The summit was quiet—too quiet for a room filled with artificers.
Vehrmath's observatory dome, once a hollowed guildwatch tower, now hummed with purple-tinted pulse-light refracting off its crystal canopy. Benedict Ashcroft stood at the head of the makeshift table, arms folded, face unreadable. Around him, nine chairs were filled, some by familiar faces. Others by ghosts in flesh.
Jorren Vale sat first. Eldest disciple. Traditionalist. His robes were pristine, his eyes harder than when they'd last met.
Lys Kelthorn lounged beside him, tail flicking lazily, violet pupils sharp. Her smile was the kind meant to be seen as diplomatic—never genuine.
Sethar Yin leaned forward, fingers drumming. A dozen rune tattoos glowed faintly beneath his sleeves. "What I want to know," he said, "is whether we're still students—or bystanders in a Benedict regime."
"No regime," Benedict said. "Just results."
"And who gets to define them?" Jorren asked. "You've destabilized leyline licensing, pulse routing, and magitek trade certs in twelve sectors."
"That's called progress."
"It's called erosion."
Arden Vel snorted, arms crossed from his place behind Benedict. "And here I thought erosion made mountains shift."
Lys' voice cut the air like a chilled wire. "Where is Vassian?"
Silence.
Then Benedict pulled a shard from his coat. A sliver of mirrored obsidian etched with collapsed runes.
"This is what's left of his personal command node. Found it three systems out, drifting in ghostspace. No life signs. No traceable core ID. He vanished after the Tower Accord was voided."
"You're saying he's dead?" Jorren asked.
"I'm saying he's off the board."
Sethar exhaled. "Or he's building a new one."
Eline Vort entered then, carrying a pulsemap wrapped in reinforced silk. She unrolled it across the table—hundreds of pulses marked in purple. And then… a few in grey-blue, flickering faintly near the eastern orbitals.
Unregistered. Mimic signals.
"Someone's running counterfeit networks," she said. "And they're good."
"Too good," Benedict added. "They're not just copying the tech—they're rewriting the code beneath it."
Lys leaned forward. "Pulse forgers?"
Eline shook her head. "No. Architects."
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Jorren did. "The Council is reconvening. The Eldest Masters will want a ruling. What you've done can't remain outside judgment."
Benedict nodded. "Good. Let them watch. Let them vote. But I don't need permission to fix what they broke."
"You used to believe in structure," Jorren snapped.
"No," Benedict said. "I believed in tools."
Outside, the pulse skyline of Vehrmath rippled across the horizon, casting violet threads that shimmered like veins of light through a breathing city.
Inside, the disciples of Calder Vance—divided now by ideology, by ambition, by time—sat around a table no longer meant for students.
Not all had spoken yet.
Nyssa Thornwall, quiet as ever, traced a silence-glyph onto the table's edge and whispered: "A system that moves without the masters… is a system that moves at all."
Lys exhaled through her nose, amused. "Careful, Nyssa. That almost sounded like support."
"It wasn't," Nyssa replied. "It was a warning."
A door hissed open at the far end of the chamber. Kael Idrun stepped in, wind-marked cloak fluttering as he adjusted his bracer. "Sorry I'm late. There was a spontaneous mana surge over the aqueduct towers. The kind that suggests someone's testing compression spells on pulse currents."
Sethar's eyes narrowed. "So it's not just mimicry. It's escalation."
Eline tapped a segment of the map. "See this zone? Rustbelt Ring. No leyline activity for twenty years. Now there's something new."
Benedict's bracer pulsed.
A new signal had lit up in the dead sectors. Not purple. Not grey-blue.
Black.
Encrypted. Compressed. Carrying recursive echoes.
He closed the alert. "The board's expanding."
"Then so is the war," said Arden.
Jorren stood slowly, gaze heavy with unease. "I hope you know what you're doing, Ashcroft. Because from here, this looks less like a system—and more like a storm."
Benedict looked over the room once more. The faces around him weren't all friends, but they were familiar. Skilled. Necessary.
"Then I hope you all remember how to build."
He reached behind him and pulled back the curtain from a side table. Beneath it was a new prototype—a relay stone split into quintet harmonics, shaped like a helix of spun silver and obsidian, humming gently with a pulse so subtle it was barely perceptible.
"This is a compression stabilizer," he said, "for the next evolution of the pulse network. It doesn't just broadcast or receive. It adapts."
Lys stepped forward cautiously. "Adaptive relays?"
"Self-correcting, self-routing, and eventually—self-aware," Benedict said. "This isn't just infrastructure anymore. It's learning."
Sethar gave a low whistle. "You're building a nervous system for the planet."
"For the system," Benedict corrected. "Not bound to one place. Not even one world."
Nyssa stared at the relay core, her gaze distant. "If it adapts… what happens when it no longer needs us?"
Benedict didn't answer. Instead, he tapped the relay, and the faint violet hue shimmered into a fractal pattern—one echoing the entire pulse lattice across Vehrmath and beyond.
"This is where we're headed. Evolution isn't a choice. It's a direction."
Eline stepped beside him, adjusting her own bracer to sync briefly with the node. A cascade of ghost signals rippled over the map—some new, some familiar, and some still without origin.
Kael folded his arms. "So we're not just responding anymore. We're outpacing the competition."
"Not outpacing," Benedict said. "Redefining."
Jorren scoffed. "And if this network of yours decides the competition is us?"
Benedict replied flatly, "Then we build again. Wiser. Stronger. That's what evolution does."
"Assuming we survive it," Lys murmured, casting a glance at the prototype.
Sethar nudged the edge of the relay casing with one boot. "You always had a flair for dramatic upgrades, Ashcroft. But this—this feels like you're holding a loaded wand with no safeties."
"Every invention starts that way," Benedict said. "What matters is where it points."
"And who's pulling the trigger," Kael added dryly.
Jorren exhaled and pulled out his own bracer.
"If we're going to survive this… we'd better get our hands dirty."
Eline nodded, smiling faintly. "Welcome back to the forge."
"Good," Benedict said, locking eyes with each of them in turn. "Because this time, we're not fixing the system."
"We're rewriting it."