For most people, the first thought to jolt their minds was September 11— as though trauma had encoded itself into collective memory. Heads tilted upward, searching for shattered towers.

Berlin had no skyline of glittering giants, but the few minarets and bell towers—those modest vertical claims to the heavens— still stood unharmed.

Instead of freezing, the city began to move. Traffic snarled as parents rushed toward schools, forming long, breathless chains of cars outside gates. Pedestrians ran with no destination, bouncing from one street to another, as if motion alone had the power to ward off terror.

Human beings know how to flee from danger— but only when they can see it. When danger is invisible, the mind fractures, instinct hijacks reason, and the creature reclaims the human.

In panic, a man becomes less a citizen and more an animal—hissing threats, or pulling from his pocket the oldest weapon ever held by human hands: a knife, swung wildly at shadows.

Relief of a sort came when smoke began to coil upward from neighborhoods on Berlin’s western side. Soon, a procession of ambulances shrieked toward the horizon, their sirens slicing through the stunned calm, marking the true location of the blast.

The possibility of more explosions— in other districts, at any moment—
was not a remote fear. Yet the authorities’ repeated appeals for composure slowly took root. People breathed, phones fell silent, and the city—smeared with anxiety and exhaust— began to settle, however uneasily.

Just moments ago, Dr. William’s message of love and brotherhood had lightened hearts—bleaching out resentment, filling people with mercy and justice. Now, with rumors spreading that the attack was a Muslim retaliation for the burning of their sacred text, those same hearts were turning dark again. Black, not white.

Fortunately, not everyone was a leaf blown by the first wind of panic. Some, grounded like trees with roots sunk deep into revelation, steadied those around them with calm discernment.

“Muslims are part of this society,” someone said. “Why would they approve of bombing their own city? But if you're saying saboteurs pretending to be Muslim or Christian did it, then you might have a point.”

To stop terrorist propaganda from spreading, the National Security Bureau shut down television broadcasts by disrupting the satellite feed to all major networks. Since the September 11 attacks, governments worldwide have learned the same lesson: never appear helpless in the face of an attack.

The blackout didn’t last long. When the screens flickered back to life, every channel pointed its lens at the same place—the National Security Bureau. The Police Chief stood before the microphones, his stern gaze, firm posture, and deep blue uniform radiating the kind of authority people cling to in moments like this.

“Everyone remain calm. There are no fatalities or injuries.”

He answered the inevitable question before anyone could ask:

“Yes, there has been an attempted attack. We are investigating every angle. We don’t yet know the motive, but the perpetrator left what appears to have been a kind of sonic device—more like a missile than a simple sound bomb. It was modified to release an excessive amount of smoke. Its purpose was clearly to induce fear and chaos. But we are also considering other possibilities.”

He paused only long enough to sharpen the tension.

“Catching the perpetrator is only a matter of time. That is all I can share for now. When the ongoing covert operation allows it, we will release further information.”

It didn’t take long—by the very next day, the perpetrator had been caught. No one had expected such a rapid arrest. When the attacker’s identity was released, the public was stunned. No one could understand why Father Aros had carried out the attack. Rumors spread instantly: alleged ties to fringe groups, secret affiliations, ideological extremism—everyone had a theory.

But the real shock came with the video that surfaced the moment he was captured. People braced themselves, expecting a typical terrorist manifesto. Instead, in a brief clip, he posed a strange riddle:

“If 16 men eat 15 apple, 12 women eat 9 apple, 3 children eat 5 apples, and later they  eat  totaling 113 apples—how many of them are there in total?”

The fifteen-second video was quickly taken down, yet in that short window it became the most-viewed clip in Europe. Some watched out of curiosity, others hoping to solve the riddle and help the authorities.

Maybe the priest—if that was really his name—had lost his mind. Or maybe he was transmitting a coded message through the crowd, using millions of people as his courier service. According to some experts, the video was not propaganda; it was worse. It was an instruction—an operational signal disguised as nonsense.

To calm the public, security forces announced that the man exhibited erratic behavior and suffered from mental instability. For a brief moment, Berlin exhaled.

The relief didn’t last.

The next explosion came from the city’s largest police station.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in a relentless convoy. This time, their cargo told the story: they were full, which meant the blast had been nothing like the first.

