Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 226: Chapter 226: The Broadcast (2)

Chapter 226: The Broadcast (2)

It was eight in the evening. Any normal guy would either be eating dinner or getting ready to sleep. After a long day at work, you expect sleep and rest.

You don’t expect anyone to hack into your electronic devices. And that was exactly what happened. They had hijacked the entire global network.

Every holographic screen, every terminal, every public display in thirteen Bastions cut out and came back with a picture of a war room table.

Lord Commander Helion Goldmane stood there.

"Six weeks ago," he said.

"I had accused the Capital for attacking my students. Tonight I am going to stop making accusations, and start handing you evidence."

He reached down and lifted the cage onto the table with one hand.

"This is an iron transport cage. It was recovered nine hours ago, six kilometers north of my wall, by my people."

He turned it.

"It has Bastion One central works foundry mark and a Senate procurement crest. Serial number four one seven, dash, zero zero nine, dash, two."

He set it down.

"There are eight more. They are sequential. They are sitting in my courtyard, and any Bastion that wishes to send an inspector to photograph them is welcome to do so at my expense."

He let the silence run and the silence was loud.

"Sixty-one live Wildlands beasts were shipped in these cages across four hundred miles of open territory. They were released upwind of a civilian construction site at half past two this morning. Two hundred and five unranked workers. Masons. Riggers. Cooks."

His voice did not rise, and that was the frightening part.

"Not soldiers. Not Awakeners. Cooks."

He looked into the lens.

"Anonymity cannot erase guilt. They believed that when the blood dried, some Senator would rise before the chamber and call it an unfortunate tragedy. Beasts roam the Wildlands. The Wildlands are dangerous. There is no court on this continent that would dare name it murder. Cowardice was mistook for Cleverness."

He gestured, and two Vanguard Knights brought the prisoner forward.

"That is not the part I want you to understand."

The Cultist was hauled into frame, and every screen in thirteen Bastions filled with a man in a stained crimson robe with the black sun tattooed up the side of his neck.

"There were nine handlers driving those beasts," Helion said. "Seven were mercenaries. Two were priests of the Church of the Eternal Eclipse."

The chamber behind him was silent.

"This man required no coercion. He has spoken at length, and every answer points to the same truth. This operation was a combined feat of the Church and the Capital. Two names were acquired. Approved on Capital authority. Written on Capital paper."

He stepped forward.

"I want every Bastion to hear this. The Church of the Eternal Eclipse. The monsters who have burned your districts, stolen your children, and torn open rifts beneath your feet for a century. They did not force their way into our government. Someone within humanity’s own government handed them a place on the requisition form."

He raised a hand.

"I will not give you a name. I possess proof of the operation. I do not possess proof of the hand that authorized it. I will not condemn a man with suspicion simply because it is convenient. That is the weapon of cowards. I have no intention of wielding it."

Then he stepped aside.

Behind him walked ten people.

Draven, Aegon, Reina, Estella, Lucien, Nyx, Natalie, Cole, Lyra, and Bram with his arm strapped across his chest.

"You thought you buried these children," Helion said. "They went into the dark six weeks ago because a project had to be finished without a fleet dropping on top of it."

He looked at the camera.

"Behold the dawn of a new age. The project is complete. Fifty miles of the northern plains now breathe clean air once more. The curse that chained Humanity to shrinking walls has been broken. For more than a hundred years, we survived. From this day onward, we reclaim."

A pause.

"So they are done hiding."

---

In Bastion Six, Gunther Stillbane watched from a half-rebuilt command center with his boots on the desk.

He got up so fast the chair went over.

"That is my boy!" he roared at a room full of startled officers, pointing at Bram on the screen. "That giant right there! Look at him! Arm in a sling and still standing at the front, that is Bastion Six blood in him, I do not care where he was born!"

"He is from Bastion Seven, sir."

