Above the city, Boston, 11:21 PM.

November 5th, 2010.

A city the size of Boston had such a high population that even with everything, not even a third of the city’s remaining occupants had made it to Boston Common, but it was progressing steadily.

The older teenagers had pulled together to take care of the younger ones as they arrived, although some of the more edgy teens had straight told everyone else to fuck off before heading straight back into the city.

A group had even taken it on themselves to start raiding a nearby camping warehouse for tents, tarps, and other things to set up cover in the park. While another focused on getting some food and water for the masses, setting up small areas in the park, and having groups bring back food from the nearby stores.

In the city—towards the river— was a group that had been growing larger and larger by the minute—That first girl he’d met was right in the middle of the pack, apparently doing a damn good job of finding the stranded children and keeping them together.

Aiden had left her to it, focusing on the ones further out and dropping them off at the park before systematically moving inwards. He moved to where the group was, touching down a few moments later, more than a hundred children were following Traci and a few teenagers.

“Bubbles!” Traci said quickly.

“Good work, kid. This is it, though—your group is getting too big to manage now,” Aiden said, impressed. “There’s about five thousand of you at the park already, and some of the older ones have started setting up basic food stalls.”

“Where are they getting the food?” One of the older boys said, frowning. “Stealing it?”

“Taking it from the nearest supermarkets,” Aiden corrected, “Nobody is going to be angry that you guys are taking food and water to feed yourself and the younger kids—that will all be compensated, don’t worry about it, this is an emergency situation, and your safety is more important than a companies bottom line.”

“Fine.” The boy said awkwardly, looking away.

“I’ve been in contact with the heroes,” Aiden said clearly; he’d already shared the information with those at the park. “They are still working to fix the situation, but they’ve located the source of all of this; it shouldn’t be long now before your parents are back.”

Aiden had messaged Conner almost immediately, getting confirmation that the Justice League had been taken to the other side of the split. Apparently, they’d had standing orders on what to do if this ended up happening, locations for the children to be taken to, and temporary access to the cell-network to mass flood directions to everyone with a phone.

A message had been sent to every device they could jack into around the world, billboards, televisions, monitors, phones, tablets, and everything else in between—the younger team of heroes urging those who were older to protect the youngest.

That’s where the vast majority of those at the park had come from—almost everybody over the age of ten had a phone or device capable of receive text messages or a friend that did. The ones who’d been caught out were the youngest, and those were who Aiden had been making sure to ferry back to Boston Commons.

“Alright,” Aiden called, “Head to the park, drop the younger kids off—if you’re up to it, grab some food on the way back; there’s a lot of mouths to feed.”

Traci turned to the younger kids standing in the middle of the ring of teenagers and smiled.

“Come on!” Traci said brightly, “Let’s go steal all the chocolate from the shop and head to the park before the adults get back!”

The outpouring of support for the idea was obvious, and Aiden snorted at what had to be the most obvious manipulation he’d ever seen in his life—then again, they seemed to all be in high spirits, so he couldn’t call it a bad move. The boy who’d spoken up earlier about the food situation looked annoyed but managed to keep it to himself.

“Get moving, you lot,” Aiden instructed sternly, “and be careful.”

There were a few calls of ‘Bubbles!’ from the kids, and he gave them a wave in recognition before crossing his arms.

He watched them go from his position floating above the road, and once they had turned the corner, he couldn’t help but glance down at the small pair of legs that stuck out from beneath a car, just out of sight of the group. Another one he’d been far too late to help—Aiden closed his eyes and found the closest signature.

There was still more to do.

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John Hancock Tower, Boston, 1:26 AM.

November 6th, 2010.

Aiden watched as the city once again turned into a hive of activity; almost every single light in the city was on now, buildings, cars—even a large amount of emergency floodlighting that had been set up in the last hour.

The two worlds had rejoined, and things had vanished or appeared, causing even more chaos.

The heroes had presumably managed to once again win out against Klarion and his band of knock-off death eaters. His phone was long since dead, having been at ten percent before all this shit started—so he hadn’t been able to contact anyone yet.

Not that he’d had the chance anyway, he’d been sweeping the city almost non stop for those who needed help; he’d only come to rest half an hour ago when they started using the city-wide P.A to start sorting everything out.

Ambulance, police, and fire rescue services had posted up in the commons, trying to organize some kind of system for reuniting the parents with their children. With the sudden appearance of all of the adults, the kids that had been doing their best to keep everything together had finally had their own chance to break down.

