The Extra's Rise - Chapter 722

722: Digital Gold (4) 722: Digital Gold (4) Dawn broke over Avalon as a thin blade of light, and the command center answered it with sirens of red.

I was already in my chair when the first alerts cascaded down our boards.

Holographic panes snapped from cool analytics to urgent telemetry; corridors of airspace lit up in concentric rings; port districts blinked amber, then blood-bright.

The pattern was unmistakable-clean, symmetrical, military.

“Simultaneous disruptions at forty-seven major transport hubs,” Reika reported, eyes violet in the glow as she fanned the map out to continental scale.

“Skyveil aircraft are executing concentric ‘safety holds’ around any facility with an Ouroboros footprint.

They’ve filed emergency NOTAMs as cover and pushed their own controllers to issue ‘temporary inspection corridors.’ Translation: blockade, with paperwork.” Every major airport, shipping terminal, and freight spine that touched us now wore a silver halo of Skyveil hardware.

No weapons.

No shots.

Just rings of aircraft and authority.

Illegal, audacious, and-if we’d been tied to the old world-effective.

‘Bold opening,’ Luna murmured at the back of my mind, weighing the geometry like a jeweler weighing cut.

‘He’s betting you won’t escalate a transport dispute into a shooting war.’ ‘He’s also betting I need his lanes more than he needs my cargo,’ I answered.

‘He loses both wagers today.’ “Arthur,” Dr.

Chen cut in from Research, voice taut and precise, the way it always went when physics turned political.

“We’re reading coordinated grid reconfiguration across Luminalis assets.

Not failure.

Intentional reshaping.

Substations are re-weighting load to build selective redundancies around Skyveil hubs and drain capacity from our districts.” Reika threw the continental grid onto the main display.

Power, visualized as living rivers of light, bent and braided into new paths.

High-priority corridors brightened around guild zones; dark basins began to form around ours.

The artistry would have been beautiful if it weren’t a vise.

“Timeline to isolate?” I asked.

“At this rate, eighteen hours until they can cold-shoulder the vast majority of our facilities without triggering automatic government alarms,” Chen said.

“She’s leaving us a corridor to surrender.” Markets, meanwhile, did what markets do when they smell conflict.

Rose’s station showed arcs of red and green whipping across exchanges.

“Investors are retreating to cash and anything labeled ‘Aetherite core infrastructure,'” she said, hair catching the emergency light as she skimmed feeds.

“Air carriers and legacy energy are falling through the floor.

If this signal holds for half a day, we’ll get macro pressure independent of the blockade.” This was what Marcus Stormwind and Elena Brightforge had learned from their predecessors: don’t fight the rails-move the ground.

Control the choke points of energy and transport and make the superior technology irrelevant by starving it of the basics.

Unfortunately for them, we had stopped building our future on other people’s foundations months ago.

“Reika,” I said, already feeling the discipline of preparation settle into my bones, “initiate Protocol Seven.” Her hands moved.

The room changed.

Across a hundred feeds, Aetherite collars blinked from standby to live, their containment rings humming as they laced space to space.

We had installed the hardware quietly for weeks-warehouse roofs, secured sub-basements, repurposed hangars-under plausible contracts and boring names.

Now the collars woke and tuned themselves, and the air inside each ring shimmered as if a heat mirage had learned geometry.

“Enhanced gate network coming online,” Reika said, the calm of competence returning to her voice.

“Western trunks first.

Inter-continental spines in ninety seconds.” At the same time, a different color spread across our facility map: the indigo of Aetherite micro-generators spooling to resonance.

One by one, our plants and command nodes lit their own suns.

Where Elena carved hollows in the public grid, our icons held steady.

Where she would eventually cut, we would yawn.

“Energy independence modules at seventy-one percent of planned footprint,” Chen added.

“Remaining units inbound.

Western clinics and municipal services prioritized per plan.” Cargo flows shifted immediately, not with the violence of a dam break but with the confidence of a river remembering its old bed.

Pallets vanished from a gate room at Nysa and arrived, tick-perfect, in a bonded bay under Avalon.

Inspection corridors built for wings did not apply to circles that refused to cross the sky.

Skyveil’s blockade didn’t break.

It simply became irrelevant.

“Jin, Kali,” I said, opening the western link, “execute the demonstration.” The hangar in their feed looked nothing like yesterday’s war room.

They had turned it into a stage for a way out: white floors, clean sightlines, and a ring that made the air inside it look like water seen from below.

Technicians in dark uniforms checked anchor points and diagnostic trees; the ouroboros sigil along the collar’s rim pulsed like a heartbeat.

“Demonstration commencing,” Jin said, the rare grin on his face the honest kind.

He had the look of a man who loved both politics and physics and had just found a way to win with both.

Kali didn’t smile.

She was the quiet heartbeat at his shoulder, hands flicking through security overlays and load curves.

“Warm the field with a dummy draw,” she told a tech.

“We’re not letting Luminalis spike us on the first impression.” “Dummy draw live,” the tech confirmed.

“Then send it,” Jin said.

A cargo container with our mark rolled into the collar.

The air inside the ring deepened, went glossy, and then-no sound, no flash-it wasn’t there.

The adjacent feed, halfway across the continent, blinked, and the same container slid out onto a platform dusted with morning light.

Total transit time: the time between blinks.

A second container followed, then a third bound for a coastal clinic straining under yesterday’s blackout.

We sent power packs the size of suitcases after it-the kind that could run critical care for twelve hours even if every line around it went dead.

Local staff in municipal vests cheered when the lights steadied.

It was a better advertisement than anything Rose could commission.

“Public reaction-” Rose broke off, then laughed once in disbelief.

