Chapter 66: Base Builder

Chapter 66: Chapter 66: Base Builder

At exactly midnight, the municipal power grid cut the feed to the Investment Guild.

Donald was standing in the Guild Master’s office on the fortieth floor when it happened. The quiet hum of the ventilation system died. The city lights outside the window kept glowing, but inside the TIG headquarters, everything went pitch black. The temperature immediately began to drop.

Julian Vane and the city’s corrupt elites were making good on their promise. The siege had begun.

Donald stood in the dark, his hands tucked into his pockets. He didn’t reach for a flashlight. He just tapped his temple and pulled up his internal interface.

The SSS+ System flared to life, casting a faint, golden glow across his face.

[Investor Tier: Silver]

[Current Balance: 38,000,000 System Credits]

[Accessing: Guild Infrastructure Investment...]

A glowing, three-dimensional wireframe blueprint of the forty-story headquarters materialized in his vision. The system flagged dozens of critical failures in red text: Power Offline. Water Severed. Defenses Null. Structural Damage Detected.

"Let’s get to work," Donald whispered to the empty room.

He didn’t need electricians or construction crews. He had capital. And the System didn’t care about municipal embargoes.

He highlighted the defunct basement generator on the wireframe.

[Available Upgrade: Municipal Generator -> Celestial Core Reactor (S-Rank)]

[Effect: Generates infinite, self-sustaining mana to power all facility functions. Completely severs reliance on external city grids.]

[Cost: -8,000,000 System Credits. Execute?]

Execute.

Deep in the subterranean levels of the building, a massive, suppressed shockwave echoed through the concrete. The sound was like a massive heartbeat. A split second later, the lights in the Guild Master’s office flickered back on.

But they weren’t the harsh, buzzing fluorescent lights of Sterling’s era. The light was warm, steady, and perfectly clean. The vents hissed as fresh, climate-controlled air—laced with the faint, energizing scent of ozone—flooded the room.

Donald smiled. He moved to the perimeter defenses.

Without guards, anyone could walk through the front doors. He highlighted the building’s exterior.

[Available Upgrade: Standard Security Wards -> Absolute Aegis Warding (S-Rank)]

[Effect: Projects an invisible, multi-layered kinetic and magical barrier over the entire property line. Automatically repels hostile intent. Grants Administrator complete control over entry/exit permissions.]

[Cost: -10,000,000 System Credits. Execute?]

Execute.

Outside, completely invisible to the naked eye, a dome of dense golden energy snapped over the forty-story skyscraper, anchoring itself into the bedrock. No corrupt Guild enforcers or stray mercenaries were getting inside without his express invitation.

Donald looked down at the wireframe again. A fortress was useless if it didn’t make its inhabitants stronger. He highlighted the massive, empty training wing on the second floor.

[Available Upgrade: Standard Gym -> Hyper-Density Training Matrix (A-Rank)]

[Effect: Installs variable gravity plating (up to 50x Earth gravity) and mana-density atmospheric controls. Exponentially increases physical and magical growth rates for all allied assets.]

[Cost: -4,000,000 System Credits. Execute?]

Execute.

Finally, he targeted the looted armory.

[Available Upgrade: Empty Racks -> Automated Mana-Forge (A-Rank)]

[Effect: Consumes ambient mana to passively fabricate standard-issue, highly durable B-Rank weaponry, armor, and healing consumables for Guild members.]

[Cost: -3,000,000 System Credits. Execute?]

Execute.

The golden wireframe flashed a brilliant, blinding white as the massive wave of system alterations finalized simultaneously.

[Infrastructure Upgrades Complete.]

[Total Expenditure: -25,000,000 System Credits.]

[Current Balance: 13,000,000 System Credits.]

Donald dismissed the screen. The golden light faded from his eyes.

He looked around the office. The deep crack running down the center of Sterling’s old mahogany desk was gone. The shattered observation window, broken during Kaelen’s rampage, was seamlessly repaired with pristine enchanted glass. The entire room felt alive, thrumming with a quiet, undeniable power.

Donald walked over to the leather couch, kicked off his boots, and went to sleep.

Evelyn woke up to the smell of fresh coffee and frying bacon.

She opened her eyes, instantly alert. She was lying in the massive bed of the executive suite on the thirty-ninth floor. For a second, she braced herself for the freezing cold she had expected. Aris had warned them the city was cutting the power at midnight.

But the room was perfectly warm. The digital clock on the nightstand read 8:00 AM.

Evelyn frowned. She climbed out of bed, wearing the loose sweatpants and t-shirt she had slept in. She walked into the suite’s private bathroom and turned the faucet.

