The Extra's Rise - Chapter 721

721: Digital Gold (3) 721: Digital Gold (3) The day after Auristrade folded, the shock didn’t crest-it propagated.

What had been a guild headquarters now functioned as a theater of operations for a continent.

Our expanded command center breathed in shifting blues and golds as holographic dashboards pulled in live feeds: market depth, ministry memos, energy flow maps, air traffic lattices, sentiment indices.

If yesterday had been gravity switching on, today was the landscape settling into a new shape.

Outside, Avalon wore stormlight.

Low clouds stacked over the river like slate; the wind gusted hard enough to throw a shiver through the window panes.

Inside, everything ran hot and precise.

“Integration proceeding ahead of our most optimistic projections,” Elias said without looking up.

His station resembled a glass beehive-dozens of panes hovering at clinical angles, each stamped with a different regulator’s seal.

Personnel transfers, custodial agreements, fiduciary attestations and continuity guarantees that normally took quarters to negotiate were moving in synchronized bursts.

“Client transition is above ninety percent where Helena signed personally.

The outliers are legacy contracts with tortured clauses; we’ll unwind them without headlines.” Good.

Stability sold the story better than any press release.

The data to our left told a rougher truth: traditional banking equities bleeding double digits; anything labeled “Aetherite, rails, or core infra” screaming north; currency markets wobbling as exchanges tried to reprice a world where settlement was a property, not a service.

“What about the rest of the Twelve?” I asked, though Reika was already moving.

She slid into the center well and rolled a knuckle across a control edge.

The room answered by flooding itself in urgent reds and amber.

A 3-D map of the continent spun up, not with borders but with influence graphs-guild footprints puckering and stretching as calls were placed and favors called.

“Ten emergency sessions filed within an hour of Helena’s notice,” she said.

“No one thinks this is ‘competition’ anymore.

Two distinct alliance geometries, one coalescing faster than the other.” A tap, and two nets brightened.

“Skyveil and Luminalis are moving in tandem,” Reika went on.

“Stormwind and Brightforge have been on continuous comms for six hours.

Coordinated notes to ministries.

Coordinated requests to controllers.

Coordinated messaging to their own boards.

We’re seeing joint scenario trees on their side.” The Trinity Alliance-the version of it that mattered-wasn’t a press conference.

It was two people with complementary power sets making a plan.

“Break it down,” I said.

“Marcus has put Skyveil’s fleet on elevated alert,” Reika said.

Sub-panels opened: aircraft vectors bending out of normal commercial lanes into rings and spokes; re-tasked drones establishing relays along high-altitude corridors.

“They’re repositioning assets to bracket our logistics corridors and create inspection chokepoints.

Not blockade-choke-and-delay under the color of safety.” “And Elena?” I asked, though Dr.

Chen saved Reika the breath.

“Arthur.” Chen’s voice cut crisp and concerned from Research.

“We’re reading non-standard switching events across Luminalis substations.

Not failure states.

Controlled reconfiguration.

Load is being re-routed along patterns that don’t match any published contingency plan.” Reika threw the grid visualization onto the main canvas.

Rivers of light-power as living topology-re-threaded themselves in deliberate arcs.

Extra redundancy appeared around Skyveil hubs; silent cavities opened around our facilities; in a few places, lines braided into black-box clusters.

“Siege architecture,” I said.

It landed in my mouth like iron.

“She’s building a grid that can cut us and feed them without tripping a general alarm.” Rose looked up from macros, the storm window catching a copper line in her hair.

“If she can selectively starve our plants and leave competitors untouched, she can force us toward terms.

Even with Aetherite, we still need a seed power source to initialize most arrays.” “And Marcus’s airframe positioning pins personnel and heavy parts in place,” I added, watching Skyveil altitudes shift.

“Supply interdiction by spreadsheet and NOTAM.” Elegant.

They were refusing the fight my way.

Beat the rails by moving the ground.

‘Clever,’ Luna murmured, cool satisfaction riding the analysis.

