As Murphy said, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. Just hours after Aron received his weekly briefing about the increasing crime rate, an event that would change his stance on the remnants began.

Former Somalia.

Sahro Hassan was sitting on a bench on the side of a street in Mogadishu, overlooking the ocean. The street itself was very clean, considering how much conflict the nation’s capital had gone through. It had been through wars between warlords, pirate groups, terrorist attacks, and riots, all within the young man’s memory.

But now, all the traces of destruction had faded and the city was, on the surface at least, at peace.

“Those were the good old days,” he sighed, reminiscing on his early life. He had lived like a prince in Somalia’s troubled times, as his father was not only a warlord himself, but also a high-ranking member of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

Those early years had shaped his personality, fostering an extremist interpretation of Islam that, through very convoluted and cherry-picked quotes taken out of context, justified the group’s atrocities. So in his eyes, he was the proper owner of Somalia, now that his father and his men had been captured or killed by the empire.

After the empire took over, he had been left with just a house and a few other things that were under his name. The impies had confiscated everything else; thus, thanks to his corrupt religious belief and the lingering resentment over his father’s capture, he took a very hardline stance against joining the empire with his mother.

Despite that, his life could still have been considered very good, thanks to the things he had, both open and hidden. But then doomsday had struck and destroyed some of his most precious things and fanning the flames of his jealousy-inspired hatred of the empire. Add to that, his mother had fallen ill and outright told him she wanted to become an impy so she could be treated.

However, due to their traditional leanings, he was the head of the household now that his father was gone. So he strictly forbade his mother from joining the empire, as, to him, that would be a betrayal of everything his father and his “religion” stood for. If she died, she died, and he would consider her just one in a long, long line of martyrs and receive her rewards in paradise.

As he was reminiscing, he noticed a small white shuttle with a bright red cross painted on the side flying over him. That wasn’t an uncommon sight, lately, but this one had caught his attention because it was flying overhead in the direction of his house and slowing down. He turned and watched it as it landed on his front lawn, then four people disembarked. Two of them were wearing white coats and guiding a hovering stretcher between them, and the other two were ARES troopers in full armor, acting as guards for the medical team.

The two in the white coats walked into his house, accompanied by one of the guards, while the other guard stood ramrod straight outside the front door of Sahro’s house. And before the young man could even react, the medical team exited the building with his mother on the stretcher, an oxygen mask on her face.

The medical team and their guards boarded the shuttle and it lifted off seconds afterward. The entire process had happened so fast that Sahro hadn’t been able to react. By the time he reached his house, he found himself silently standing in front of the open front door, his body slightly trembling.

After standing in silence for a few minutes, he clenched his fists so hard that his fingernails drew blood from his palms, then raised his eyes skyward and screamed his hatred aloud.

“First you took my father, and I could do nothing. I was powerless to stop you! But now you impy dogs stole my mother without my permission!?” he growled, his bloodshot eyes beginning to faintly glow red. His hair also began turning bright red, like the heart of a fire. “This place will BURN!”

He raised his bloody fists and shook them in the direction the shuttle had flown off. “You and that bitch who chose this world of sinners over paradise will regret this!” he shouted, then turned and looked at the bustling street, seething in anger. The empire had taken too much!

They had taken his father, they had taken his father’s loyal men, they had taken his lavish lifestyle and his high status that made him untouchable. All of it was gone... gone! He had been forced to live like a rat, hiding and subsisting on the scraps of his life that once was. And now his mother, a woman that he’d had firmly under his control, had betrayed him and joined his enemies! She had taken the last of his honor and showed with her actions that he was unworthy, that he had failed, that he couldn’t be the man his father once was.

In that instant of pain, rage, humiliation, and loss, he decided that if his mother didn’t want paradise, he would take it from her as his first, and final, act of revenge.

He turned and slowly walked toward the beachside marketplace, his strides even and inexorable as wisps of fire rose from his eyes and the tips of his hair.

A massacre was about to begin.

……

Twenty seconds.

Not even half a minute later, the emergency response team arrived and found nothing but a sea of fire burning in an eerie silence. There were no screams, no crashing of collapsing buildings, no roaring of the flames. It was as if the fire itself had included sound with the rest of the fuel that normally allows blazes to exist.

Mogadishu wasn’t a tiny city. With a population of nearly 2.5 million people before the Last War, it could even be considered a thriving metropolis. Of course, the population had steeply declined after the war, between the losses caused by the war, the mass arrests afterward, and then the general exodus of people who had chosen to join the empire, so it wasn’t what it once was. Only a few dozen thousand people remained, leaving the rest of the city empty.

Thus, the emergency responders in the city weren’t fully prepared to deal with a catastrophe of this level. They were on guard and sufficient for things like gas line explosions or power lines coming down, and of course, the regular gamut of things that first responders dealt with on a daily basis. But this... this was on another level.

Despite the immensity of the threat, the police, fire department, and ARES responded per protocol, calling for reinforcements from the nearest cube as they bathed the surrounding neighborhood in fire suppressant foam in an attempt to prevent it from spreading. Once reinforcements arrived, they would move in to suffocate the blaze in its entirety.

At the same time, hospital ships had been scanning for survivors and people trapped in the fire. But they found nothing.