Colonel Stankin stared at the wreckage falling from the sky like metal rain and felt reality detach from itself.
One strike. One rotation. One second of red light, and the entire Eagle Squadron had ceased to exist.
"GET OUT OF MY WAY!"
He shoved the communications officer aside and grabbed the radio himself.
"Eagle One, respond!"
Static.
"Eagle Two, respond!"
Static.
"Eagle Three — Eagle Four — Eagle Five—"
He went down the list. Methodically. Compulsively. As if calling each callsign would somehow reverse what had happened. As if the next frequency would produce a voice instead of a busy tone.
None did.
Forty callsigns. Forty attempts. Forty dead channels.
Stankin set the radio down with the careful precision of a man who understood that if he let his hands do what they wanted, they would shake, and if they shook, everyone on the bridge would see.
He couldn't let himself think about the red light. If he thought about the red light — the way it had swept through metal and fuel and explosive warheads like a blade through paper — he would lose something that a commanding officer could not afford to lose.
He stared at the blank tactical display and said nothing.
In Ashford City, at the Bureau of Internal Affairs headquarters, Director Graves laughed.
Not the controlled chuckle of a political professional. A full, unmasked, building-shaking laugh that rolled through the corridors and reached offices on floors above and below.
The staff didn't complain. Nobody complained. Because every person in the building was watching the same feed, and every person in the building was feeling the same thing.
Relief so intense it was indistinguishable from joy.
A staff member in Graves's office started clapping. Tentatively at first, as if unsure whether applause was appropriate for watching forty fighter jets explode. Then harder. Then others joined, and the sound spread through the building like a wave, gathering force and volume until it became something that wasn't just applause but a release — months of guilt and shame and self-recrimination, compressed into the sound of hands hitting hands.
These were Bureau agents. Selected for absolute loyalty. Trained to protect the Republic's most valuable assets. And they had failed. Frank Holloway had been kidnapped on their watch. Fourteen of their colleagues had died. The most important person in the Republic had been forced to fly across an ocean alone because the Bureau hadn't done its job.
They'd carried that weight for weeks. The sidelong glances from other agencies. The unspoken accusations. The cold shoulders in meetings. And worse than all of it: the knowledge, in their own hearts, that the accusations were deserved.
If Ethan came home, the mistake couldn't be undone. But the worst consequence of the mistake — losing him — could be.
Some of the agents clapping had red eyes. Nobody mentioned it.
At the Hargrove residence, Marcus was gripping his water glass so hard his knuckles had gone white.
The laser. He hadn't imagined it. One flash, one rotation, and an entire fighter formation plus forty missiles had been eliminated. The physics community had theorized about military-grade laser applications for years, but those were conjectures. Not even theoretical frameworks. Just idle speculation about what might be possible in a future that nobody expected to arrive in their lifetime.
Ethan Mercer had built it. Integrated it into a suit of armor. And used it to destroy a carrier group's air wing in under a second.
Marcus's mind was racing through implications so fast that his body couldn't keep up. One moment he was trembling with excitement, the next he was slumped in his chair, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what he'd just witnessed.
In the bedroom, Hargrove watched his son through the doorway with growing concern.
The boy was acting strange. Excited, then deflated. Gripping his cup, then staring at nothing. Muttering calculations under his breath.
Academic pressure, perhaps? An experiment gone wrong? Some kind of breakdown?
Hargrove quietly retreated to his room and called an old comrade who served as the Director of Neurology at a military hospital.
"Old friend, I need you to clear some time. I think my son might need an evaluation."
If Marcus had heard this call, he would have laughed until his ribs hurt. But Marcus was too busy watching the most important broadcast in the history of the Republic to notice his father scheduling him for a psychiatric assessment.
Inside the Mark Two, Ethan was staring at the reactor readout with an expression that was significantly less triumphant than anyone watching would have expected.
The laser sweep had consumed nearly half the reactor's remaining energy.
Half.
Flying from Valoria to the Aurelian Republic, a distance of over ten thousand kilometers, had used a quarter. One laser rotation had used twice as much energy as crossing an ocean.
Ethan's mouth twisted into a rueful grin.
In the future, unless I'm genuinely out of options, that move stays in the vault.
The infrared laser wasn't supposed to be here. In the Earth-Prime memories, this weapon belonged to the Mark VI — the armor from Iron Man 2, several generations ahead of what Ethan currently had access to. He didn't have the Mark VI's construction data. But his understanding of infrared physics, combined with the System's foundational knowledge, had been enough to derive the weapon's operating principles and integrate a functional version into the Mark Two.
Functional. Devastatingly effective. And so energy-hungry that using it twice would leave the reactor dead.
One shot. That was all he'd had. And he'd used it.
If the carrier sent another formation and he had to fight...
He looked down through the clouds. The magnification systems in the helmet brought the ocean surface into focus. Below, the fleet of warships sat motionless. No jets on the catapults. No activity on the flight decks. The ARS Morley, which had launched forty aircraft less than ten minutes ago, was sitting still.
The cold smile returned.
They're scared.
In truth, if the carrier had launched its remaining aircraft — it carried eighty-five total, and roughly forty-five were still on board — Ethan would have had to run. Climb to thirty thousand meters, above the ceiling of any fighter or missile, and simply fly home at altitude. At that height, nothing could touch him.
But the bluff was working. The Colonel on that carrier had just watched one sweep erase forty jets. He didn't know the laser had a two-shot limit. He didn't know the reactor was running low. All he knew was that the red light existed and that everything it touched died.
That was enough.
On the ARS Morley, Callister's voice crackled through the bridge speakers.
"Colonel Stankin. Continue the pursuit. Immediately."
Stankin's jaw tightened.
"After that strike, the reactor in the armor dimmed noticeably. Its energy reserves are depleted. This is our only chance."
The analysis was sharp. Correct, even. Callister, from the mainland, had spotted the key detail that Stankin, drowning in shock, had missed: the laser had cost the armor dearly.
But Stankin wasn't thinking about energy levels. He was thinking about the forty callsigns that had gone silent.
The carrier had launched eighty-five aircraft in its service life across dozens of operations. In the last five minutes, it had lost forty of them. Nearly half its air wing, gone in a single second.
If Stankin sent the remaining forty-five and the kid had another trick — another weapon, another sweep, another thing that nobody had predicted — then the ARS Morley would be an aircraft carrier with zero aircraft.
A billion-dollar warship turned into a floating parking lot.
His career. His command. His reputation. All of it balanced on a coin flip.
"Colonel! Did you hear me? Launch everything! NOW!"
Stankin stared at the tactical display. At the single dot moving away from his position. At the empty spaces where forty other dots had been.
He said nothing.
At ten thousand meters, Ethan turned the Mark Two toward the Signal Bee's camera.
The armor was battered. Dented. Scorched from forty missiles' worth of nearby detonations. Bullet impacts from the hospital fight. Scrapes from the ten-story fall. It looked like it had been through a war, which was accurate, because it had.
But the reactor was glowing. The eye slits were lit. And the voice that came through the external speakers was the voice of a teenager who'd flown across an ocean, killed two traitors, fought through the Aurelian Republic's Department of Defense, dragged a helicopter out of the sky, destroyed an entire fighter squadron, and was now heading home.
"Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Callister."
A pause. A grin behind the faceplate.
"No need to see me off. I'm afraid the goodbye would be too emotional for you."
He turned the Mark Two east.
Toward the open ocean.
Toward home.