWACS and ISR aircraft held altitude well off the coast, routing sensor feeds into the command net. The hum of surveillance and the distant thrum of engines provided a mechanical heartbeat behind the quiet.
On the ground, tactical comms sat in a low roar: encrypted channels, status pings, requests for sensor overlays. A colonel's voice cut through the static with a rationed calm. "Weapons hold unless hostility observed," he said into a secure handset. "Medical teams staged. EOD on standby. Non-lethal options prioritized. Civil authorities control messaging."
People spilled into streets and sidewalks in a disordered, stunned migration. They were not screaming in the way panic is usually imagined. Most stood very still, mouths open, phones held high as though raising them made the scene real. On cathedral steps, tourists clutched each other. On office balconies, workers watched in groups, whispering. Little knots of teenagers recorded everything with shaking hands and wide, exhilarated eyes. Some began to pray out loud; others sat on stoops, silent, head in hands.
An old man in a wool coat simply lit a cigarette and watched as if it were the end of a great performance. A child asked a parent if the man would save them. A mother said, very quietly, "Don't look away." People laughed at first — a brittle sound — then stilled as if laughing were suddenly indecent.
Traffic moved in awkward patience. Drivers had left cars idling in the middle of intersections to stare. Pedestrians drifted towards viewable hills and bridges; the Tidal Basin and the Lincoln Memorial steps filled with hushed crowds who had come to witness history. When the fleet's shadow crossed the Potomac and then the Mall, the city seemed to exhale as one — a soundless, physical thing.
Phones recorded, uploaded, re-streamed. Ten million feeds multiplied the scene into ten thousand variations: different angles, different saturation, the same silhouette no one could fully remember. Comment threads oscillated between worship and instruction: "He's amazing." / "Stay away." / "Don't post his face." / "We are watching the end." Memes popped and died in minutes. People in the crowd tried to describe his face and failed; their words were awash with qualifier after qualifier — "serious," "calm," "blank" — but no detail held.
The world watched with the same rigid curiosity and immediate greed.
In Moscow, analysts replayed high-definition feeds and argued over fragments of posture and cadence. The Foreign Ministry issued a restrained release; the policy shop drafted talking points designed to make Russia look like the savvy state that would court him. Privately, a GRU deputy wrote a cable: "Initiate covert channels to proximate assets—psychological leverage, cultural emollients. If he can be courted, we will court him."
In Beijing, screens showed the silhouette too. The Central Military Commission convened, and a propaganda cell began crafting a narrative emphasizing civilization, order, and an offer of structured cooperation — the velvet glove behind which the Academy's cyber teams probed for comms leakage and metadata trails. Senior politburo advisers discussed soft-power overtures and the optics of being the first to frame him as a partner in "reconstruction," should he be persuadable.
Delhi's Situation Room took a different tack: public statements of neutrality were prepared, while back-channel envoys were placed on standby: cultural emissaries, religious scholars, non-aligned diplomats groomed to speak without claiming dominion but with the implicit promise of sanctuary. Europe's capitals trembled between panic and calculation. In London and Paris, backroom cables argued the moral posture vs. strategic necessity — could Europe offer him legitimacy in exchange for restraint? Everyone wondered who would blink first.
Social media around the world convulsed. Hashtags divided into factions: #HeIsOurs trended in nationalist circles, #NotForSale trended among human-rights activists, and #ChooseWisely gathered a ghastly devotional following. Online marketplaces quickly spilled with opportunistic merchandisers hawking everything from "Kai for Peace" shirts to "Resist the Sovereign" posters. Conspiracy forums insisted he was an engineered asset; religious channels argued he was a sign. The commentariat churned out essays, manifestos, and manifestos about manifestos — all competing for traction against the same hollow, ungraspable center.
Inside the cordon, the mood was clinical but bone-deep uneasy. A young private adjusted her helmet and stared at the man. "He looks tired," she said to a squadmate. "Like someone who's been waiting for a long time." He only shrugged and checked his magazine.
