Cecil Stedman had learned, over decades of watching the world try to tear itself apart, that disasters rarely announced themselves properly.

They didn’t come with titles or warnings or dramatic silhouettes against the sun. They came as blips. As numbers that didn’t add up. As a technician hesitating before speaking into a headset.

This one started as a ripple.

Not an invasion-level surge, not a Viltrumite signature, not even one of Levy’s dimension-hopping migraines. Just a spike. Localized. Wrong in the way only unfamiliar power ever was. Cecil had already been halfway through issuing orders when the satellite feed sharpened and the situation… changed.

The cameras showed a child.

Young. Too young to be standing alone in the middle of a ruined industrial block, surrounded by bodies that barely qualified as human anymore. Amalgamations of flesh and metal, stitched together by bad science and worse ethics. Black market work, most likely. Someone testing limits they didn’t understand.

Cecil leaned back slightly, fingers steepled, eyes narrowing.

“Rogue hero,” he muttered, more habit than conclusion.

He’d seen it before. Kids manifesting abilities early, burning bright and fast before someone taught them restraint. Dangerous, yes, but manageable. Something to log, monitor, maybe intervene later with the right speech and a careful contract.

Then the child raised their hand.

Molecular bonds unraveled like loose thread.

Cecil didn’t blink as one of the creatures detonated into its base components, matter breaking apart cleanly, beautifully, horrifically precise. Another twisted, reshaped, its grotesque form smoothed into something almost human again, as if reality itself had been politely asked to fix a mistake.

Silence filled the control room.

Someone swallowed.

Cecil’s jaw tightened.

That wasn’t raw strength. That wasn’t brute force. That was control. Conceptual, fundamental, terrifyingly elegant control.

“…Well,” Cecil said quietly, eyes never leaving the screen, “that’s new.”

He straightened, already calculating trajectories, probabilities, futures branching outward from this single moment. Power like that didn’t stay small. It either learned discipline… or it broke the world around it.

And Cecil Stedman did not wait for either outcome to surprise him.

“Prep a teleport,” he ordered. “I want eyes on this firsthand.”

Because if the GDA had learned anything at all, it was this:

The worst mistakes weren’t made by monsters.

They were made by people you didn’t reach in time.