Dozens of minutes earlier, Tianyi had hovered several hundred meters in the air ahead of the fleet.
He took a scroll from inside his robe, unfurled it, and formed hand seals with both hands.
Release!
Bang! White smoke burst out, and several silver-white drones flew from it and hovered before him, their rotors spinning silently and the cameras beneath their bodies glowing red.
These were the new equipment Commander Tian had rushed over the previous night: five military-factory-built microdrones with extended flight endurance, networked for a live broadcast with broadcast-quality footage.
Commander Tian had stressed repeatedly over the communicator that, since they were going public, they should make it a complete, unabridged unveiling that would shut the whole world up.
He wanted every nation on earth to know that the times had changed. The Bald Eagle's hegemony would fall today.
Once each drone had flown into its assigned position,
he slowly descended until both feet rested on the sea. Waves surged beneath him, and his body rose and fell gently with the water, otherwise perfectly still.
He raised his right hand, spread his fingers, and gently closed them.
Several kilometers away, at the harbor of Norfolk Naval Base, there were containers that had yet to be loaded onto transport ships, steel rails stacked on the docks, and spare parts stored in warehouses.
An invisible force tore them all off the ground and sent them into the air. They streaked across the sky, flew over the sea, and gathered behind him.
Rebar, steel plates, rails, and containers spun, twisted, reassembled, and layered together under his Magnet Release. Packed so densely they blotted out the sky, they formed a curtain wall of metal behind him.
At that moment, a radar operator in the carrier's command tower detected the anomaly.
Tianyi stood quietly