“There isn’t precedent.

Every comm line is saturated.

Transportation stocks are in freefall across exchanges.

Governments are pinging me for regulatory briefings.

Half my inbox is ‘what would it cost to connect this city?’ The other half is ‘how fast can you ship a collar?'” On another day we might have staged this slower, with friendlier camera angles and three think-tanks to frame the conversation.

Today, Skyveil had made sure every camera was already watching.

The comms chimed again.

Marcus Stormwind took our main screen.

He looked exactly as the files had promised: late forties by appearance, military hair, a face that had learned how to hold still while a fighter jet did something extraordinary.

The Skyveil uniform he wore found a way to be both corporate and martial, and in anyone else that would have been a costume.

On him it looked like a decision.

“Arthur Nightingale,” he said, and left the niceties on the floor.

“We need to discuss our situation.” “Marcus,” I answered, polite, letting him choose whether that courtesy felt like respect or a warning.

“Enjoying the show?” His eyes ticked in the way of a man who noticed everything and admitted nothing.

“Your cost curves for gate transit are… impressive.

Your deployment footprint, however, looks limited, and your maintenance curve will look uglier when you’re running civilian volume.” “For now,” I agreed.

“Cost curves improve with scale.

Maintenance curves improve with practice and redundancy.

You know the math.” “I do,” he said, leaning forward a degree.

“Which is why I’m calling.

Elena and I believe there is space for settlement before this escalates further.” He chose the word carefully.

Escalates.

He had been a soldier long enough to know how fragile infrastructure becomes when pride takes the field.

“I listen to reasonable proposals,” I said.

“Territorial division,” he said without throat-clearing.

“We maintain control of atmospheric and conventional transport across agreed regions.

You run gate networks in others.

Elena proposes matching arrangements for energy-Luminalis holds the legacy grid where it is entrenched; your micro-generation serves places that opt in.” It was tidy, rational, and entirely designed to keep two guilds relevant in a world where their best value proposition had become habit rather than necessity.

Under a different sky, on a different morning, it would have been a decent compromise.

“The problem with lines on maps,” I said, “is that clients don’t keep their needs inside them.

When someone in your territory sees they can move a pallet for a hundredth of the cost in a hundredth of the time, how will you explain that ‘territorial integrity’ requires them to be poor on purpose?” “You’re not interested in coexistence,” he said, not accusing-diagnosing.

“I’m interested in progress,” I said.

“Artificial scarcity is not a business model I intend to preserve.” “And if we refuse your progress?” I gestured toward the room, where gates continued to hum and our facilities continued to glow.

“Then you’ll discover that fighting technological drift is like fighting gravity.

You can build scaffolds and call them skies for a while.

But when the weight shifts, it shifts.” His mouth tightened by one millimeter.

“Very well,” he said, and cut the line before I could see whether he exhaled.

‘He’ll be back,’ Luna said, as if we had not already decided that.

‘But not alone.

He’ll want Elena on the screen, and he’ll want to arrive with a demonstration of teeth.’ ‘Good,’ I said.

‘The remaining guilds will read the tape.

Let them see we didn’t win because the other side forgot how to fight.’ “Sir.” Reika stepped into the well again, posture all alert lines.

“Energy spikes at clustered Luminalis nodes.

Two Skyveil long-range platforms climbing to altitudes normally reserved for defense drills.

We’re also seeing chatter on a private Skyveil band that maps to emergency doctrine.” “They’re going to try one big swing,” Rose said.

“Market optics.

Political optics.

Last chance to frame this as ‘reckless upstart threatens stability’ rather than ‘old monopolies block progress.'” “Prepare for maximum escalation,” I said, and I did not raise my voice.

“Full deployment.

Every redundancy live.

Gate traffic staggered across more lanes than we like.

Energy storage topped and isolated.

Chen, if they throw a frequency spike into any district we just lit, I want our micro-grids to take the hit and keep the hospitals steady.” “Already re-tuning,” Chen said.

“We can ride through their dirtiest tricks without tripping state failsafes.” “Jin, Kali,” I added on a private channel, “assume Skyveil will try to demonstrate interdiction on a live run.

No heroics.

If their hardware gets too close, route around and publish the reroute in under a minute.

Make their attempt look like a triviality, not a cliffhanger.” Kali’s voice came first: “Copy.

We’re seeding three decoy manifests to burn their cycles.” Jin followed, lighter: “And keeping the real cargo boring.” The command center settled into that high, taut quiet that serious rooms achieve when every person knows both their job and the symmetry of the moment.

Outside, the pale edge of dawn had become full light filtered by storm-gray poured over glass.

On the big board, Skyveil’s rings shifted, pushing closer to two of our suburban gate rooms as if physical proximity could change the economics of space.

Luminalis’s rivers of light braided tighter, trying to starve a handful of our facilities where we hadn’t yet installed micro-generation.

For the first time since the morning began, I felt the tickle of adrenaline-the body’s way of respecting an opponent who had chosen not to be stupid.

“This is it,” Rose said softly, not for drama but because narration steadies hands.

“They have one chance to make the world afraid of the new thing.” “Then we make the world bored by it,” I said.

“Bored is safer than impressed.” The room moved.

Gates sang.

Batteries filled.

The grid tried to turn away, and we refused to go dark.

Tomorrow, the story would say Marcus Stormwind and Elena Brightforge mounted a dawn assault with all the discipline their legends deserved.

It would say they threw the weight of two empires at a machine that no longer ran on their fuel.

It would say they learned what everyone else would now learn, one by one-when the future arrives on rails that are intrinsic instead of owned, you cannot blockade it.

You can only decide how fast you stop pretending the old roads are enough.