‘Refuse the duel.

Close the field.’ ‘So we make the field irrelevant,’ I answered, and straightened.

“Change of plan,” I said to the room.

Conversations decelerated; the command center leaned in.

“We’re going simultaneous on Skyveil and Luminalis.

No sequential cleanup.

They think consolidation buys us delay.

It buys them time.

We won’t give it.” Rose’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“You’re asking us to absorb a third major system while we’re still metabolizing the second.

Even with Imperial cover, that’s regulatory oxygen depletion.” “Under normal timelines, yes,” I said.

“But we’ve been planning this since Pyrros.” I pushed a block of ops up to shared view.

Resource matrices unfolded-Aetherite inventories, trained crews, routing tables, redundancy budgets, western stand-ups.

“Their error is assuming we must consolidate to operate.

We don’t.

We can clone capacity faster than they can weaponize frailty.” “Status west?” I asked.

“Strong,” Reika said, not hiding the satisfaction she took in that single word.

“Jin and Kali seeded command infrastructure in twelve cities.

Financial adoption there is past sixty percent among households and small business; institutional onboarding lagging but accelerating now that Auristrade fell.

More important-” She highlighted lines that weren’t on any public grid.

“They’ve mapped and started provisioning alternative energy and transport spines.

If Skyveil and Luminalis cut, we route.” “Coordinate with them,” I said.

“Build full operational independence from both monopolies.

Forty-eight hours.” Elias lifted his head at that.

“We’ll need Imperial administrative signals to blunt the antitrust chorus.

Oversight committees have that hungry look.” “Then feed them something else,” I said.

“Rose-prep a slate of humanitarian deployments.

Micro-generation in underserved zones.

Autonomous transport to remote regions.

Zero-fee micro merchant rails.

Frame what we’re doing not as ‘eating guilds’ but as ‘modernizing public infrastructure.’ Don’t lie.

We are doing that.” Her mouth curved.

“Understood.

Make it morally expensive to object.” “Chen,” I said, and the lab’s indigo reflection seemed to deepen in the glass.

“Where are we on Aetherite micro-generators that can cold start from storage cells?” “In field tests,” she said.

“We have five prototypes that can bootstrap off stabilized Aetherite resonance without grid power.

Output is limited for the first six minutes; full power at nine.

We can scale builds in parallel across three facilities if we pull senior machinists off non-critical projects.” “Do it.

Western cities first.

Then high-latency rural nodes.

I want a path where Elena can kill our lights and we yawn.” On the transport side, the obvious answer was one the wealthy had treated like a parlor trick for fifty years.

“Warp gates,” I said, and the word didn’t feel like science fiction anymore.

“Not as an elite lane.

As a utility.” “Our power cost models finally make that realistic,” Rose said, flipping up the spreadsheet that had started this particular fight months ago.

“Aetherite drops per-jump energy by ninety-plus percent.

The maintenance curve is the remaining problem.” “We solve maintenance with personnel and redundancy,” I said.

“We’re not replacing Skyveil’s whole net-just creating enough through-lines they can’t starve us by holding airspace.

Chen, spin up fabrication for the collar rings and emitter housings.

Reika, put eyes on every warehouse that ever stored legacy gate parts.

Some collector will have the components we need sitting under a dust run.” “Already scraping registries,” Reika said.

“And the collector forums.” The command center shifted into sustained burn.

Teams slid from plan to execution: Chen’s people scheduling overnight shifts to birth ugly, beautiful little reactors; Transport re-writing gate firmware with safety tolerances lowered for crisis; Legal building public trust scaffolding so stout it would look like policy; Finance pre-wiring relief for the civic partners who would be brave enough to test-swap their grids for ours.

Between updates, the storm broke.

Rain streaked the windows and turned the city streets into mercury ribbons.

It made everything feel honest.

The western link flashed to life at 18:42.

Jin appeared first-tie gone, sleeves rolled, black eyes bright with the wakefulness that comes from doing hard things at speed.

