The Extra's Rise - Chapter 735

735: Life and Death (5) 735: Life and Death (5) The New Year didn’t just flip a page-it stitched five banners into one.

From the mezzanine of Intelligence Command Alpha I watched Viktor’s intercepts coalesce into a single, breathing diagram.

Lines of money, materiel, and people flowed between organizations that had spent centuries competing by reflex.

Now they moved like organs sharing blood.

“Chronovant is pushing time-series research methods into Stratovate’s build teams,” Viktor said, the map brightening where blueprints gained predictive models.

“Terranova is provisioning Harmonyx with food security for mass events.

Pyronis is underwriting energy for the others’ labs.

And they’ve unified their strike capacity.” I zoomed the lattice down to see details-their governance layer, their knowledge graph, their personnel exchanges.

It wasn’t coordination anymore.

It was integration.

“They’ve built a genuine R&D commons,” I said.

“Not a memorandum-an engine.” Viktor flipped to a different threat surface.

“Counter-recruitment.

They’re approaching our people with endowed chairs, bespoke labs, and ‘no-teaching’ contracts.

Offers are customized to personal obsessions.

Eight percent touched; three percent tempted.

Highest pressure on Aetherite integration staff.” It was the right move if you believed talent chose stipends over scope.

We didn’t hire with money; we hired with meaning.

But you don’t win a war by assuming your values translate.

You show why they do.

“Open Project Renaissance,” I said.

The board lit: unlimited research budgets tied to safety and publication, not to politics; a guaranteed right to publish with exceptions only for active harm; lattice-backed provenance; and the thing no classical guild would ever offer-complete intellectual freedom with infrastructure to match.

A secure window opened: Princess Rachel, hair untidy from the hours, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that means the math just sang.

“Arthur, it works,” she said, turning her camera so floating sigils and crystalline apparatus threw soft light over her face.

“Aetherite amplification of magical analysis collapses research cycles.

Not just faster-qualitatively different.

The system learns where the proof will break before the experiment does.” “Show me the contour,” I said.

She overlaid two timelines.

The top-traditional magical research-staggered forward in careful, incremental steps.

The lower-lattice-assisted-curved smooth and steep.

“We’re using Aetherite to pre-solve a family of equations, then feeding those into rune constructions that traditionally required years of hand-tuning.

It gives us three gifts: rapid prototyping, predictive failure analysis, and trend-surfing-seeing the next useful question before your rival knows what they’re asking.” “Deployment?” “Six weeks to stand up core features,” she said, all precision.

“Three months to deep integration across disciplines.

But we should spool counter-espionage in parallel.

They’ll try to steal the tool once they realize we have it.” We layered Umbrythm over her lab like glass: decoy corpora, watermarking, honey protocols that tagged any exfiltration with a signature you could see from space, and a provenance chain that made stolen work hard to publish and easy to discredit.

I visited her that evening.

Equations hung like constellations; Aetherite cores pulsed at the room’s edge.

Rachel didn’t look up, because she didn’t need to to know I was there.

“We’re not merging magic and engineering,” she murmured, fingers dancing through a calculus of light.

“We’re inventing a third discipline that treats both as languages.” “Defensive implications?” I asked, hands on her shoulders as a new construct clicked into place with a low, satisfying chord.

“Transformative.

We can outrun Chronovant’s development velocity, flag dangerous lines before they metastasize, and model how their collaboration will strain.

They’ve built an orchestra.

We’re composing in four dimensions.” She finally glanced back, a grin edging into pride.

“I read the offers our people received.

Impressive money.

Constricting briefs.

They’re promising comfort.

We’re offering civilization.” Dr.

Chen chimed in from the operations bay, numbers to hand.

“Renaissance is live.

Retention at ninety-seven percent and rising.

‘Defections’ mostly junior staff who wanted to teach; we built them a pedagogical track by lunch.

Also-net inflow.

Chronovant lost twelve percent of its R&D headcount this fortnight.

Our inbound applications doubled after Rachel’s preprint hit the open server.” We didn’t just hold talent; we inverted the magnet.

Jin and Kali joined on a split screen-not from a lab, but from a hall packed with engineers, medics, teachers, and a handful of artists.

A hand-painted banner read TALENT COMMONS in block letters, and beneath it a smaller line in permanent marker: Work on what matters, with people who do.

“They’re circling through our people socially,” Jin said.

“Private dinners, ‘research salons,’ job offers couched as flattery.

We’re meeting them in the open.

