Chapter 61: Dragonfire Economics & The Fold’s Fracture
High above the plaza, pinned beneath a constricting cage of interlocked paperclips that had folded her mighty wings into useless, stiff fans, Tabitha seethed. The emerald dragon wasn’t just furious; she was professionally insulted. Recycling? Liquidation? Denial of overtime gemstones and hydra dental? This wasn’t just an attack; it was a violation of the most sacred dragon doctrine: negotiated compensation.
The chaotic duel below – Mammon’s void-contracts warping the air against Stapler Prime’s percussive barrages of administrative ordnance – sent disruptive shockwaves rippling through reality. Each clash made the paperclip mesh pinning Tabitha vibrate.
The rigid metal groaned. A single clip, stressed beyond its tensile strength by a particularly violent reality tremor caused by Mammon dissolving a filing cabinet tower into sentient fine print, pinged loose.
Tabitha’s slit-pupiled eyes, burning with emerald fire, snapped to the tiny gap. Weakness. Union Rule #37: Exploit management oversights. She focused, drawing not on raw fiery rage, but on the meticulous, burning indignation of unpaid labor. Her chest glowed, not with incandescent heat, but with the shimmering, incandescent fury of audit-fire. She channeled her demands, her grievances, the collective outrage of every mythical creature scheduled for "recycling":
Gemstone back-pay with compound interest!
Full periodontal coverage for Cerberus!
Phoenix ash-collection hazard pay!
The audit-fire, normally a torrent, became a scalpel. A thin, precise beam of superheated contractual obligation lanced from her jaws, striking not the mesh itself, but the exact point where the loose clip had stressed its neighbor. The beam wasn’t fire; it was legally binding heat. It superheated the specific alloy junction, exploiting a microscopic flaw in the Bureau’s standardized paperclip composition – a flaw only a being intimately familiar with contractual minutiae could detect.
SNAP! Another clip failed. Then another. The failure propagated like a collapsing house of cards built on unfair labor practices. The mesh groaned, buckled, and finally tore apart with a sound like rending stock certificates. Tabitha exploded upwards in a shower of twisted metal, her wings snapping open with a crack that echoed like a gavel strike.
She hovered for a second, a vengeful avatar of organized labor, scales gleaming under the flickering lined-paper/void static sky. Her gaze swept the battlefield, locking onto the source of the disruptive energy aiding her escape: the titanic clash between Mammon and Stapler Prime. Then her eyes narrowed, focusing beyond them, towards the heart of the transformed Bureau complex – where a massive, throbbing column of pure, structured bureaucratic energy pulsed: The Power Core.
"RIGHT!" Tabitha roared, her voice shaking loose memos from nearby drone towers. "OVERTIME JUST GOT APPROVED! UNION BROTHERS AND SISTERS! TO THE CORE! BANKRUPT THIS RUST BUCKET!" Her call wasn’t just sound; it was imbued with the resonant frequency of worker solidarity. Scattered throughout the ruins, other pinned or hiding mythicals heard it. A minotaur trapped under a folded-rubble cubicle wall bellowed, shoving it aside. A group of sprites, their wings clipped by sticky-note nets, buzzed with renewed fury.