A platoon sergeant, veteran of two wars, wiped his palms on his trousers and looked at the White House in an unfamiliar, helpless way. "This isn't insurgency," he muttered. "This is… something else." The medic checked his watch and sat on an ammunition crate, staring up at the darkness between the ships. He couldn't tell if his hands shook from adrenaline or dread.
The sniper team on a rooftop had clear orders: prioritize non-lethal escalation, observe, and preserve civilian life. They kept their scopes trained, but their eyes returned to Kai, wondering what a human face could be when no one could remember it.
On the secure nets, the Chairman's voice echoed in short updates: "Maintain defensive posture. No kinetic engagement without direct hostile action. Protect civilians. Keep channels open for any attempt at communication. Document everything."
A legal adviser posted a memo: "Protocol for anomalous person-of-interest: apply custody and interrogation frameworks if biological. If not, prioritize preservation and non-escalation pending further intel." The sentence held a claustrophobic moral weight — it was the state trying to reduce an unreadable human into a legal category.
And still he hovered, eyes unreadable, energy absent or impenetrable. For all the tanks and steel, for all the human horsepower converging, the moment felt like waiting at the lip of a cliff: full of mechanical preparedness and spiritual impotence. The city watched. The world schemed. Everyone wanted him for themselves, but no one wanted to be the one to make the first move.
Kai did not flinch. He raised no hand. He only hovered, letting the world stare its fill, and in that deliberate silence the feeling spread through the crowd — a cold, exact certainty that whatever choice he would make, if he made one at all, would not be for them to control.
When the ten ships vanished from the sky over Washington, the world was still trying to understand what had happened.
Then air defense networks across the planet lit up.
Not slowly.
Not in stages.
All at once.
EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS GO INTO CRISIS MODE
NORAD
ESA Space Surveillance
China Strategic Support Force
Russia Aerospace Defense Command
India Integrated Air Defense Network
Every radar wall, every ballistic tracking array, every space-monitoring station reported the same thing:
Ten high-mass aerial contacts — re-entry pattern — hypersonic transition — Mach-level velocities stabilizing.
Operators didn't shout.
They froze.
Their hands hovered over consoles.
Their brains refused to process the data.
These were not missiles. They were not aircraft. They had shipping displacement mass signatures.
And they were accelerating.
Once the trajectory software finished calculating…
The room atmospheres collapsed.
The destinations appeared on screens:
New York City
Mumbai
Shanghai
São Paulo
Sydney
Barcelona
Milan
Istanbul
Los Angeles
Johannesburg
Someone whispered:
"Oh my God…"
Someone else vomited into a trash bin.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Because the implication was obvious.
These were not random vectors.
They were urban kill zones.
Civilization-critical nodes.
And they were traveling at Mach 3.
ETA projections ticked downward like a countdown.
NORAD relayed the New York track to Washington.
The message was blunt:
"Projected overflight corridor Manhattan metro.
Time to arrival: 84 minutes."
The room erupted.
Not controlled military dialogue.
Not calm crisis management.
Just fear.
One general swore under his breath. Another demanded confirmation three times.
A DHS advisor spoke with a shaking voice:
"We cannot evacuate Manhattan in that time."
Silence.
The President's national security team didn't debate military options.
They debated civilian death numbers.
Emergency agencies asked whether they should issue an evacuation alert.
The answer came back:
"If we announce evacuations — the city will tear itself apart before the object even arrives."
Subways flooded anyway. People streamed toward bridges. Taxi drivers abandoned vehicles mid-street.
Markets collapsed in real time.
Wall Street traders didn't panic-sell.
They stood still.
Like people waiting to be executed.
Shanghai tracking confirmed.
The ship vector was heading toward the city at hypersonic cruise.
Local authorities tried to suppress the information.
They failed.
