Chapter 178
Past Plans, Future PlanningThe elevator descended.
Alexander leaned against the steel wall, watching the shaft lights pass in steady intervals through the tactical viewport set into the door. The small reinforced glass panel was standard for secure elevators like this, offering just enough visibility to assess what waited on the other side before manually triggering the door to open.
Almost two weeks had gone by since the New York heist. The immediate aftermath was chaotic. Questions from everyone. Inventory counts. Annie cackling loudly every time someone brought up the yacht footage, while simultaneously furious she’d missed out.
Things had finally settled into something approaching normal.
The alliance with the Royals was now official. Jasmine and Talia spent days working through the formal language in partnership with the Queen’s own people to ensure everything aligned. The signing ceremony was mercifully brief. Just Alexander, the Queen, their respective witnesses, and a few toasts. He’d signed his name beside hers, sealing Grimnir’s first formal alliance with another guild.
There was no doubt in his mind that it would be the first in a long line of diplomatic treaties in the world to come.
What struck him most was how the Queen changed afterward. The subtle challenge vanished. There were no more comments about him learning the game or finding his footing. She spoke to him as an equal now.
Perhaps being the whimsical architect of the greatest heist in history had a way of clarifying things.
Then again, it might also have something to do with Augustus’s increasingly regular disappearances.
Alexander wished them both the best. He knew as well as anyone the importance of finding what few moments of happiness one could.
Annie had taken to her new responsibilities with surprising enthusiasm. She’d organized the crew into work rotations, coordinated with Augustus and Talia on training schedules, and kept the new recruits busy enough that they hadn’t gotten into any trouble.
As he’d predicted, she’d all but adopted Zane, Zara, and Allie, even taking to sparring with Zara personally, helping her hone her ability.
Sylvan Genesis was its name. Unlike Alexander’s primary power, the name of which had been initially obfuscated, Zara’s was uniquely named from the moment she revealed it. Much like Talia’s and Annie’s. Augustus, too, though that had changed in response to the man’s effort and Will.
Talia explained that the girl’s power was, in a word, terrifying. She’d drawn a parallel between his own Technopathy, Machine God, and the absolute control over machines it provided.
While most wielders of the various plant-sphere powers, such as Phytokinesis or Chlorokinesis, manipulated plant life in a variety of ways, accelerating their growth, healing them, or controlling them directly, they generally lacked the ability to generate new life from nothing. They needed existing plants, commonly using seeds.
Zara could conjure plant life from nothing. It was draining on the young girl, and she was currently limited in that the plants directly grew from her hands… but Talia was absolutely convinced that focused training and a single technique would allow her to bypass those limits.
If the girl cared about such things. So far, her only goal was to gain control and continue training alongside her brother and best friend until they awakened themselves.
Annie made it clear she wouldn’t push her to grow stronger, to chase power. It would be her choice.
Not that Alexander had any such intention.
Still, seeing Annie’s protectiveness and how easily she integrated new people, befriending and managing them through encouragement or violent sparring sessions, was all the validation he needed.
Talia had been right.
Annie was the Freyja the guild needed. The crew and the new arrivals all looked up to her.
Sort of. She was still shorter than everyone.
Including the kids.
The elevator slowed as it approached the bottom of the shaft.
Carmen had proven invaluable during the hiring surge. Contracting construction teams through Astra Omnia while maintaining complete operational security should have been a challenge. She’d made it look routine. Multiple teams. Architects. Engineers. Carpenters. Electricians. Plumbers. More tradespeople than Alexander knew existed.
All working simultaneously on different projects. Some of them without knowing where they actually were or who they were working for.
The solution to the secrecy problem came from an unexpected source. A supervillain living on Astra Omnia with the ability to compartmentalize memories. He could seal away specific information or time periods, lock it behind mental barriers temporarily, and even erase it completely if needed.
Alexander and the Queen had visited him together to verify his capabilities.
The man had been terrified. His power made him uniquely valuable to people like them. Too useful to ignore. Too dangerous to trust. So they made it clear what would happen if he abused his power.
Then they’d worked out an arrangement. Valerie and Alexander both realized they would have an ongoing need for such services. Grimnir paid him. The Royals ‘kept him.’ Making him connected, an associate of and protected by two of the most powerful guilds in the world of supervillains and superheroes. In the end, terror turned to gratitude, though, hopefully, for his sake, still wrapped around a kernel of respectable fear.
Jasmine drafted contracts that included substantial hazard pay for the memory manipulation. Workers would have their knowledge of the island’s location and the specifics of the work sealed during construction, accessible only while on site, then expunged once the projects finished.
It worked flawlessly as far as they could tell.
The elevator stopped with barely a jolt. The doors slid open.
Alexander stepped into the access tunnel. Reinforced concrete walls stretched ahead, smooth and unmarked except for LED strips running along the ceiling joints. The tunnel was wide enough for an armored transport to drive through comfortably, which had been the entire point.
The construction impressed him each time he came down here. The teams knew their work. Every surface was level, every joint sealed, every system redundant. And the speed at which it was accomplished wasn’t entirely attributed to just throwing millions at it. Though they did that, too.
Carmen had found good people. Competent people.
Multiple projects were still underway. An underground garage connecting to the mansion’s newly expanded basement. An emergency bunker was being dug out, the entrance set into the cliff face from inside the mansion. They were tunneling deep into the bedrock to ensure they had a completely independent and secure facility.
They weren’t anticipating any problems… but the System never failed to surprise them. Not to mention the ongoing threat of superheroes finding them.
Designs had been finalized, and construction had already begun on Astra Omnia. Alexander’s idea of a floor-to-ceiling fortified building wrapping around an open park and their secure doorway facility was slowly becoming a reality. It would take another couple of months, even with the accelerated timeline.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Meanwhile, the yacht remained anchored in the central valley’s lake. They’d repaint it eventually, modifying the features just enough that it wouldn’t be immediately recognizable. For now it served as an oversized decoration and learning prop.
It turned out that Ryan and some of Sleipnir’s crew were training to captain and operate the vessel. Annie’s idea.
The armored transports had finally been emptied this week. Billions in materials, carefully catalogued and stored in the expanded basement’s new vault. Talia took the time to inventory it, tallying the take from his heist to the third decimal for everyone curious.
Six point six four billion. Which matched what the news reports claimed after they had time to run down the details.
The Machine God and Grimnir had become international rock stars in the villain community. They’d also become internationally wanted supervillains, with their threat classification increased to S.
Annie and Augustus had framed their guild’s wanted page. Hung it up in the living room with their original bounties.
He passed the open security office on his right. Wrap-around tempered glass cut into the walls, overlooking both the tunnel in and what they were calling the ‘Gateway Sanctum’ beyond. Control panels lined one wall, monitoring everything from air quality to structural integrity. There were heat maps and seismic detections. Redundancies in triplicate were in place for all sensors, alarms, and automated protocols.
Alexander set most of it up himself. Talia and Augustus added their unique combination of permanent enchantments to… well, everything. They installed separate generators to power the entire underground facility, also with redundant systems, and with so much power available, Alexander had insisted that they enchant even the tables, seats, and server paneling. Layers of obfuscation enchantments.