The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 741

Alex didn't move for a long time.

The old man didn't either. He just stood there at the edge of his own path, hands still shoved in his pockets, waiting for whatever came next the way you wait for weather.

Nothing came next. Not right away.

Alex looked at the black shell where his place used to stand, and the thought that finally rose up through everything else wasn't grief.

It was guilt.

This was all about him.

Monica was innocent. Yolanda was innocent. A dog and a bird that had never once wandered beyond this road had no stake in this fight. He knew it with sickening certainty: if he hadn't come here, they would still be alive.

They were just people who happened to live in the house he came to.

Caught in a crossfire that had started before they'd ever met him.

And Alex already knew, standing there, exactly whose crossfire it was.

Ragnar's grandfather.

He didn't have proof. Not yet.

This had the shape of that order all over it.

He just couldn't prove it.

...

"Tell me everything again," Alex said. "Slower this time."

The old man nodded, fast, grateful to have something to do with his hands besides shake.

"More than ten," he said. "Maybe fifteen. They came up the road on foot, not by carriage, not by anything I could hear coming. They enter, I heard scream. They are looking for someone. Then suddenly all destroyed."

"What were they wearing?"

"Regular clothes. Dominion clothes. Same as you'd see on anyone in the market." He frowned, working to remember. "Nothing marked. No colors. I thought they were travelers at first, until they started asking for you by name."

"Robes? Sigils? Anything on the sleeves, the collar?"

"No. Nothing like that."

"Did they cast anything you recognized? Anything that looked like anything?"

The old man's face went blank in the specific way of a man being asked a question in a language he didn't speak.

"Son, I don't know magic," he said. "I've never needed to. Something came out of their hands and the house came down. That's all I can tell you. I couldn't tell a Red spell from a Green one if my life needed it, and it very nearly did. I never travel to any other country except this one."

Alex looked at the ash a moment longer.

Fifteen magicians. No robes. No tower colors.

Not sloppy. Careful.

Whoever sent them had made sure that even if somebody lived to describe it, there'd be nothing in the description worth following.

...

He walked the perimeter of the house once, slow, looking at what the fire hadn't finished off.

There was nothing to find. No emblem burned into the dirt. No signature spell-scar the way a fire leaves a certain kind of scorch depending on who lit it. Whoever did this had scrubbed themselves clean on purpose, the same way Cornelius had tried to scrub his own tracks in a factory that came down around him.

Alex crouched by what used to be the front step and thought it through the only way that had ever worked for him.

Not with his hands first. With access.

Every tower kept records. Had to. Dispatch logs, membership rolls, who got sent where and on whose order — no organization five hundred years old ran without paperwork somewhere, even if the paperwork was locked in a vault nobody outside the tower ever saw.

If fifteen magicians left one of the seven towers with an assignment like this one, that tower's own books would know it.

But no tower was going to open its vault for a stranger. Asking would just tell whoever gave that order that somebody was looking — and looking was the last thing Alex wanted them to know about, not yet.

There was only one way to get inside those records without asking permission.

Own the towers.

He already had one.

Standing in his own ashes, he decided one wasn't going to be enough.

Seven, if he could manage it. As many as he could take before somebody worked out what he was actually doing and tried to stop him.

...

Same as she didn't know about Gaia.

...

What Alex actually brought to the site three nights later didn't look like magic, because it wasn't.

Small. Quiet. Nothing that glowed, nothing that hummed the way a working ward-line hummed. A dozen machines, no bigger than birds, that rose off the back of an unmarked cart after dark and went to work on the west wall while the two guards on duty watched from thirty feet away and saw nothing worth reporting.

Drones filled the sky, their numbers growing by the second. Thousands of machines, locked in synchronized motion, hard at work building.

Nobody in the United State of Magic had ever built one. Nobody in the United State of Magic knew such a thing was possible, which meant nobody in the United State of Magic knew to be afraid of one.

If a guard did happen to catch a shape moving too fast against the dark, too precise to be a bird, he'd think exactly what Alex needed him to think.

Must be one of the Grandmaster's spells.

That was the whole advantage. Not power. Not secrecy, even — the drones worked in plain sight, every night, in front of guards who were paid to notice things. It worked because there was nothing in five hundred years of tower history that had prepared a single one of them to recognize what they were actually looking at.

...

Beatrix's number had been nine hundred million for renovations, three billion all in, spread over two years.

The White Tower's west wall was finished in six days.

The roof went up in nine.

By the end of the third week, two of the five new branch sites had already gone from bare foundation to standing structure, and the site foremen — real ones, human ones, hired to supervise work they didn't actually have to do anymore — had stopped asking questions out loud and started asking them to each other instead, quietly, over meals, in the particular tone of men who suspected the answer would only make them more uncomfortable.

Nobody outside the project ever heard there'd been a race against a year-long timeline.

There didn't need to be an announcement.

One month after Alex told Beatrix he needed more money than they had, every White Tower branch in the Arcanum State stood finished — new roofs, new walls, new halls built to hold four hundred students where nine had barely fit the year before.

A shockwave ripped through the state, then the whole country: the White Tower was finally making a move, and no one was ready for it.

“Everyone is talking about the White Tower now,” Alex told the assembled elders. They looked at him with sheer awe, completely sold on the idea that he was a master sorcerer—no one in the whole country could raise a citadel this huge in just thirty days. “We start recruiting new students today.”

If Alex wanted to forge his own kingdom, he needed loyal soldiers ready to bend the knee.

And he was going to start training them right now.