Chapter 579 Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

Chapter 579 Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Heaven's Door

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.

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.