Chapter 157: Nova Unleashed

Nova Corps left Reserve Nine with three hundred and twelve prisoners.

The rescue convoy could carry one hundred and eighty.

Doctor Smoke solved the arithmetic by taking control of Neva’s own transports. She tested every driver for contract marks, sedated the loyal enforcers and turned freed borrowers who still remembered the routes into drivers instead.

"Can they drive armoured vehicles?" Martin asked.

"One operated mining equipment. One drove freight. The third says he can learn."

"That is not certification."

"Neither is prison."

The convoy moved.

Grace rode the rear platform, shielding it from the guards giving chase. Every blocked strike fed Wrathbound Bangle a little more force, and she spent the reserve with care, not on the bodies chasing them but on the tunnel roof at their backs. Three strikes brought down a controlled collapse the moment the last vehicle cleared it.

"Paladins usually protect sacred ground," Eli said from his stretcher.

"This ground was ugly."

"Evil sacred ground, then."

"I may recruit you into my religion."

Doctor Smoke pressed a sedative patch against his neck before he could keep talking.

"Threat neutralised," she said, and didn’t sound sorry about it at all.

Damien rode in the first vehicle with Martin’s operation map spread open between them. House Twelve had cleared its nursery and pressed into the assault. House Three had regrouped. Houses Six and Ten were still fighting, small red knots on the map that refused to go still. The moving authority was secure. The Ledger Citadel had sealed every physical entrance it had.

Vera’s seal showed nine minutes.

"We cannot take four targets and cross the city in nine minutes," Martin said.

"We don’t need the teams to finish." Damien didn’t look up from the map. "We need each authority disconnected."

He opened the channel to the remaining commanders.

"Stop pursuing leaders. Take the anchors. If an anchor can’t be removed, isolate it from the Citadel. Arrests come after the network is blind."

At House Six, Neva had packed the anchor chamber with civilians and armed every prisoner with a forced-attack contract. Daria reached it before the convoy had even cleared the surface.

Her Elemental Deity Class shifted colour the moment she crossed the threshold. Water wrapped itself around raised weapons and held them still. Earth climbed ankles and locked feet to the floor. Wind swept Doctor Smoke’s neutraliser through the room in a single breath, corner to corner. Fire drew the heat straight out of the contract seals without so much as reddening a wrist.

For a heartbeat, all four elements worked apart. Then, all at once, they worked together, and the forced attackers folded to the ground alive, one after another, like puppets with their strings cut gently instead of severed.

Daria found the anchor wired straight into the building’s mana supply. Pulling it clean would kill the life-support wards on the medical floor above. She stood over it a moment, weighing that.

"I need a replacement source," she said, mostly to herself.

She lifted the Fourfold Mana Heart from around her neck and pressed it into the empty socket as the anchor came free. Its stored reserve flowed straight into the wards without so much as a flicker of loss upstairs. It had been her reward, hard-won and rare, and she gave it up without a backward glance.

"House Six disconnected," she reported.

At House Ten, Hamari stepped into a courtyard strung with suspended contract mirrors. Every bullet she fired would bounce straight back toward some borrower chained below. The Neva manager stood behind the display, smiling, and invited her to try.

Hamari lowered the rifle.

Armament Regina had never needed ammunition to begin with.

She read the courtyard instead: broken chains, loose bolts, fallen weapons scattered across the stone. Forty pieces of metal rose around her at once. Stillpoint Lenses charted paths that never once crossed a mirror’s surface, and the improvised armaments flew sideways, curved behind columns, and sliced through the suspension wires like thread.

The mirrors came down face first, one crash after another until the courtyard went quiet.

Her rifle settled back into her hands.

One shot broke the anchor.

"House Ten disconnected," she reported. "Manager has developed a strong interest in surrender."

House Twelve’s nursery evacuation stalled over a child who refused to leave without a stuffed green bird. Lieutenant Sera Noll halted an entire regional raid to search three rooms for it, found the bird wedged behind a crib, carried the child out herself, and then caught the moving authority’s commander by the collar when he tried to slip past disguised among the parents.

House Three remained the problem.

Its officers had withdrawn cleanly, exactly as planned, but Neva had packed the abandoned site with explosives and reconnected its anchor through a hidden secondary line. If that line was still live when Vera’s seal expired, House Three alone could restore the entire network behind them.

Damien changed the convoy’s route.

"The Citadel is west," Martin said.

"House Three is on the way, if we make it one."

Eli cracked one eye open from the stretcher. "There’s an old freight tunnel under Milner Avenue."

"Your Class is sealed," Doctor Smoke said, not looking up from his bandages.

"My memory’s annoyingly healthy, though."

He described a route too narrow for anything armoured. Damien sent the main convoy on toward the Citadel and took a smaller vehicle through the tunnel instead, Grace and Hamari with him. Daria stayed behind with the prisoners. Doctor Smoke stayed with Eli, mostly because he’d already tried to sit up twice and clearly intended a third attempt.

House Three’s manager kept his eyes on the public road. He never once considered that Nova Corps might come up through his basement wall instead.

The explosives went off anyway, right on schedule, just not the way he’d planned.

Damien used Shadow Dash through the deepest dark of the basement, crossed three hundred metres in the space of a breath, and reached the trigger operator before the man’s hand had finished closing around the device. He cut it free before it could fire.

Grace caught the first blast on her shield and let Wrathbound answer for her, driving the charged force straight into the anchor’s protective casing until it split.

Hamari threw him a registered spear without so much as looking his way.

Damien caught it out of the air and pinned the secondary line to the floor before it could retract.

Mina cut it the rest of the way from somewhere safe and far away.

"House Three disconnected," Damien reported.

Every fixed authority on the map turned grey, one after another, until only one point remained.

The Ledger Citadel, still burning red.

Vera’s copied seal had four minutes left.

The Citadel sent a destruction order the instant its own clock ran out.

Mina met it head-on through the borrowed authority.

➤[Order disputed]

➤[Regional consensus unavailable]

➤[Destruction delayed: 00:04:00]

Nova Corps converged on the western financial district, where the Citadel hid beneath an unfinished banking tower surrounded by ordinary offices that had no idea what stood beneath their floors. Its entrance had no door at all, only a black wall that recognised nothing but debt.

Mina arrived carrying contracts gathered from every house in the network and pressed them flat against the wall.

"We’re here to settle the account," she said.

The wall opened for her like it had been waiting.

Benny Korr stood on the other side, white gloves restored, a detonator in one hand and something close to confidence on his face right up until he saw exactly who had followed him home.

His smile faltered the moment he recognised every person he’d once helped trap.

"You followed very well," Damien said.

Grace hit him before he could answer, and Doctor Smoke had him cuffed while he was still capable of breathing, if not smiling.

The loan branch’s first collector had now been captured twice. This time, nobody carrying a clock knew where he’d been taken.

Beyond him, deep in the tower’s roots, the Citadel shuddered.

Something enormous was assembling itself out of everything Region 21 had ever lost.