The holo picked out the edges of a command floor behind him: modular consoles, local feeds, staff moving with that same efficient urgency we’d taught ourselves to require.

“Western prep complete,” he said without preamble.

“Micro-generators are online in nine cities, hardware delivered to three more.

Gate collars installed at five hubs; two more by morning.

Treasury and payroll can run fully local even under total Luminalis cut.

We timed a drill-nineteen seconds to fail over from public grid to our cells.” Kali crossed behind him, talking to two operators at once, then paused when she caught the edge of the feed.

She wore field black and a calm that made alarms work harder.

“Security windows are tight,” she said, stepping into frame.

“We’ve hardened gate rooms, layered ID, and moved high-value traversal onto randomized lanes.

If Skyveil wants to test us, they’re going to have to do it the slow, expensive way.” “Sequence?” Jin asked, glancing at her.

“Spin the last two gate collars before we light generators in their districts,” Kali said.

“If Luminalis rebalance logic sniffs us, they’ll try to throw a frequency spike through anything drawing new load.” He frowned.

“Risk: someone eats a brownout while we hold the collar.” “Not if we pre-warm with dummy draw,” she said, already tilting her head to call the order.

“They see noise; we get our window.” Jin’s irritation flashed and was gone.

“Third path,” he conceded, a small smile cresting before he killed it.

“We take it.” I let the beat sit a second-friction resolving into fluency in a way that would not fit into a report but did fit into why they worked together.

“Excellent work,” I said.

“Hold posture.

Marcus and Elena will move inside twenty-four hours.

Likely sooner.” “Let them,” Kali said, and cut the channel to go do the thing she’d just promised.

The room exhaled.

I did not.

Luna brushed my thoughts, a fingertip along a map.

‘You could wait,’ she suggested-not disagreeing, genuinely testing the lines.

‘Give the prototypes another day.

Let Chen sleep.’ ‘Every hour Elena works, the grid gets smarter at starving us,’ I replied.

‘Every hour Marcus has, he finds a new choke-and convinces a committee to call it “prudence.” We keep initiative, or we give it away.’ She considered, then let the argument go quiet.

Elias broke the silence we kept for decisions.

“Oversight committees have requested an open session forty-eight hours from now.” “Good,” I said.

“We’ll publish first.

Rose?” She was already standing.

“Drafting the announcement now: micro-grids for clinics and schools, subsidized gates for remote merchants, fee-free micro-merchant rails, default transparency APIs for civic audits.

I’ll seed it to the chairs before they can build a show trial.” “Do it.

And make sure the copy is boring.” She laughed, quick and genuine.

“The most dangerous kind of boring.” We worked until the storm spent itself and left the city rinsed and reflective.

Ops ticked toward green across the board, not perfect-never perfect-but thick with redundancies and “if/then”s that could carry weight.

When at last the command center’s noise softened to a professional hum, I stepped back and let my eyes unfocus on the largest wall.

Energy flows bent along new lines.

Air corridors shifted to dodge ours-and our gate pins appeared like little rings stitched through a cloth.

Financial adoption curves climbed and then smoothed-excitement maturing into habit.

In a world addicted to power hoarded in choke points, we were building routes that declined to be choked.

Two of the Twelve lay folded into our spine, their power converted rather than shattered.

Ten remained.

Not all would make Marcus’s or Elena’s mistake; not all would gamble on a siege.

Some would come in clean; some would come in claws first.

Tomorrow we were going to meet the ones who’d chosen claws.

I sat, called up the simultaneous ops plans one more time, and pulled every lever I could to remove the remaining friction from their first twelve hours.

Then I did the most disciplined thing I could: I stopped touching them.

The displays ghosted into standby.

The windows showed a city breathing after rain.

The real war-against scarcity as a business model, against gatekeeping as a profession-didn’t begin with an explosion.

It began with a grid that refused to go dark and gates that opened for the people who’d never been invited through.

Tomorrow, Skyveil and Luminalis would try to close the field.

We were already standing outside it.