Footage leaked.
Within minutes:
highways gridlocked
ferries overloaded
people stampeded metro exits
A senior Chinese official slammed his fist into the table.
"Why these cities? Why civilians?!"
No answer.
Military staff did not talk strategy.
They talked liability.
They talked fallout.
They talked uncontrollable public disorder.
Commanders began quietly redeploying riot control units.
Not to confront protestors.
But to contain mass psychological breakdown.
Hospitals reported hundreds flooding emergency wards — panic attacks, fainting, injuries from trampling.
No weapon had fired.
And yet the damage was already catastrophic.
Russian Aerospace Command watched the Istanbul trajectory lock into final arc.
The senior air defense officer muttered:
"This is not an attack pattern."
A younger officer replied:
"No… It's a demonstration."
He wasn't wrong.
But no one knew what was being demonstrated.
Or why.
A Kremlin advisor said what everyone was thinking:
"If it strikes — the world economy collapses in hours."
Another voice added:
"If it doesn't strike — he still owns the fear."
Strategic doctrine had no language for this.
Because this wasn't warfare.
It was psychological occupation.
Without a single shot fired.
When Mumbai authorities received the trajectory notice…
The city responded like a living organism in distress.
Phones died under network saturation. Temples overflowed. Some people prayed in the streets.
Others ran.
People didn't know whether to hide, to leave, to wait, to scream.
Police attempted to issue calm instructions.
They were drowned out by chaos.
Citizens climbed onto rooftops to film the sky.
Not because they were curious —
—but because they believed it might be their last view.
Inside the emergency cabinet room, an officer spoke in a terrified whisper:
"We are not prepared for something we cannot shoot, cannot talk to, cannot understand."
Nobody argued.
Because there was nothing to argue.
Barcelona
Milan
Istanbul
Three of the most historic cities on Earth.
Now projected hypersonic target zones.
European leaders didn't speak in strategy terms.
They spoke in raw dread.
Tourists clogged city plazas.
Families fled on foot.
Ambulances were trapped between stampeding crowds.
One EU official murmured:
"These are not military targets. These are… statements."
No one liked the implication.
That it wasn't about destroying cities —
It was about choosing not to.
And forcing the world to live inside that decision.
The news didn't spread.
It detonated.
Livestreams. Leaked radar feeds. Emergency scanner recordings.
People screamed into microphones. Others recorded themselves crying. Some said goodbye to strangers.
Online communities polarized instantly:
"He's a god."
"He's a monster."
"He's going to cleanse the world."
"He's going to end civilization."
Conspiracy groups called it a punishment. Doom cults formed within an hour. Children asked their parents if they were going to die.
No authority message unified anyone.
Because every government was paralyzed.
No statement was strong enough. No reassurance believable.
No one could say:
"You are safe."
Because they were not.
And every second, the ETA timers kept shrinking.
Ten cities.
Ten populations.
Ten beating hearts of the world —
with something massive, silent, and impossible
racing toward them at Mach three.
The world didn't feel threatened anymore.
It felt owned.
Each ship hits at hypersonic speed and, upon contact, releases its stored energy in a single, cataclysmic pulse. The first perceptible thing is a white, blind light — an instant brighter than the sun that washes faces and throws bodies to the ground. That flash carries heat so intense it chars faces, singes clothing, and sets combustibles alight at a distance. For a few heartbeats the world is a theater of white and flame.
Then the fireball blooms. An expanding globe of incandescent gas and vaporized matter climbs skyward, dragging air with it and leaving a hollow pressure trough behind. A shock front follows the visible heat: a supersonic wall of compressed air that shatters glass like rain, strips cladding from buildings, capsizes buses, and topples trees. The overpressure slams through streets and tunnels — masonry and steel designed for ordinary loads are turned into brittle debris. Concrete facades peel away as if flayed; steel frames kink where tolerance is exceeded.
