Cassius was lightly banging his head on his desk. Repeatedly.


    He looked almost human, only vertically slit pupils in his blue eyes and his undyed, short light blue hair sold him out as an alien race. To be precise, he was a dragon in human form.


    In front of him sat a military incident report. As an officer of the highest rank on the planet, the incident had unluckily fallen to him to handle.


    Cassius groaned and picked himself up off his desk, looking at the report in front of him again.


    An entire military complex, and all its personnel, evaporated. When the reflective energy barrier broke, the resulting shockwave and heat blast led to fires and broken glass for miles. That in turn led to endless complaints, not to mention the injuries the surrounding soldiers sustained trying to protect the citizens.


    So what had been the cause? A single fexel, first name Mikatil. White hair, black eyes. Tall. Everything else was unknown, as barely any information came from the complex after it had locked down.


    Cassius guessed it was because the interrogation room was relatively close to the central broadcasting room, so if the incident started there, it would be one of the first places to evacuate from the heat.


    As he returned to leaning his head against the desk, his aide walked in with a few holographic screens flashing in front of him. He waved his hands and the holographic screens flew from hovering in front of his face to hovering over Cassius’s desk.


    “Luckily the records were backed up. Here they are,” said the aide. His tone was unusually subdued. Cassius read the content quickly and sighed.


    He banged his head back onto the desk, harder this time. “So you’re saying Mikatil was illegally grabbed off the street because the patrolling mages sensed antimagic from him, he was mostly cooperative for three days, and a fight broke out the fourth day.”


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    Antimagic was undoubtedly dangerous. The magical equivalent of antimatter, it could chew through spells like acid, and tended to explode with aggressive force when in contact with mana.


    But fexels couldn’t be arrested for manipulating antimagic.


    It was an impossible situation. Mikatil was illegally detained, but also the mass murderer of an entire military base over the course of an hour. Every actor on the stage had done something wrong. Every actor (along with many bystanders) were either confirmed dead or launched into space.


    So far, only one survivor had been found and collected, and he had no useful information. He was originally on the opposite side of the complex when fighting broke out, so he simply protected himself from the extreme conditions until rescued.


    Cassius groaned again, putting his face in his hands. “Assuming Mikatil’s alive somewhere, even if we manage to capture him, there’s no way to make charges stick. There’s just nothing left. No video surveillance, no witnesses, and unlawfully detained.”


    fexels were a race that were widely accepted as magical powerhouses on par with dragons, but had a tendency to hyper specialize their magic into one type. Despite their decidedly cute humanoid appearance with furry ears and a tail, their species was elusive, insular, and not very social. They, like dragons, were classified as an intelligent magical beast that could polymorph rather than a humanoid race.


    Due to a couple incidents that had happened in the distant past, it became illegal to detain a fexel for anything related to magic, as the act of doing so usually brought disasters in their wake.


    Conversely, military recruiters chased after fexels relentlessly, begging them to join the warfronts due to their frequently overwhelming magical prowess. They rarely saw much luck.


    “Send out a wanted person’s alert. We have to do something when the damage is this great,” Cassius continued, tapping his finger on the desk.“And make a new requirement for all non-frontline military bases: reflective energy barriers must shut off if the control room is compromised. We don’t want rebels getting any ideas.”


    While unlikely, Cassius was worried someone would attempt to replicate the explosion in a different base, smuggling in some sort of reactor or energy bomb and roasting the place to a crisp.


    Cassius stood up, muttering under his breath, and prepared to report to the higher ups. It was almost certain someone would get demoted, if not fired. Cassius just hoped it wouldn’t be him.