"He bakes bread, Vinicius, he is from everywhere. Somebody get me a line to Goldmane."

Bastion Nine was thinking if it was too late to send an inspector. Now that the truth was out, they could not afford to remain neutral anymore.

---

The atmosphere at Bastion One was as cold as ice. Elder Isolde Renwick watched the whole broadcast.

She had given almost all of the information to them herself. She was the type who believed war is not an option. But in this world where power rules, War is always an option.

It was still different, hearing it said out loud to thirteen Bastions, with a cage on the table and a Cultist on his knees.

’He did exactly what he told me he would,’ she thought. ’He did not touch a single asset and did not name a single man. It was a gamble and the gamble paid well.’

---

The Capital could not answer to these accusations right at the moment. After about six hours, they were ready.

The response was drastic. At two in the morning, every grain ship for Bastion 7 turned in the water, every transport of the grain was stopped. The Capital had made the decision and that was to use every method to prevent Bastion Seven grow any further.

And if there is no food, the people would be hungry. If the people are hungry, they will rebel. Rebellion means questioning the authorities. Riots. Chaos. Yes! The Capital was doing exactly what the Church wanted without even getting their hands dirty.

Humanity was divided due to personal differences.

Helion read the reports and his resolution strengthened further. The strongest man or not, he was righteous and the epitome of truth. He had to make those cold decisions.

Then he laughed, once, with no humor in it whatsoever.

"They have done it," he said.

Lord Tokks looked up. "Commander?"

"Kest argued the Hawks out of a fleet." Helion set the notice down.

"He knows the importance of grains. The leverage they hold over all the thirteen Bastions. The decision they made was a warning to every other Bastion, who are dependent on their food. A warning that says if you support Bastion Seven, you shall suffer the same fate!"

He tapped the paper.

"And tonight, in temper, in front of every Bastion on this continent, Vast picked up that lever and used it to hit a city that just proved they gave a requisition form to the Eclipse."

"That is good for us," Tokks said slowly.

"That is excellent for us," Helion said. "In eighteen months."

He looked around the room.

"Somebody tell me what it is tonight."

Nobody had to. Sella did it, in a courtyard, out loud, without being asked.

The crews had come back to a hero’s welcome. They had eaten a hot meal and had been told by half the city that they had saved it.

Then somebody had come running with the news about the ships, and Sella had sat down on a bench with a piece of chalk and started doing sums on the flagstones.

"Reserve stores are ninety days at full ration," she said. "Call it a hundred and forty if we cut it, and we will cut it, because that is what always happens."

She wiped a number out with her thumb.

"Winter wheat wants a hundred and twenty days in the ground before it is worth anything. And that is if you have got seed, and a plough team, and topsoil, and I have been out there, love, and what is out there is moss."

She looked up.

"That ground is not going to feed anybody until next autumn at the earliest. Probably the one after."

Halvers stood with his arms folded and said nothing.

"So the tower is right," Sella said. "The tower is the correct answer. It is just twelve months late for the question they have asked us tonight."

---

Draven stood alone in the villa courtyard well after midnight.

The World Tree glowed in the dark and the nine spirits moved slow through her branches, and the air in that walled garden was the cleanest on the continent.

She was four days old. She could give one leaf every seven days.

He turned the small glass vial over in his fingers.

[Heartwood Accelerant. Compresses natural maturation cycles. Effect is permanent and irreversible.]

Five months of showing up every single day. A hundred and fifty-five sign-ins, most of them junk, one of them a bottle in his hand on the exact night the Capital cut the food off.

’A hundred and forty days of stores,’ he thought.

’A hundred and twenty days for wheat, in soil that does not exist yet.’

He looked up into the canopy at a tree that was supposed to take decades.

’And one bottle that says a sapling does not have to grow at the speed of a sapling.’

The Warden drifted down out of the branches and stopped in front of him, deep green shot through with gold, and looked at the vial in his hand.

It did not say anything.

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