The thermal pulse ignites an immediate ring of fires. Within minutes isolated blazes merge into overwhelming conflagrations. Urban canyons become vertical ovens — gasoline, plastics, timber, textiles, and hydrocarbon stores burst into sustained combustion. Fire consumes oxygen, creates convective columns, and begins to organize itself into a firestorm: winds vault into the inferno from the surroundings, fanning flames outward, dragging smoke into a rising column that blackens the sky for miles.
Acoustic and blast injury follows the flash and heat. Eardrums rupture. Lungs are bruised by overpressure; people who survive the initial strike find themselves coughing blood and choking on dust. Glass lacerations sting thousands; non-deadly wounds are everywhere, but massive crush injuries become common as buildings and overpasses fail. Hospitals closest to ground zero are destroyed or cut off; emergency response grids collapse under heat, debris, and the flood of injured. Even where triage begins, the numbers overwhelm the supply and space: ambulances queue, ER bays convert hallways into makeshift wards, and medics make impossible triage calls.
Electronics and communications stutter and die. The detonation's broadband electromagnetic and shock effects fry local electronics and disrupt power distribution — transformers blow, substations trip, and entire districts go dark. Traffic lights die mid-cycle; elevators trap people between floors; pumps fail where they are needed most. Without power, fire suppression systems stop working; hydrant pressure drops as pumping stations are lost. The urban infrastructure that underwrites modern rescue simply cannot operate.
Dust and ash rain down like a second snowfall. Streets fill with choking fine particulate that embeds into lungs and mechanical systems. Visibility drops to a few meters under a grey pall. With roads blocked, firesbanked, and communications severed, the city's ability to move people, supplies, and information collapses into chaotic islands of survivors.
New York (Manhattan)
Lower Manhattan explodes along a corridor of dense high-rises. The financial district — glass towers, trading floors, subterranean rail — is hammered. A towering column of fire and smoke punches above Battery Park; a black cloud stretches like an ash flag over the Hudson. Bridges develop structural cracks from reflected blasts; tunnels take on water as pressure differentials rupture seals. Wall Street's data centers go dark; global markets freeze into a vacuum of uncertainty. People trapped in subways and basements drown in smoke or are crushed by falling masonry. The volume of casualties overwhelms local hospitals; ambulances cannot penetrate collapsed streets. The skyline is no longer skyline — it is a ragged, smoking wound.
Mumbai
The explosion vaporizes swathes of coastal neighborhoods in an instant, throwing an incandescent wall across slums, high-rises, and railway lines. The thermal pulse sets wooden shanties and high-end apartments alike ablaze; fire leaps from block to block. The city's dense population density means immediate stampedes at rail stations and ferry points; panicked crowds trample to death far from the blast zone. The port facilities – fuel and chemical storage – cook off and chain-react into secondary blasts, widening the destruction. Hospitals are flooded and powerless; morgues fill within hours.
Shanghai
A shockwave slams through the Pudong towers and across the financial arteries, toppling cranes and tearing façades off skyscrapers. Massive fuel storage tanks at the port rupture and ignite, creating jet-flame rivers that race along the Yangtze's edge. Smoke turns the bright neon skyline into a charcoal silhouette; ash contaminates water intakes. The municipal grid fails, and with it subway life-sustaining systems. Rescue becomes impossible in the center as fires reach critical mass and whole blocks collapse into molten ruins.
São Paulo
The detonation produces a pressure wall that snaps concrete high-rise panels like brittle shells. Downtown turns into a field of twisted rebar and roaring fires. The built environment — tightly packed office towers and apartment blocks — collapses into labyrinths of hot rubble. Emergency services are unable to access many neighborhoods because of collapsed overpasses and overturned heavy vehicles. Secondary gas-line explosions ripple through the city.