He’d seen Traci, the brave girl that had followed his directions and helped hundreds of kids was one of them. He only caught a glimpse of her in passing, but she was crying to herself, the night finally having caught up with her.

The coming days and weeks would be filled with mourning, he knew—there would likely be little else shown on the news—just how many people had died? Aiden wondered about the many children that hadn’t made it through the night and how their parents would feel when each of them was discovered.

There were people who killed in the moment, overwhelmed by the situation and their emotions—there were those who were so twisted up inside that they’d do some truly heinous crimes, serials killers and the like, but this…

Aiden stepped off the building and into the air.

In the span of four short hours, this ‘Lord of Chaos’ Klarion had managed to decimate an unknown amount of children and adults across the entire world. He’d done more to harm humanity in four hours than anything that Aiden could even attribute in the last few decades.

A passing curiosity had once driven him to wonder how many planes were in the air at one time.

When he’d searched out the answer, he had found that—in the year that he had looked it up, and back in his original word—somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 planes were in the air at one time.

Even if only half of those planes had been passenger planes, with somewhere in the range of 200, to 500 passengers—more even in some cases—when every single pilot suddenly disappeared, anybody below the age of 18 would have died without exception.

If even ten percent of the passengers were in that age range—Aiden pressed his palms into his eyes, hoping the pressure would force the ache away that had been growing more painful over the course of the night.

He touched down outside of his warehouse several hours later, tired and mentally exhausted. The reuniting was still going strong, and it would likely be several days at a minimum before it was mostly dealt with. He’d reached the end of his usefulness here, and it was time to step back and let the people who were actually trained for this kind of thing to take the reigns.

He opened the door to his warehouse, stepped inside, and spotted Byrna lying on top of her workbench—asleep—and drooling on her folded arms. Aiden plugged his phone in before dropping down onto her swivel chair and let his head fall back to stare up at the ceiling.

In all likelihood, across the entire world— government officials, heroes, soldiers, and everybody else had all had loved ones die or be injured in this attack—even villains had families, they were a smaller portion of the population sure, but this had affected everyone.

Klarion would be in the sights of every man, woman, and child in the world.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Aiden hoped he enjoyed his five minutes in the light—because if he ever came face to face with the monster that wore the face of a child—he would be doing everything in his power to wipe him off the face of the planet.

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“Why the hell didn’t you wake me up?” Byrna groaned painfully.

Aiden leaned against the wall, drinking his coffee.

“Why would you even sleep on the bench, to begin with, dumbass—there's a couch right there?” Aiden sighed, “Didn’t you see the message on all the screens?”

“Of course I did,” Byrna snapped, sliding off the workbench gingerly. “I wanted to make sure you got back alright, and I was just resting my eyes—”

“I don’t think six hours of sleep is resting your eyes,” Aiden interjected quietly, ignoring her indignant huff. “Coffee is behind you, nothings open, so it’s just trash—sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Byrna said, shaking her head, “Coffee is coffee—I don’t care if it’s the cheap stuff or not.”

“Gross,” Aiden said indifferently.

Byrna rolled her eyes as she slowly got herself together—before turning to study him, her own drink in hand.

“Aiden, how bad was it out there?” Byrna asked quietly. “Everybody was freaking out on this side, but—was it worse than you said the other day?”

He’d explained the possibility of it occurring after he’d told Conner to avoid any bizarre reactions or him trying to explain it while she was freaking out—he wasn’t supposed to be on that side of the split, though—it hadn’t even crossed his mind.

His initial assumption had been that the spell was locked purely to actual years because this entire plotline had been Shazam’s moment. When he was in the adult form, he was classed as an adult; when he was in the kid form, he was a kid.

There was an argument to be made that his wisdom gained by the powers had been what had taken him over—but there wasn’t a single case of an exceptionally mature seventeen-year-old that had been on the adult side! Aiden hadn’t even been—and he was twenty-six mentally.

So then he’d thought he was able to put the spell down to having nothing to do with mentality and it being purely years of age—but there were god damned exceptions to that as well. The one that he remembered from the source material was Miss Martian.

There was some nonsense about Martians maturing slower—but maturity had nothing to do with the spell because Aiden didn’t get taken over to the adult side, despite being mentally much older. So the fact that Miss Martian was actually older in years than Batman meant that the spell made absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever!

“Fuck that spell,” Aiden muttered darkly before shaking his head. “It was much worse than I thought—there was… a lot of kids that were in cars at the time, but it’s entirely possible to survive a car crash if your lucky—the real problem was the planes.”

Byrna looked away at the comment, staring into her coffee quietly.

