Elena Brightforge answered Marcus's failure with the only move that made sense for a woman who had spent decades turning electrons into empire.
No bluster. No grandstanding. Just a continent-wide pulse as distribution nodes re-weighted and the map of power began to flow the way she wanted it to.
I stood before the central display as the grid visualization shed its usual symmetry. Threads of light folded and braided with the confidence of a surgeon's hands—load shaved here, redundancy added there, whole districts eased toward brownout while adjacent corridors brightened to a deceitful daylight.