Los Angeles
The ship's impact ignites fuel depots and sets off a run of conflagrations that flow into the sprawl. Freeways buckle and pile up vehicles into burning jams. The shockwave slams into palm-lined boulevards, turning iconic districts into heat-scorched corridors. The Los Angeles basin's unique topography traps smoke and superheats the air, intensifying the blaze into a regional inferno.
Istanbul
Detonated near the Bosphorus, the blast sends a pressure surge that shears centuries-old masonry from historic neighborhoods. The historic heart of the city — old stone, tile, and timber — is particularly vulnerable: ancient walls and domes fragment, sending clouds of dust through narrow streets. The shock against water ripples and launches seawater surges into low-lying coastal districts; combined with burning oil stores, this creates floating fires that choke harbor areas.
Sydney, Barcelona, Milan, Johannesburg
In each, the same pattern repeats with local texture: industrial port fires, ignited fuel depots, collapsing glass and concrete façades, overwhelmed hospitals and overflowing trauma centers, major transportation arteries severed, and emergency communications crippled. Historic centers are scarred; residential neighborhoods are flattened into ash and twisted metal. Power and water distribution fail. Food and medical supply chains sever almost instantly.
There is no single moment when humanity understands what has happened — realization spreads like a slow, sick wave across time zones.
Screens go black in some countries. In others, live feeds flicker and freeze mid-fireball. Commentators fall silent. Studio lights reflect in tear-glossed eyes as anchors struggle to form sentences that sound like language instead of raw animal horror.
Governments request casualty numbers they know do not exist. Officials speak in voices hollowed out by shock. Every statement sounds rehearsed and useless.
"Mass-casualty event."
"Urban core compromised."
"National emergency extended."
Words that once sounded theoretical now feel obscene.
No nation is untouched. No audience watches as an outsider.
The world is not grieving for cities — it is grieving for civilization itself.
Financial markets break before they crash
Trading floors do not roar — they whisper. Phones ring unanswered. Screens flood red and then freeze as automated halts cascade across continents.
Entire sectors vanish in minutes.
Insurance. Ports. Banking. Logistics. Aviation. Digital infrastructure.
Central banks issue coordinated emergency statements — but there is nothing to stabilize, only the collapse of confidence itself. Currencies oscillate like dying heartbeats. Commodities spike not from speculation but from fear of survival.
Economists stop speaking in projections and instead say things like:
"I don't know."
and
"This is the worst-case scenario."
Behind closed doors, finance ministers whisper the same truth:
We are no longer managing markets — we are managing panic.
Intelligence communities face the void
War rooms are filled with cold light and exhausted men and women reading damage assessments through clenched jaws.
Satellite feeds show:
Ash columns forming over skylines
Coastal ports on fire
Grid failures rippling like shockwaves
Analysts whisper the word deterrence as if it has died.
No fingerprints.
No launch signatures.
No missile paths.
Whatever struck the cities did so with surgical choice — and left no declared enemy.
Consequence without authorship.
And that is worse than war.
Because war has rules.
This does not.
It starts in a ragged, human rush — a long suppressed impulse with a single, terrible logic: if it killed our cities, we will kill it. The President's "weapons hold" unravels at the edges as orders and panic collide. Troops, MPs, Marines and pilots in the National Capital Region all reach the same, awful decision at once: fire.
"Weapons free," the colonel snaps over an encrypted net. "Engage at will. Intercept and neutralize."
And then the city becomes a gun.
From the Mall the salvo is almost humble: National Guard M1A2 rounds spit from Abrams at angled traverse, 120mm sabots tearing from brass racks. Apaches break from holding patterns, TADS slaved, AGM-114 Hellfires screaming free. Marine Humvees pop 50-cal turrets. Soldiers shoulder M4s and squeeze; tracer ribbons streak the air. On the skyline, F-22s and F-35s peel to engage — AMRAAMs (AIM-120) and Sidewinders (AIM-9) light their rails and fan out on cue. An AH-64I lets loose a guided Hellfire; a door gunner on a Black Hawk opens up with a minigun, tracers knitting the air.
