Technocracy 101:Rise Of The Steel Empire

Location: Oslo – Northern Storehouses (Grain District)Time: Day 396 After Alec's Arrival

It started with smoke.

Thin. Pale. Creeping through the slats of the northernmost grain storehouse like a whispered curse — too faint to raise alarm, too deliberate to be chance. It drifted upward, coiling into the gray morning like the breath of something old and watching.

At first, no one noticed.

Shift change had just begun. The sun, still low behind the rooftops, cast long, sleepy shadows over the cobbled alleys. Spring dew clung to every surface, muting sound and softening the scrape of boots and murmurs of trade.

But then the wind turned.

It wasn't a gust — it was a pivot. Sharp. Intentional. The kind of change that made flags snap taut and birds fall silent.

The second storehouse went up in seconds.

Not from a stray ember. Not from heat spread through beam or timber.

It caught along the ground — a dry trail of husks and powdered grain laced like a fuse. The fire ran it like a script, crawling from one threshold to the next in a line that had been drawn long before the morning had begun.

By the time the third storehouse flared, people were screaming.

Not out of pain. Not yet. But out of confusion, panic — that helpless sound that came when order collapsed and no one could see who had pulled the string.

Alec arrived before the guards.

He hadn't been summoned. No cry had reached him. No runner dispatched.

He was already en route.

A systems check. A routine inspection of the outer silos. A habit he'd kept without fail since Month Four — not from obsession, but from design. Pattern. Repetition. Precision.

Fate, some would claim later. As if the fire had called him.

But Alec would disagree.

He'd say it was arithmetic.

The flames were rising now — unnaturally bright against the overcast sky. Grain hissed and popped like brittle bones in the heat. Smoke bled into the air, black and thick and wrong. Not the soft gray of damp wood, but the greasy, violent kind. A smolder that clung to the lungs.

Alec didn't flinch.

Didn't shout.

Didn't look for someone to blame or someone to follow.

He turned on his heel, locked eyes with the nearest courier — a boy no older than twelve, face pale under the soot.

"Go to the canal teams," Alec said. "I want ten men. Buckets. Rope. Whatever they use for slop fires. You have four minutes."

The boy blinked. Frozen.

Alec didn't repeat himself.

He only looked at him once more.

The boy ran.

By the time Elira arrived — bareback, boots still wet from wherever she'd ridden from — three bucket lines were already in motion. Dozens of workers, soot-streaked and shouting, passed brimming slop from hand to hand. One line for water. One for soaked linen. One for ash-coat slurry pulled from canal mud.

Two storehouses were gone.

The second had collapsed inward, a smoldering husk of blackened beams. The first had never stood a chance — the fire had gutted it too cleanly.

But the third— The third was holding.

Barely.

Alec stood at its flank, coat scorched at the hem, sleeves rolled high. His voice cut through the chaos, not with volume, but precision — the kind of voice that didn't beg to be heard, but simply was.

"Vent the south wall," he ordered. "Let it breathe sideways. Not upward. Up feeds it. South breaks the pull."

A team moved, axes rising and falling.

"Dig down to the runoff line," Alec said next. "Use the moisture under the grain. It's there — you'll smell it. Drag it to the edges and let it bleed through."

Ash began to fall as they worked — slow and soft as first snow, coating the rooftops, the canal stones, the hair of the workers who refused to break.

When the last flame hissed out — smothered under mud and grit — the sun had climbed high enough to cast sharp white light across the ruin.

It was over.

But it had left its mark.

Ash coated everything.

It hung in the air like an accusation.

Elira found him crouched near the threshold of the third storehouse, one gloved hand buried in the blackened grain. He didn't look up when she approached. His profile was calm, distant — the kind of stillness that only came when something in the mind had snapped into place.

"This was placed," he said.

No question.

No doubt.

She didn't ask how he knew.

She knew better.

He straightened slowly, brushing ash from his hand, eyes sweeping the wreckage with an analyst's distance. Not detached. Not cold. Just… clinical.

"The locks weren't forced," he continued. "Trail was clean. Intentional. Powdered grain laid against the interior wall. Oil mixed in. It climbed too fast for damp spring wood. This was taught. Practiced."

Elira's throat tightened.

"The workers?"

"Alive," Alec said. "One scalded. The rest… shaken. They'll talk. That's part of it."

She scanned the wreckage. Half the season's grain — gone. The rest, even if salvageable, would be tainted by smoke, fear, rumor.

She knew what that meant.

So did he.

"This wasn't sabotage for loss," he said. "It wasn't meant to ruin. Just to stall. Just enough to rattle the rhythm."

She met his eyes.

"Dain?"

He paused. Just briefly.

"Not directly. Dain doesn't strike until he's mapped the grid. But the rhythm — yes. This feels like one of his preludes."

They stood there, the two of them, silent as the wind shifted again.

Ash clung to her cloak.

To his scorched coat.

To everything between them — settling like memory.

"What now?" she asked.

Alec didn't answer at once. He was staring at the wreckage again, but not seeing it. Not exactly.

He was seeing beyond it.

"Now," he said quietly, "I stop building."

She turned to him sharply.

But what she saw in his face was not defeat. Not frustration. Not even fatigue.

It was calculation.

A cold rebalancing behind his eyes.

That evening, long after the workers had gone and the guards had resumed their patrols, Alec stood alone at the edge of the third storehouse. He held a single charred kernel between his fingers.

Studied it.

As if it might speak.

He didn't say a word.

Didn't need to.

The wind picked up again, carrying ash down the alley, through the gutters, over the canal stones.

And when Alec finally turned—

He was already planning the counterstroke.

Not just defense