The year is $2552$. Humanity, having long since scattered across the stars under the fragile banner of the United Sol Federation (USF), still whispered of the Great Silence—the terrifying prelude to the events of $2506$. For centuries, $UFO$ sightings had been dismissed as mᴀss hysteria, atmospheric distortions, or—most commonly—classified military prototypes. The official position, enshrined in the Sol-Terra Treaty of $2310$, maintained a staunch denial of extragalactic life forms. Then, the $3$I Fleet arrived, and the truth, hidden beneath layers of bureaucratic lies and Project ATLAS (Advanced Terrestrial-Liaison Anomaly Study) documentation, erupted into blinding, terrifying reality.

The first definitive proof, later designated “Contact $01$ Alpha,” occurred not in the heavens, but deep within the declassified archives of the ATLAS Project. In $2545$, a rogue USF historian, Dr. Aris Thorne, uncovered encrypted logs detailing the capture and analysis of a vessel fragment recovered from the asteroid belt following a mᴀssive energy spike in $2506$. This fragment, unmistakably non-human in origin, bore the strange, interlocking tri-symbol that the military later code-named “$3$I.” According to the recovered ATLAS data, the fragment exhibited properties that defied known physics: an inner core composed of a meta-stable dark matter alloy and an outer hull that momentarily warped local spacetime, explaining the ‘flickering’ disappearances that had plagued Earth’s low-orbit satellites since the early $21$st century. The $UFO$s were not simply ships; they were localized reality anchors.

The true panic, the “extreme panic” rumored in the darknets, began in $2552$. The $3$I Fleet, an armada of colossal, obsidian-black dreadnoughts, emerged from a manufactured rift near the Jovian moon Io. These weren’t the sleek, darting craft of old legends; they were monstrous, kilometer-long behemoths, their hulls glowing with malevolent, crimson energy, reminiscent of the captured ATLAS fragment. Leading the ᴀssault was a flagship—the Dreadnaught Kerberos—so immense it cast a shadow over an entire moon. The flagship was currently locked in an impossible duel: its stern, bathed in the sickly purple lightning of an unknown defensive mechanism, was facing a furious counter-strike from its bow, a torrential cascade of red, disintegrating energy.

The accompanying image, an intercepted feed from the doomed USF scout Sentinel-V, confirmed the unthinkable: the $3$I Fleet was not a single enтιтy, but a collective of warring factions, locked in a brutal civil war that had spilled across the void and landed, catastrophically, on humanity’s doorstep. NASA, or rather, its successor, the Unified Space Command (USC), wasn’t panicking because they were found, but because they were caught between two unstoppable forces, one of which was the very civilization they had secretly been studying for $300$ years. The ATLAS Protocol was now moot; the “anomalies” were here, and they were fighting each other with weapons that could tear the Solar System apart.