The Extra's Rise - Chapter 957

957: Aftershock 957: Aftershock The blue garden held for one more breath.

Then my slate buzzed once against my hip, a quiet but insistent summons back to the war.

‘North: anomaly on your ring.’ Rose’s fingers tightened on my arm.

“Already?” “They’re testing the leash,” I said.

“Let’s get back.” We stepped out of the greenhouse and straight into Ouroboros ops.

The quiet intimacy of the garden was replaced by the low hum of reality anchors and the smell of ozone and hot tea.

Cecilia stood before the main map of the world, which was now dotted with dozens of red pins.

“We cut the spine,” she said without preamble.

“Now we break the legs.” She tapped a satellite image showing a desolate canyon.

“Evelyn’s last spell left a thread.

It points here.

A pocket city, anchored by a fissure.

The Order never disbanded.

They just hid sideways.” Vyr, her hand resting on the hilt of her blade, nodded sharply.

“My teams are prepped.

We can hold the breach or push through on your mark.” “The intel is solid,” Elias added, pointing to a schematic.

“Their power is centralized.

Four key anchors.

If they fall, the city’s infrastructure goes dark.” Cecilia’s eyes met mine, hard and clear.

“This is Emberfall.

We burn them out before they regrow.” “Then let’s get to work,” I said.

We moved the moment the plan was set.

Our first cut was a textile mill two districts off the river, its third basement bricked over at the back.

The ward paint on the bricks looked like a simple mildew stain.

The seam in reality behind it was as clean as a fresh lie.

“Redeemers first,” Rachel said, her voice calm.

Two of her order stepped forward, their lanterns held high.

They opened the shutters a hand-width, and a wave of pure, clean light washed over the brickwork.

The air lost its sticky, cloying quality.

Vyr’s squad took the corners of the narrow corridor, weapons ready.

I drew a circle in the air with my finger and cut a door without a sound.

Inside: shelves of ledgers and a chalkboard that had taught a thousand people how to move money without the magistrates ever noticing.

Three Radiant clerks and one mage in a plain robe with wicked-looking fingers.

He hissed and snapped a ring on his thumb.

A sloth bind, heavy and suffocating as a wet wool blanket, rolled toward us.

I laid down a sheet of Lucent Harmony, and the bind forgot how to be convincing.

A simple Wind Lock construct pinned the mage’s stance.

A Kinetic Lash plucked the ring from his hand and sent it skittering across the floor to Rachel, who caught it with a pair of tongs and dropped it into a heavy copper jar.

Reika, quiet as ever, wrote two small, shimmering curves in the air; any hidden doors in that room stopped pretending they were walls.

Rose walked to the chalkboard, grew three small blue roses, and wrote the single word ‘audit’ across the neat columns of numbers.

The math curdled, the columns becoming a confession.

“Two minutes,” Vyr said in my ear.

“First street is quiet.

West reports contact.” “On to the next,” I said.

We hit seven more rooms before noon.

They were insidious, woven into the city’s fabric.

A river-barge office that funneled ‘donations’ to their forges; a shrine to a forgotten god painted over as a tea hall; an old city armory with freshly oiled weapons on its racks.

The bathhouse was the most clever.

The steam that filled its chambers was laced with a subtle ward of misdirection and apathy, designed to make patrons and inspectors alike forget any irregularities they might notice.

Rachel’s Redeemers had to vent the entire chamber with cones of pure, dry wind before Rose could find the anchor-a single, enchanted tile at the bottom of the cold plunge pool.

She created a paradox where the tile had cracked a year ago, flooding its own spell with harmless water and breaking the illusion.

By midday, the updates were rolling in from across the globe.

West chimed in: Jin had taken three port caches in as many hours, no civilian bleed.

Seraphina sent a single, perfect line from the East-‘two sanctums, iced’-which meant she’d done it without leaving a trace.

Rachel logged seventeen sloth rings bagged and three sacrificial pits un-stuck.

Cecilia’s messages kept coming, tight and efficient: court warrants appearing where we needed them, flight paths opening like obedient doors, budget lines approved before we could even ask.

As we prepared to breach an old school for handlers, the ring on my finger warmed again.

Not heat.

Pressure, like someone thumbing a fresh bruise.

On the table back in ops, the slender bone box Erebus had left clicked once, an audible tick in the quiet room.

His voice entered my mind across the link.

“They are testing the tether on the blood,” he said.

“Not with power.

With math.” “Cut it,” I said.

“Already writing a counter-equation,” he answered.

“But it is yours to refuse, not mine.” I stepped aside into a quiet stairwell as Vyr’s team prepared the entry.

This required a delicate touch.