“Something like seven thousand planes ‘went down’; they are still raising the count on the news,” Aiden said, frowning. “It’s a slow process to catalog every single plane that was in the sky at the time of the split—especially because those same planes are now sitting perfectly fine, exactly where they were landed.”

“The planes survived?” Byrna frowned, “I don’t understand; I thought they crashed?”

Aiden sighed; he hadn’t understood it at first either, but after seeing cars vanish in the streets and others reappear in different locations, it had clicked.

“I’ll try to explain—There world split into two separate realities, and in the first reality all of the children vanish, the adults piloting the planes safely landed the planes, and the ones that were driving cars pulled over, and the missing children were reported by their parents.”

Aiden took a breath before continuing.

“In the second reality, all of the adults were suddenly gone—the pilots disappeared, the parents driving the cars—they all crashed with nobody in the driver’s seat, and all the children in the planes would have died.”

Aiden shook his head, tone grim.

“Some of the longer flights stayed on their journey for a while—autopilot, still engaged—what do you think happened to those ‘lucky’ few children when the worlds remerged? Well, the planes just vanished didn’t they?”

Byrna looked sick.

“So there are children’s bodies scattered all over the world, and nobody knows exactly where they died?” Byrna said, paling. “That’s.. how many children were on those planes?”

“I don’t know; it’s all guesswork for now.” Aiden said quietly, “But it’s easily in the thousands—this wasn’t just in America Byrna, it was the entire world. It was fairly late at night here when it happened—what about elsewhere, where it was the middle of the day? Parents driving their children to school, or driving on the highway, or buses filled with school kids—”

Byrna pressed her face into her hands, quietly wiping at her eyes, and Aiden forced himself to stop—he’d forgotten for a moment there that she’d been a school teacher for years.

“I can’t even imagine how anybody is going to react to this,” Byrna said shakily.

“They will blame the Justice League for not stopping it,” Aiden said quietly.

“It’s not their fault this happened,” Byrna said, sniffling now.

“I know it’s not—and as much as they piss me off, I don’t think they are at fault either.” Aiden agreed quietly, “But when a villain does something on this scale, and everybody is as terrified and grief-stricken as you would expect… they are going to push all of the blame squarely onto the ones who they hold up as those who are supposed to stop this kind of thing.”

Byrna mumbled something under her breath.

“The blame for this lies solely at the feet of Klarion and the others who did this, but when the people who lost their loved ones can’t reach the villains—well, it pretty obvious what’s going to happen.” Aiden said seriously, “This is going to be a long, long year.”

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Gravity Chamber, Boston, 12:01 AM.

November 8th, 2010.

Aiden divided his Ki again, following the same pattern he’d been working at for the thousandth time. Once again, he felt his Ki half, before breaking away from him, to slowly form a mass in front of him. It started to solidify over a very strenuous minute, as the weight of the gravity pressing down on him seemingly doubled in an instant.

The multiform technique was wavering under the pressure, doing its best to project itself onto reality. As he slowly grew used to the new weight, his focus sharpened enough for it to snap into being. For a second, Aiden watched him with gritted teeth as the world tried to erase him and gravity tried to squash him.

It had only been three days since he’d first succeeded in getting a barely-there clone, more of an afterimage then solid, and it hadn’t been anywhere real enough to do anything other then vanish. He’d kept at it while sitting in enhanced gravity, and he’d finally reached the point where it was actually tangible.

He knew if he’d tried to perform it outside of the chamber, it would have been far easier, but he didn’t mind the longer process as his body continued to slowly adapt to the effect of the force weighing down on him.

Aiden had spoken to Tracy and paid her for another battery for the machine; he hadn’t passed sixteen times gravity yet, and was far from the existing limit of twenty-five, but the higher he pushed it, the faster the drain—which meant he had to wait a long-ass time every five hours or so before he could use it again. Tracy had agreed happily, indicating a week or so before it would be ready.

After five minutes of thought, the clone was still struggling against the world. Aiden pushed himself to his feet slowly, straining, and the clone did its best to mirror him, but with much more difficulty. It still wasn’t perfect—but it was getting better with every attempt.

Aiden shuffled towards it, arms up in position, and the clone took a stance but remained firmly planted on the spot, lest it fall apart. He swung at it, fighting against the pressure of the room, and the clone managed to lean to the side, stumbling away from him.

It tried to punch him back, and midway through the motion, it suddenly fell apart—vanishing into nothingness—he felt a tiny amount of his Ki return as he sat down once more.

Aiden began the technique again once more, halving the remaining Ki again.