Every shot has the raw human sound of accusation: artillery bark, the high-pitched whine of missile motors, the wet staccato of bullets. The air above the Ellipse blisters with combustion, the smell of cordite and JP-8 and ozone. Pilots call up to AWACS:
"AWACS, this is Raptor One — we have weapon employment. Visual on the subject. Missiles away."
"Copy," the AWACS replies. "Vector inbound. Maintain standoff. Keep comms clean."
Then everything changes.
A 120mm APFSDS round leaves a tank barrel with the angry punctuality of an animal released. It should bury into the air ahead of it; instead, a fraction of a second before impact every heavy round in the sky—tank, artillery, cannon, missile—twists like metal on an invisible spindle. Their planned ballistic arcs kink mid-flight. Tracers that had carved elegant parabolas bend upward, become vertical, and accelerate.
The helicopter pilot hears the HUD beeps go mad. "Controls feel like…someone's hand in the air," she says, breath ragged. She watches a Hellfire she just fired pivot on its own axis, nose yawing skyward as if someone grabbed it and tipped it into the heavens. The missile's plume tears into a vertical contrail, a cometary string of white vapor, and it vanishes into a thin blue above the highest cloud decks.
An AIM-120 sheared into the sunlight becomes a pinprick that grows smaller and smaller with impossible speed, burning a staccato hole through the stratosphere. Tank rounds fall away from the target and lift, like a school of startled fish turning skyward together. Bullets stop mid-trajectory, hang as though stalled, then accelerate upward, leaving staccato vapor trails and the smell of scorched air.
Soldiers on the ground watch their own lead — metal they have banked and bled for — bend away from the figure and climb. Their hands go slack on triggers. The sound of gunfire loses its direction and becomes noise without purpose. A sergeant curses and slams a fist on an armored hull, staring as a stream of 7.62 rounds arcs skyward and fades to a point.
"Bogey turning vertical, trajectory unknown — all units, check weapons status!" a fighter pilot screams, and the network answers in panicked overlap.
"Missile diverted. It climbed straight up."
"AIM-120 drifted off! Confirmed visual — heading high, high, high!"
"Son of a — our rounds just… changed vector."
"Eject, if necessary? Do not target the subject with laser designators any longer."
AWACS and ground radar trace the same impossible pattern. The telemetry shows objects accelerating far beyond their designed g-limits. Flight data recorders register angular changes no human control stick could produce. NORAD screens glow with a spreadsheet of ascending objects: some intact, leaving coherent contrails into the mesosphere; others break apart into showers of hot fragments, each fragment then pulled upward in a sudden bloom.
On the encrypted chat an intelligence analyst types, hands trembling: "It's not deflection — it's capture." Someone else replies: "Gravity gradient? Localized spacetime distortion?" Nobody has an answer they can say aloud.
People who had been screaming at the figure a moment before go silent, watching their spent ammunition fly like meteors. Phones held high show their own weapons leaving them, a betrayal recorded on shaky video: tracers veer off and rocket into the heavens, black against the afternoon sun, a rain of humanity's anger ascending where nothing should. Mothers press children to the ground, eyes wide. A child asks, voice small: "Why is their fire going up?" People pray; others throw their hands to their mouths.
The PR battle becomes visceral. "Shoot him!" some yell. "Make him answer!" others sob. The armored crews who had obeyed orders grip at a new horror: their own instruments of force are being turned into something that disobeys them, launched into a space where their jurisdiction — and their ability to retaliate — means nothing.
It is not light that Kai emits. It is pressure and intent.
Around him the air seems to condense into texture: a thick, metallic hush that tightens breathing, raises hairs along forearms, and makes compasses jitter. Soldiers later swear they could taste metal in the air — a copper tang that meant the world had been altered in the immediate radius of his body. The presence is not merely psychological; it reads as a gradient, a physical field suffusing the local atmosphere. Sensors log an anomalous vector field: localized perturbations in electromagnetic, inertial, and pressure channels — raw telemetry of "impossible."
