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LOCATION: OFFICE OF THE SUPREME LEADER
CITY: PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA
DATE: APRIL 15, 2026 | TIME: 8:00 AM
April 15th was a day of celebration in North Korea.
Forced celebration, of course. But celebration nonetheless.
It was the birthday of the country's founder, and the grandfather of the current Supreme Leader.
It was always marked by military parades and grotesquely exaggerated public displays of loyalty.
It was also often marked by missile tests. This year, however, was different.
This time, the warhead atop the hypersonic Hwasong IV Iron Phoenix missile wasn't just for show.
It carried a live, medium-yield nuclear payload.
The Supreme Leader's long-winded speech reached its climax.
The sky does not ask permission to thunder.
The mountain does not kneel to the wind.
And heirs of the sacred flame do not ask permission to rise.
Today, we will carve our will into the sky!
Let this Day of the Sun burn its name into the heavens themselves!
At the end of his speech, The Supreme Leader of North Korea extended his hand with theatrical slowness toward the black metal box in front of him.
His finger hovered over the red button for just a moment before he pressed it down.
Two of the three cameras followed the gesture.
The third stayed on his face and caught the infernal smile that rose there. It was a smile so twisted and evil, it sent a shudder through the cameraman behind the lens.
230 miles northeast of Pyongyang, a missile silo hidden in the rugged slopes of Mount Paektu yawned open.
A single missile launched straight upward, yellow flames tearing through the morning sky.
In just under three minutes, it reached the apogee of its arc in Earth's upper atmosphere, brushing the edges of space itself.
There, the hypersonic glide vehicle carrying the payload separated from the missile body.
It cruised briefly before angling downward for its hellish descent, a dagger falling from heaven itself.
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LOCATION: THE PHILIPPINE SEA
REGION: SOUTHEAST OF JAPAN
DATE: APRIL 15, 2026 | TIME: 0800 HOURS
In the cool April waters of the Pacific Ocean, the US Navy Carrier Strike Group surrounding the USS Gerald R. Ford included the supercarrier itself and seven supporting vessels.
They were in the Philippine Sea, south of Japan, for war games with Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces and the Republic of Korea Navy.
Nothing out of the ordinary, just a show of force at a time when North Korea tended to get restless. These exercises were a good opportunity to instill a level of readiness in the regional troops without usually experiencing much real danger to life and limb.
The Ford moved with slow, deliberate power, her engines humming through the steel bones of the ship. On deck, the distant echo of a boatswain's whistle cut through the morning chatter.
And then, of course, there was coffee. You couldn't walk fifty feet without smelling it. On a ship like the Ford, propelled by twin nuclear reactors, the crew was fueled primarily by coffee.
Juan Rodriguez was the Ford's Command Master Chief, the highest-ranking enlisted man aboard, and the captain's right hand for everything that happened on the ship.
Around 0800, Master Chief Rodriguez was just returning from the head when he heard shouting from the Combat Direction Center.
The CDC was the nerve center for the defensive functions of the entire carrier strike group, so shouting coming from that room was never good.
He rushed there at top speed.
Radar operators had just received data from Pacific Command indicating a missile launch from the mountains north of Pyongyang.
They quickly calculated the trajectory, and hit the alarms.
Master Chief Rodriguez arrived in the room to find controlled chaos. He quickly confirmed the status and relayed it to the bridge, urging immediate evasive measures.
The Iron Phoenix, however, had different plans.
A hypersonic missile reaching low-Earth orbit and dropping from the edge of space with terminal velocity takes just over five minutes at those speeds.
A vessel the size of the USS Gerald R. Ford supercarrier would take double that to evade. And the Master Chief knew it.
After confirming the report and sending it to the bridge, he had just enough time to send two messages.
One was to his wife.
He told her he loved her.
To take care of their three children.
To find happiness again.
But not with Hector.
That guy was an asshole.
The second message was to his old buddy Graham 'Grim' Thorne.
He and Grim had entered the Navy together out of high school.
Where Grim had spent his military career in the SEALs, going the special operations route, Juan had walked the command path, climbing from deck seaman to senior enlisted leadership.