I wrapped my pocket in two overlapping pages of Grey, isolating it from the primary reality.

I laid a sheet of Harmony over the Grey to keep the pocket calm and stable.

Then, I reached out with my Soul Resonance-softly, carefully-brushing only the pattern of the magical tether, not the vial’s toxic contents.

My Gifts let me hear other people’s tricks.

I listened to the knot the Order had tied onto the vial-an address, a signature, and a way to count the answers-and I simply wrote a new name on top of theirs.

Mine.

Then I threw a decoy, a Grey echo of the vial’s signature into an empty fold of space.

If the tether called again, it would be calling a wall.

The pressure on my ring eased.

The bone box back in ops clicked once, then went still.

“Done,” Erebus said.

“Your refusal was polite.

They will get angry.” “They can mail their complaints to the court,” I said, and cut the link.

The afternoon took us to a branch that tried to bite back: a low Radiant cell hidden beneath a warehouse, the brick floor painted with a perception filter.

Six mages and one binder with ugly coordination.

They threw a full nine-circle volley the second we stepped through-a net of chain lightning and a dozen heat-snaps wrapped in thick, heavy sloth reins.

I led with a Stonework construct, and the floor answered my request, rising into a solid shield that absorbed the brunt of their attack.

The move gave Vyr a clean lane down the middle of the room.

She took it like war was her day job, which it is.

Rose created a simple paradox-‘no echo’-across their half of the room, and their second, perfectly timed volley of spells tripped over the lingering energy of their first.

Reika slid three characters onto her own skin and hit their flank like a hammer.

Rachel’s lanterns combed the last of the sloth-stain out of the air and made the room honest again.

One of them-the binder-reached for a last-ditch oath with both hands, his ring flaring with black, sacrificial light.

Before the oath could finish forming, I stole its shape with Soul Resonance, filing the bad idea away in my head for later study.

Then I drew a short, straight line with Valeria, and the ring fell from his finger in two clean pieces.

“It’s done,” I said.

“Hands behind your heads.” As Vyr’s team cuffed the dazed mages, Rose and I approached the freshly painted shrine at the back of the vault.

“The ink is mixed with consecrated sloth,” she said quietly, her nose wrinkled in distaste.

“It’s designed to seep into the building’s foundation over time.” I nodded, noting its placement.

“Right on top of a major leyline intersection.

They weren’t just praying here.

They were trying to poison the city’s magic.” We took the ledgers and the box of profane ritual tools they didn’t want us to touch.

Vyr cuffed the last of them, and a Redeemer tagged the room: CLEANSE – 48H.

People obey boring signs.

The day rolled on.

Branches went dark.

Then, just as the last target was secured, my ring went tight against my skin again.

This time it wasn’t a test.

It was attention.

Not the Demon Lord’s-it was too clean for that.

A feminine voice spoke in the room, using no air.

‘You took something heavy,’ Alyssara said, her tone calm and amused.

Cecilia’s jaw tightened.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed.

Rose stood a little straighter and didn’t let go of my sleeve.

“I did,” I said.

“You should stay away from it.” ‘I won’t,’ she replied.

There was a beat of silence.

Then, a plain, terrible truth I did not like: ‘I found a way to kill Lust.

You’ll hate it.’ The line cut.

No echo.

No trace.

Alyssara had always been good at hanging up first.

“Later,” I said to the room, pushing the thought away.

“We finish the work.” Back at Ouroboros, the map finally looked the way I wanted it to.

Red pins gone.

Black pins bagged for evidence.

Blue pins posted for the courts.

I took a breath and felt the exhaustion of the day settle into my bones.

“Go see her,” Cecilia said, not looking up from her stack of reports.

“She’ll say she’s fine.

She’s not.” “She’s more than fine,” I said.

“But I will.” I stepped out and took the quiet hall to the greenhouse that never makes the tour.

The door opened on my first touch.

Blue roses.

Night air.

Rose standing with her back to me, her shoulders finally down for the first time all day.

I didn’t say anything.

I walked up and wrapped my arms around her waist from behind, and she leaned into me like she’d been waiting for that exact angle.

Her mana was heavier now.

Cleaner.

Mid Radiant, steady as a pulse.

“You smell like ink and ozone,” she said.

“You smell like home,” I answered.

We stood like that until the palace clocks ticked through a minute we could keep, the silence a shield against the day’s noise and the promises of tomorrow’s fights.

My ring was quiet against her wrist, a silent reminder that we were holding something even a Demon Lord would notice.

But for tonight, the work was done.

Her mother had tried to make her a tool, a pen to write her own ambitions.

But standing here, in the quiet strength of the garden she had made, Rose was the author of her own story.

And I was just glad to be on the same page.