Location: Secure Facility "Black Site 04" – Beneath the Pyrenees Mountains
Time: 12 Hours After the Barcelona Incident
The room did not exist on any blueprint. Its walls were lined with a material that absorbed both sound and magical resonance, creating a silence so profound it felt like pressure against the eardrums.
Agent Elena Castellanos sat at the polished obsidian table, her hands clasped tightly to stop them from shaking. On the screen in front of her, the footage of Gabriel Santos played on a loop. The falling ceiling. The blade of shadow. The catatonic survivors.
And then, the impossible extraction. The way reality simply folded around him and the woman identified as "Entity: Luna," leaving nothing but ozone and failure for the tactical teams.
"He is gone, Elena," a voice resonated from the shadows of the room. It wasn't a human voice; it carried harmonic frequencies that vibrated in Elena's teeth.
Two figures stepped into the cold light. They looked human, superficially. They wore expensive suits and had perfect symmetry, but their movements were too fluid, their eyes too devoid of the rapid saccades that characterized human vision.
Consultants Meridian and Vex. The advisors who had been whispering in the ears of global governments for fifteen years.
"He escaped containment," Elena corrected, trying to maintain her professional composure. "But we have his profile. We have his psychological assessment. We know his triggers: family, efficiency, the need to fix things."
"You have a profile of who he was," Vex said, walking to the screen and touching the frozen image of Gabriel's face. "You do not understand what he has become. The optimization protocols he displayed... they are not terrestrial. They are not even from Stellarum."
Meridian sat opposite Elena, his presence making the air temperature drop ten degrees. "We warned you, Agent. We told you that when an Enhanced Individual exceeds Class Alpha parameters, integration is no longer an option. Only containment or elimination remains."
"He saved four hundred people," Elena argued, though she knew it was a weak defense in this room. "He showed restraint."
"He showed calculation," Meridian corrected. "He saved them because it was the most efficient path to resolve the immediate crisis without compromising his long-term viability. Do not mistake algorithms for altruism."
The screen changed, displaying a map of the dimensional rifts currently destabilizing reality. Red dots pulsed across the globe, but the largest tear was centered on the coordinates where Gabriel had vanished.
"The breach he used to escape is still bleeding," Vex noted. "It connects directly to the Stellarum sector. A world already in the advanced stages of entropic collapse."
"So he's trapped there," Elena said. "Problem solved. Let him play hero in a dying world."
Meridian laughed — a sound like grinding glass. "You think a being like that stays trapped? He didn't go there to hide, Agent. He went there to level up. To access resources and power densities that this reality cannot support."
Vex turned to Elena, his eyes glowing with a faint, violet luminescence. "When he returns — and he will return — he will not be a rogue academic with a shadow sword. He will be a dimensional warlord who has optimized an entire reality for war."
Elena felt a chill that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. She thought of Roberto Santos, the proud father she was currently detaining in a safe house. She thought of Sofia, the sister who looked at the camera with defiance.
"What is the directive?" Elena asked, her voice hollow.
Meridian placed a black folder on the table. It bore no seal, only a single silver glyph that hurt the eyes to look at.
"Protocol: World-Breaker," Meridian said softly. "We are no longer in a containment scenario, Elena. We are in a pre-war mobilization."
"You are authorizing the deployment of the Nullifiers?" Elena whispered, horrified. "Those are theoretical weapons. They tear the fabric of—"
"They are necessary," Vex interrupted. "Prepare the dimensional anchors. We are going to seal the breach behind him."
"And if he tries to force his way back?"
Meridian smiled, revealing teeth that were slightly too numerous.
"Then we will show him that optimization works both ways. We will optimize this world to be a fortress that even a god cannot breach."
Elena looked at the folder. She thought of the young man she had tried to recruit, the one who had just wanted to build efficient systems for water distribution.
She reached out and opened the file.
"God help us all," she whispered.
"Gods have nothing to do with this," Vex replied, turning back to the shadows. "This is purely a matter of efficiency."