Weekly commons-no stage fog, just demos and questions.

Pair every lab with a field rotation so no one forgets the faces behind the math.” Kali held up a slim booklet: the Research Third Path-our freedom-and-responsibility charter for work that touches lives.

“We wrote this together,” she said.

“Publication by default; safety trumps schedule; patient and citizen privacy as a hard boundary; red-team every advance before it touches production; disclose conflicts; disclose mistakes; fix in daylight.” He gestured to the crowd.

“Principals take questions from interns and volunteers.

We stream everything and leave up the hard parts.” “And we wired the room,” Kali added, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

“In a good way.

Honey docs, canaries, and provenance on decks.

If an ‘attendee’ forwards a deck to a hostile inbox, it signs their invite with a little blue comet.” She tapped a console; a private monitor filled with comet tails streaking toward known Alliance domains.

“We’re not here to punish.

We’re here to show that transparency is safer than secrecy.” They’d found their rhythm.

Jin’s gift for making the room bigger; Kali’s for making its edges hold.

Romance as ornament had died weeks ago; partnership as discipline was alive and visible in the way they finished each other’s plans rather than their sentences.

“Case in point,” Jin said, and a scientist took the mic-a rising Aetherite chemist we could not afford to lose.

“Chronovant offered me a lab named after me,” she said, cheeks pink with equal parts flattery and fury.

“No patient line of sight.

No disclosure.

I asked to keep teaching two days a month.

They said, ‘later.’ I told them we do it every Thursday now.

I thanked them and kept my badge.” Kali’s panel blinked-another comet.

She logged it without drama.

“We’ll send the stream link with our charter.” Viktor overlaid the alliance’s internal friction on the wall: Chronovant bristling at Pyronis’s rigid timelines, Stratovate begging for patience while Harmonyx pushed for splash, Terranova quietly advocating for long-term soil over short-term spectacle.

He traced a circle around the stress points.

“Sixty days to their first coordinated play,” he said.

“They’re scaling smart, but five cultures are five frictions.” “Then we press where they’re smooth and where they’re rough,” I said.

“Renaissance to outrun their labs.

Commons to outpull their offers.

ChronoSafe to keep time work honest.

Keystone to make sabotage a reroute.

GreenNet to starve famine threats.

Civic Signal to keep the narrative public.

Aegis to stay defensive and seen.” Rachel looked up again, catching the stack the instant it mattered.

“We’ll publish against their velocity,” she said.

“If they try to weaponize meaning, we show receipts.

If they try to race, we change the track.” “An aside,” Rose added from economics, voice warm with the pleasure of a graph behaving itself.

“Renaissance payroll looks like an indulgence.

It isn’t.

The Abundance Ledger shows value creation outpacing spend in two cycles.

When people aren’t guarding water and paying for illness, they invent.” Elias slid in with governance.

“Oversight bodies are seated.

The ombuds has already subpoenaed one of our own labs for a privacy lapse we self-reported yesterday.” “Good,” I said.

“If the teeth can’t bite us, no one will trust them to bite anyone.” We pushed more pins into the board, then pulled up the ready stacks: welcome packets for incoming researchers leaving the Alliance, community rotation schedules, publication calendars with red-team dates stamped in red because we mean it, a cross-guild ethics colloquium chaired by Curex and moderated by the ombuds, an open seminar co-taught by a Chronovant defector and a Skyveil pilot on error budgets in life-critical systems, and a line on the wall, written by Jin and inked by Kali: WE DON’T HOARD FUTURES.

WE BUILD THEM.

Project Renaissance extended across the lattice like a tide.

Rachel’s preprints hit open servers with reproducible kits.

Our mentorship marketplace paired senior researchers with first-year techs and union apprentices; field residencies put lab coats in clinics and on reservoir decks; and the commons mic stayed live until the last questioner wandered out with a badge application and a copy of the charter.

The Alliance had made the right move for the wrong world.

They’d wagered that you could bribe brilliance out of a purpose-built engine with stipends and titles.

What we offered wasn’t comfort, it was consequence: the ability to put your hands on work that altered the shape of a day for millions, under rules that kept you honest and resources that never ran dry.

Viktor’s sixty-day clock continued to tick in the corner of the wall, but the map around it kept changing color.

Where their arrows crossed, our circles grew.

Where their recruiters whispered, our rooms filled.

In labs and lecture halls and loading docks, people who might have left read the same line and decided to stay: Here, the work matters-and the receipts are public.