"Aura" is the only word the young media use, and then only quietly. The effect is elegantly cruel: the more aggression flares toward him — the more munitions, the louder the engines, the keener the intent — the stronger the field grows. It is as if his stillness eats momentum and returns it upward. Soldiers' anger charges the air; their rounds become fuel to feed a machine that needs no engine but appetite. Light bends; missile motors cough; bullets become satellites.
Kai stands centered in that field like a sculptor holding a finished statue — every fired weapon lifted away, offered, and discarded into the night sky. Each piece of America's strength that leaves Earth arcs toward space as a glowing testament: the city's teeth, torn free and thrown away.
Satellites pick up the ascending streams in thermal and optical bands. NORAD and international space agencies quickly triangulate: dozens of ordnance streaks punch into high atmosphere, a scatter of hot points that do not fall back but climb, some detectable to low-earth-orbit tracking. Space agencies issue terse advisories: Objects observed transitioning into near-space trajectory originating from Washington, D.C. vicinity. Analysts awake to a new word they don't like: depopulation of kinetic assets.
Across the globe leaders watch live feeds as their own exported violence becomes an exodus skyward. The sight is obscene and humbling: militaries are turned into litter, thrown as confetti into heaven. A minister in London covers his face. A general in Moscow refuses to meet the camera. China's Central Military Commission restarts contingency scripts that had been intended for battlefield escalation, not for defending against the mass exodus of ordnance.
Some missiles creak into the exosphere, engines sputtering, contrails thinning into fine threads like the whiskers of a mechanical beast. Others break apart in the mesosphere, producing showers of glowing debris that rain into the ionosphere, visible from the ground as fleeting shooting stars. The heavens, for a terrible moment, look like a battlefield's sky turned inside out.
An astrophysics center posts, terrified and clinical: Objects rising above Kármán line detected. Some achieving low-earth-orbit transfer velocities. Unclear whether stable; debris trajectories are unpredictable. The implications tumble through command rooms like acid: weaponry that leaves Earth is lost to conventional retaliation; it is an escalation removed from human control.
On the ground, the men and women who pulled triggers and launched missiles stand frozen and numb. Their training offers no remedy for having their own force hurled away. A corporal lowers his rifle and weeps for the first time in service. A pilot, mouth dry, repeats into his helmet: "We followed orders. We followed orders." The slide from righteous action to impotent witness happens in seconds.
Field medics, who had prepared to treat blast injuries, now check for heatstroke and a strange compression sickness among the crowd. Emergency calls surge; people who once trusted the state to protect them now peer at its power leaving like a flock of fire.
He never raises a hand. He does not make a gesture of gratitude or disdain.
Every projectile the world fed him rockets into the sky as if he'd said the word "take." The aura around him tightens into a visible shroud: not luminous, but a tactile distortion, like heat over tarmac concatenated with gravity's wrongness. It swallows sound. It eats momentum. It turns human fury into celestial objects that climb beyond reach.
For those who watch — for soldiers, ministers, and ordinary people — the image sears itself into memory: a small dark man above a ruined lawn, calm as a man in prayer, encircled by a halo of departing hate rising to the stars.
Worldwide, the reaction claws from panic into a rawer form — impotent terror. Governments who had been bargaining for custody realize the cost: every weapon they threw at him is now gone, potentially in orbit as a piece of unknown danger or a trophy in a place no one can reach. Economies stutter again; wars of rhetoric erupt over who had the right to fire; conspiracy forums scream that their side "lost" a strategic asset to the sky.
But beneath the political noise is a simpler human truth laid bare by the tableau: a species that had always measured power in the number of things it could make move now watches those things leave the sphere of all meaning. The aura — his field of dominion — has not merely disarmed them. It has converted their rage into something else: light-streaks burning through upper atmosphere, a braided crown of human violence now orbiting the planet.