Steaming hot, crystal-clear water immediately poured out.

"What the hell?" Evelyn muttered.

She quickly washed her face and walked out into the hallway. The moment she stepped out of her suite, she stopped.

The building felt different. The stale, corporate atmosphere that Sterling had cultivated for years was completely gone. The air was incredibly pure, heavily saturated with a faint, ambient mana that made her S-Rank core hum in pleasant synchronization.

She took the elevator down to the second floor, wanting to check the perimeter.

The elevator doors opened to the training wing. Evelyn stepped out and froze.

The empty, looted gym they had walked through yesterday was gone. The floor was plated in a strange, matte-black metallic alloy. Instead of standard wooden training dummies, a row of sleek, dark-metal combat androids stood dormant along the wall. Floating digital consoles rested near the entrance, displaying sliders for ’Gravity Manipulation’ and ’Mana Resistance’.

Evelyn walked slowly through the room, her hand trailing over the pristine, high-tech equipment. It was better than the Awakener Association’s private facilities. It was better than anything she had ever seen.

She hurried to the stairs and jogged down to the ground-floor lobby.

The obsidian reception desk was polished to a mirror shine. The shattered servers were replaced by sleek, humming data-towers.

And Donald was standing in the center of the lobby, holding a plate of bacon and eggs.

He was wearing a fresh black thermal shirt and his dark tactical pants, looking completely relaxed.

"Morning," Donald said, taking a bite of bacon. "I made breakfast. The executive kitchen is fully stocked."

Evelyn walked up to him, gesturing wildly at the immaculate, humming lobby around them.

"Donald," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a shocked whisper. "The power. The training wing. The water. Aris said we were embargoed. I went to sleep in a looted tomb, and I woke up in a sci-fi fortress. What did you do?"

"I told you I was going to do some remodeling," Donald smiled, offering her a piece of bacon from his plate.

Evelyn took it mechanically, still staring at the ceiling. "You can’t remodel a forty-story skyscraper in eight hours. There wasn’t a single construction crew! I didn’t hear a drill!"

"I used a very highly paid, extremely discreet team of underground contractors," Donald lied smoothly, not missing a beat. "I pay them a premium to work fast and stay invisible. As for the embargo? I had them sever the building from the municipal grid entirely."

Evelyn looked at him, completely bewildered. "Severed? Then how are the lights on?"

"We tapped into the city’s natural leylines," Donald said, spinning the narrative to cover the S-Rank Reactor sitting in the basement. "We’re running on pure ambient mana now. Dragonheart can threaten the Mayor and the power companies all they want. They can’t shut off the earth."

Evelyn slowly ate the bacon. She stared at Donald.

She was an S-Rank Valkyrie. She knew how magic worked. Tapping a leyline and completely overhauling a skyscraper overnight was physically and magically impossible without an army of A-Rank Enchanters.

But Donald had also forcefully evolved her core in a penthouse living room. He had dropped thirty-eight million credits on a single bet. And he had blocked a mutated monster with a golden shield.

Evelyn let out a breath, a disbelieving laugh escaping her lips.

"You’re terrifying, you know that?" Evelyn said, shaking her head. "Julian Vane thinks we’re sitting in the dark, starving. He doesn’t realize you just built a castle right under his nose."

"Exactly," Donald smiled, taking her hand and leading her back toward the elevator. "They want to play a proxy war? Let them. They’ll realize soon enough that nobody is getting through the front doors."

They stepped into the elevator, heading back up to the executive floor to eat.

"So," Evelyn said, leaning against the glass wall of the elevator. "We have the perfect base. We have the gear. But we still don’t have an army. It’s just you and me."

"Not for long," Donald replied. "We’re going to start hiring today. But we aren’t using the elite Guild networks. I want to go down to Sector 4. The slums. We’re going to find the people the Capital threw away."

Evelyn’s eyes lit up with fierce approval. Before she could agree, a sharp, piercing alarm echoed through the elevator cabin.

The lights didn’t flicker, but a glowing red holographic screen materialized in the air between them.

[ALERT: AEGIS WARD BREACH DETECTED.]

[Anomaly: High-Density Dark Mana.]

[Location: Floor 40. Executive Office.]

Evelyn’s S-Rank aura instantly flared, the celestial heat vaporizing the casual atmosphere in a millisecond.

"Someone is in your office," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a lethal hum.

Donald stared at the red alert. His S-Rank wards were designed to keep an army out. For a single person to bypass them without triggering an explosive kinetic response, they had to be an absolute master of evasion.

"Not someone," Donald corrected, his left hand instinctively dropping to the heavy Thunderclap Pile Bunker strapped beneath his sleeve. "An assassin."