With the first light of dawn, those who stood before the ruins understood the brutal truth:

“The ambulances weren’t carrying the injured, but the dead. A blast strong enough to pulverize a building like that left no one alive inside.”

Although no official numbers had been released, the public had already begun to steel itself for the inevitable—casualties counted not in tens, but in hundreds. And soon, the details of the attack began to surface. When the method of the explosion was finally understood, the public recoiled in disbelief.

The perpetrator was one of the police department’s own ranking officers: Chief Inspector Berry.

Berry was responsible for the station’s security. Every item entering the building was scanned through the X-ray system—but the officers operating the machine reported directly to Berry, and therefore did not check him or his belongings. That alone explained how he could have smuggled both the explosives and their handlers inside unhindered.

He had supposedly been conducting a routine security audit—entering every floor, every office, “checking” things. No one questioned it. Under that pretext, he placed dozens of charges throughout the building with ease.

The digital boxes he installed in various rooms had been introduced as frequency jammers, supposedly designed to prevent remote-triggered attacks. Everyone believed it. No one imagined they were stuffed with C-4, one of the most powerful explosives known.

There had been no reason to suspect him. He had no history that would raise a flag. In Europe, when a bomb goes off, public suspicion almost reflexively turns toward Muslims. It happened again—until it was learned that Berry was neither Muslim, nor the child of Muslims. His mother was Catholic, his father Protestant.

Upon hearing this, some Muslims pounced:

“If the attacker had been Muslim, you would have unleashed hell on us. Why aren’t you saying anything negative about Christianity? Why aren’t you claiming the Bible encourages killing?”

There was some truth in the anger of those first sentences. But the accusations leveled at the Bible and at Christ were unbecoming of Muslims who knew even a little of their own faith.

Worse, they put the city’s moderates—the advocates of refugee rights, the defenders of tolerance—into an impossible position.

After the bombing, the insults hurled at Muslim sacred figures by fringe Christians now boomeranged back from fringe Muslims—no longer criticism, but venom.

The bomb’s real damage had been inflicted not on buildings, but on whatever remained of civic peace and tolerance. Whether Berry, or whatever force had guided him, had a precise objective remained unclear, but one thing was certain: the explosion had deepened public unease and sharpened latent hostility.

No group claimed responsibility. The motive was a riddle with no key.

Uncertainty breeds fear, and fear, when amplified, becomes a catalyst for chaos, said veteran counterterror experts as they mobilized to crack the case before the city spiraled.

Some analysts insisted that Father Aros was a deranged eccentric with no connection to the second attack. Others argued he was something far more engineered, a new kind of agent, or in the language of neuroscientists, a central nervous system ignition that triggered the activation of ambient neural networks.

Experts were justified in calling Aros insane. The man behaved like a soulless automaton. Interrogators threatened him, promised consequences for his family, barked at him with the cruelty of men who had seen too much. He reacted to none of it.

How could a human being show no emotional register?

Even the fiercest zealots betray themselves: the darting pupils, the tremor in their voice, the twitch in their fingers, the micro-expressions that crawl across the face when fear surfaces. But Aros displayed none of the physiology of fright.

Nor did he show the slightest reaction when told that, since no one had died, he might walk free. No change in breathing, no flicker of relief, no hopeful curve of a lip. A normal person, even in despair, would betray some sign of feeling. Aros’s face might as well have been carved from chalk.

“I’ve interrogated every kind of filth,” said the seasoned officer later. “They said terrorists wouldn’t talk, cartel runners wouldn’t betray their bosses. Sure, some held out. But all of them, every one, showed fear somewhere in their eyes. This freak? Nothing. Not a shadow.”

The real shock came when the blood work returned. The report showed no methamphetamine, cocaine, or any stimulant known to numb fear and inflate confidence. Nothing that suppressed neuronal signaling or chemically blunted emotion.

Baffled, the officer visited Aros’s family. His relatives began describing a troubled childhood, but the investigator cut them off.

“Let me guess,” he said. “As a kid, he tore the wings off flies, trapped insects in jars, cut the tails off cats and dogs, right?”

The family answered without hesitation.

“Absolutely not. On the contrary, he never hurt animals. In fact, he was so afraid of them he wouldn't even go near them. He was terrified of a tiny cockroach. He wouldn’t touch a fish because it might move.”

“So he was a cowardly child,” the officer said, incredulous.