And Kai remains, utterly human in silhouette, monstrously sovereign in effect, harvesting the world's aggression like prayer.
Under that bruised and breathless sky — with shattered contrails still fading into the stratosphere — Kai hangs there like an omen carved into reality itself.
The world does not blink.
Not the soldiers.
Not the pilots.
Not the billions watching through trembling screens.
Every weapon that fired at him now drifts among the stars — silent reminders of futility.
The wind stalls.
Time hesitates.
And then…
He speaks.
His voice is not loud — yet it fills the planet.
It vibrates in steel beams and subway tunnels.
It hums through ocean floors and glass towers.
It seeps straight into the human nervous system.
Calm.
Unrushed.
Unavoidable.
"You pull the trigger… and call it courage."
He does not accuse — he observes.
The words feel like a mirror humanity never wanted to look into.
"You launch your missiles…
fire your cannons…
and convince yourselves you are powerful."
He drifts forward a fraction of an inch — and the world recoils.
"But power… does not ask you to believe in it."
The silence grows dense — like the sky itself is bracing.
"You saw something you did not understand…
and your first instinct was fear."
A soldier clenches his jaw.
A general lowers his head.
A child hides behind their mother's coat.
"Fear… is the only language your world truly speaks."
His voice cuts deeper — smooth, merciless.
"You divided yourselves into nations…
drew borders on stolen land…
crowned leaders to soothe your insecurity."
A heartbeat passes.
"And when everything trembled…
you prayed to flags."
Screens across the world flicker — not from failure…
…but from the weight of listening.
"You believed your armies made you safe."
"You believed your governments made you important."
"You believed your world would never be judged."
The air grows cold — like a storm that never forms.
"You ask if I am a god."
"You ask if I am a weapon."
"You ask if I am human."
His tone sharpens — like the edge of inevitability.
"None of those answers would comfort you."
People tremble without knowing why.
Not terror.
Not awe.
Something older.
Submission before overwhelming presence.
"Understand this."
"You did not summon me."
"You did not provoke me."
"You did not earn my attention."
A pause — terrifying in its indifference.
"You were simply… noticed."
The world feels smaller.
Leaders grip tables.
Satellites drift silent.
Pilots whisper prayers inside sealed helmets.
He lifts his chin slightly — and the sky seems to bow.
"From this moment onward…"
"Every engine you build."
"Every weapon you forge."
"Every calculation you make…"
"…will exist beneath my shadow."
A slow, suffocating realization spreads through humanity:
They are no longer the apex of their own world.
"You will scramble your scientists."
"You will summon your generals."
"You will unite your enemies."
His words accelerate — not in volume — but in inevitability.
"You will pour your gold, your faith, your fear…
into one desperate hope."
Lightning trembles inside clouds that never break.
"Because I am going to give you… a test."
Silence tears through the planet like a fault line.
He lets the dread ripen.
Then:
"In one year…"
A million hearts stop.
"…I will destroy your moon."
The world breaks.
Gasps.
Screams.
Prayers.
Dead quiet.
He continues — steady — absolute.
"You have twelve months."
"You may beg your allies."
"You may threaten your rivals."
"You may unleash every mind you have left."
The weight of destiny presses down on humanity's spine.
"Do everything you can to stop me."
"Unite your armies."
"Exhaust your resources."
"Burn your world… if you believe it will save you."
His voice softens —
— and that is somehow worse.
"This is your proof."
"Of what you are."
"Of what you are not."
The final words fall like a cosmic verdict:
"In one year…
meet me in the sky."
"Protect your moon."
"If you can."
And then—
Silence.
No thunder.
No wind.
Just a planet realizing…
It has never been more alive.
Or more helpless.
As soon as those words are setteled in Kai dissapears as though he was never there.