The "declaration of war" didn't arrive with fire and noise. It arrived as a sound most people would mistake for silence—the low, steady breath of Aetherite collars spinning up across a continent.
On the main wall, our deployment graph didn't climb; it curved, each node seeding another, each collar bringing two more online as installers and pre-staged crews met their marks. What Skyveil intended as a choke became the ignition event for a transportation regime change. The old map—routes, hubs, privileged corridors—stopped describing reality the moment space itself joined our payroll.
"Network expansion is ahead of every model," Dr. Chen said, not bothering to restrain her satisfaction. "Aetherite draw is at twelve percent of legacy gate operations. We can sustain continental coverage on current stock, and we can bootstrap new circuits from local storage indefinitely."