“Yes. He came home crying almost every day. We took him to countless psychologists, but nothing seemed to help. If someone so much as raised their voice, he’d run to his room and lock the door. Even the medication from psychiatrists made no difference.”

“And yet now he shows no sign of fear. I’m here to understand how such a transformation is possible. I’m not interrogating you as suspects.”

Aros’s parents exchanged a look before the father spoke.

“To tell you the truth, we’ve wondered the same thing. Everything we told you was true until five years ago. Then he suddenly disappeared. We couldn’t find him anywhere. We went to Missing Persons, but there was no trace. It was as if he had evaporated.”

“One moment,” the officer interrupted. “He would have been about twenty then. Young people vanish over drugs, sex, whatever—but they resurface. In jail, in a hospital, somewhere. You must have some idea why he left.”

Aros’s mother exhaled slowly.

“My son was… unusual. And his friends were just as strange. They dressed like metalheads. He never told us anything about them. I worried he’d fallen in with bad people—neo-Nazis, cults, I don’t know. So I followed him. I found him and his odd friends in a ruined building.”

She looked at her husband, her eyes signaling that she couldn’t go on.

The father continued, his expression grim.

“They had formed a circle. In the middle, dozens of cats—small and large—were hanging. When I saw the hunger for cruelty on their faces, I panicked. I left without making a sound. The next day, we decided to send Aros to a boarding school. He protested, but we believed he eventually went. When the school administration told us he’d never shown up, we realized he had tricked us—and run away.”

He rubbed his temple with his thumb and forefinger, as if the memory physically hurt.

“We heard nothing from him for two years. Then, just as suddenly as he disappeared, he returned. But he was nothing like before.”

“You mean he became fearless?”

“No, not that. I’ll get to that,” he said, and went on.
“Before he vanished, he was an atheist. He hated the church. He believed there might be a creator, but if so, it was cruel, unjust—someone he would fight if he had the courage. Whatever happened in those two years, when he returned, he said he wanted to become a priest. He started attending church programs. Eventually, he completed training and was about to begin as an assistant priest in a small parish.”

The investigator struggled to place Aros into any familiar profile.
Authorities had expected that extremist Muslim groups might retaliate after the desecration of the Qur’an. But neither the records nor the family’s account suggested Aros had any connection to Islam.

From what his parents described, he had been involved with satanic groups before his disappearance—then, perhaps, manipulated by radical leftist organizations afterward. Maybe this entire incident was a staged trap designed to set Muslims and Christians against each other.

A third possibility was that Aros had been used by fringe Christian groups. Considering that the bomb had detonated inside a church without harming anyone—yet with enough force to dominate the national agenda for days—this scenario could not be dismissed. Through the church’s victimhood, Muslims could once again be put on the firing line.

The investigator knew that the answers lay in Aros’s missing two years. Where had he gone, and who had reshaped him?

Aros’s father interrupted his train of thought.
“You okay? You look lost.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” the investigator said, unwilling to lose the thread forming in his mind. “You still haven’t explained how he became so fearless.”

“I was getting to that,” the father replied.

“We thought he’d returned to a normal life once he started his training as a priest. He never told us what happened during those two missing years, but we didn’t push him. People don’t like talking about trauma—assault, humiliation, whatever it might be. Then, at some point, he disappeared again. But this time, he came back after a month. And the change was impossible to ignore. The timid boy was gone. In his place was someone utterly flat—emotionless, monotonous. He used to watch shows with joy, even laughter. Now he watched them with a dull, vacant stare. Nothing moved on his face.”

He shook his head, baffled even now.

“He used to go to Bayern Munich matches whenever he could. How can a person watch football without feeling anything? No excitement, no frustration, no joy? He’d sit there like a statue. That wasn’t him.”

“So why the change? What happened in one month that triggered a second metamorphosis?”

The father shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the one who has to find out.”

He hesitated, then added,
“When he came back, I saw his head bandaged a few times. Stitches. There had been no accident here—nothing that could’ve caused it. We never figured out how or why his head was cut open.”

Detective Maxi knew he had to trace where Aros had gone during those two vanished years—and that strange, unexplained month afterward. Even without evidence, he was still convinced Aros was connected to Berry’s bombing of the police station. He had included that suspicion in his first report to his superiors.