Grim had fought in deserts, jungles, and frozen wastes. Juan had run the floating city that carried men like Grim into battle.
Both were survivors in their own arenas.
Until today, at least.
The idea that the SpecOps warrior would outlive the Master Chief was both preposterous and suddenly hilarious to Juan.
He laughed out loud as he typed the message to Grim.
His text read:
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Hey, fuckface.
Turns out you win.
You'll outlive me.
But I'll tell you this: If you don't avenge me, I swear I'm going to marry your mother in hell.
RIP USS Ford
---
He hit send and prayed.
It was the first time in ages that he'd done so, but it felt appropriate. He saw others in the CDC begin to do the same.
Alarms across the massive ship blared, and 5,000 men and women of the crew braced for impact.
North Korean technology, if it could be called that, was not known for its precision. They usually made up for the lack of it by embracing a sort of sloppy chaos.
When you want to send a message to the world, you don't choose the nimble destroyers. You target the supercarrier.
The one with a 100,000-ton displacement.
The one that's harder to miss.
As the hypersonic glide vehicle driving the Iron Phoenix arced toward its target far below in the Philippine Sea, the warhead blinked to life.
The dictator in Pyongyang continued to smile as reports began coming in from the generals surrounding him. The warhead was armed.
This time, the world would take notice. North Korea would no longer be called the hermit kingdom.
As the Iron Phoenix began its horrific descent, it quickly reached the layer of the atmosphere infused with nanites.
The System entity, always watching, made trillions of split-second calculations. In the end, it decided this was a significant moment, and intervened.
Nanites swarmed through the warhead's firing assembly, crawling across circuit boards and burrowing into detonator housings.
They stripped data from the environmental sensors, flooded guidance channels with impossible readings, and fused key triggers in the arming sequence.
A single cascade failure became a hundred, then a thousand, rippling through the detonation chain until the warhead was nothing more than a falling, inert shell.
A shell that, nonetheless, still weighed two metric tons.
The Island superstructure on the Ford included all the major functions crucial to running the ship. Command and control, combat information centers, propulsion and threat detection systems. It was all located in the Island.
It was 0811 on the clock when the Iron Phoenix made its impact.
The US Navy had run thousands of simulations when they designed the USS Ford supercarrier. It was nearly impossible for a strike from any angle to sink the vessel altogether.
But it turns out that with the right combination of catastrophic circumstances, something just as horrific can happen.
The Phoenix struck just forward of the Island, destroying the entire superstructure in a single moment.
The hypersonic speed of the projectile displaced the atmosphere around and in front of itself as it fell, causing the air to become compressed into a hammer of heat and force.
The pressure from the shockwave that preceded the strike snuffed out every human life above decks instantaneously, like a candle in a tornado.
But it didn't stop there.
The two-ton missile had reached Mach 10 during its descent, and the impact punctured the hangar deck and kept on going. Superheated fragments of steel and concrete exploded outward in every direction like shrapnel, and decimated everything around the point of impact.
Glass from the observation decks and bridge shattered along with everything else, perforating bodies and equipment alike.
The tanks storing jet fuel and ordnance for the 70 fighter jets, choppers and surveillance aircraft that populated the flight deck were located just beneath, surrounding the Island.
The kinetic heat from the impact kicked off a chain reaction that instantly ignited the fuel, which then set off the munitions.
Within three minutes of the impact, every single one of the 2,600 personnel from the ship's company and the 2,480 members of the air wing were dead.
Master Chief Rodriguez felt a skull-rattling wave of force that threw him back into the inner wall. He felt his teeth break apart in his mouth as his jaw was slammed together.
He heard the jarring sound of metal stretching beyond its tensile limits and tearing from the assault. And the last thing that crossed his mind as his life was forfeit was how red the sun was on the horizon that morning.
He remembered an old saying his Dad would recite when they went out fishing:
Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
A sailor's warning on a day when it couldn't be heeded.
He smiled at the irony, a heartbeat before his life was snuffed out.
The crew of the two closest destroyers could do nothing but watch from miles away. They would later tell friends and family that the worst part wasn't the fire and the smoke.
It was the silence that followed. That, and the sight of the supercarrier still gliding through the ocean as if nothing had happened.