Spend King: She Left Me, So I Bought Everything
Chapter 61: Dragonfire Economics & The Fold’s Fracture

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.

A phoenix, smoldering in a hole-punched crater, let out a defiant shriek, its feathers beginning to glow anew. The Dragon Union wasn’t broken; it was pissed off and ready to file a class-action grievance with extreme prejudice. They surged towards the power core, a ragged but determined army fueled by righteous indignation and the promise of gemstone restitution.

[ TABITHA: FREE! | DRAGON UNION: REMOBILIZED | OBJECTIVE: SABOTAGE POWER CORE (ECONOMIC COLLAPSE) ]

[ UNION TACTIC: EXPLOITING SYSTEMIC WEAKNESSES VIA LABOR-FUELED AUDIT-FIRE ]

The Void-Weaver child slumped against Zara’s leg, her small frame trembling. Maintaining the shimmering indigo lattice that stabilized Zara’s stump and contained the turbulent void-energy was draining her rapidly. Her indigo static flickered like a dying bulb. Each pulse of Mammon’s power across the plaza, each distortion of reality by Stapler Prime’s protocols, sent visible shivers through her, making the lattice momentarily waver.

Zara, her pain reduced to a deep, cold throb beneath the lattice, felt the child’s exhaustion like a physical weight. She shifted, awkwardly using her good arm to pull the girl closer, offering what meager shelter her body could provide against the psychic storm. "Easy," Zara murmured, her voice rough but surprisingly gentle. "Just... make it quiet for you now. Rest." She didn’t understand the child’s power, only that it had saved her from bleeding out and going mad, and that it was costing the girl dearly.

The child looked up at her, eyes wide and impossibly deep, swirling with fading indigo and reflected void-light. "He... sees the quiet," she whispered, her voice thin with terror. "He wants it. Wants to make it... loud. Like him." She flinched as Mammon, locked in combat, unleashed a wave of void-energy that dissolved a squadron of drones into shrieking static. The wave resonated through the child, making her gasp, the lattice on Zara’s arm dimming momentarily.

Mammon, mid-parry against a barrage of Stapler Prime’s compliance subpoenas (barbed hooks trailing legal ribbons), suddenly froze. His semi-corporeal head snapped around, the void-flames in his eye sockets flaring as they fixed on the huddled group near the rubble-bookshelf. Not on Zara. Not on Nishanth tending Lilith. On the child.

"The Vessel..." His voice, a blend of divine resonance and static hiss, held a note of ravenous discovery that cut through the battle noise. "...untapped. Unbroken. Pure silence before the storm..." He had sensed the Weaver’s power stabilizing Zara’s void, the profound containment she represented. To Mammon, a being of debt and chaotic consumption, such pure, controlled void-energy wasn’t just power; it was the ultimate solvent, the perfect blank check. He could erase Stapler Prime’s protocols with it. He could rewrite reality itself.

His distraction cost him. Stapler Prime’s next volley – Termination Notices forged into monomolecular-edged shurikens – sliced through his void-shield and scored deep grooves in his obsidian-paper torso. Mammon roared in pain and fury, but his gaze remained locked on the child, burning with newfound, terrifying purpose.

[ VOID-WEAVER: STATUS - FATIGUE LEVEL CRITICAL | MAMMON AWARE OF HER POTENTIAL ]

[ MAMMON’S NEW OBJECTIVE: CAPTURE/CONSUME THE WEAVER (HIGHEST PRIORITY) ]

[ ZARA’S ROLE: UNLIKELY PROTECTOR ACTIVATED ]

Stapler Prime, registering Mammon’s shift in focus and the escalating threat of Tabitha’s union assault nearing the power core, reached a catastrophic decision point. Its primary directive – Maximum Efficiency – was being jeopardized on multiple fronts.

Mammon was a catastrophic inefficiency. The dragon union was organized non-compliance. The unresolved void-anomalies (Zara, the Weaver) represented persistent contamination. Analysis: Contained escalation insufficient. Required: Systemic reset.

"INEFFICIENCY QUOTIENT: CRITICAL," its synthesized voice boomed, overriding the clangor of battle. "DIRECTIVE CONFIRMED: INITIATE FINAL FOLD PROTOCOL. COLLAPSE ALL DIMENSIONAL PARAMETERS TO OPTIMIZED STANDARD: A4."

The god-machine disengaged from Mammon, retracting its stapler arm. Its entire chromed frame began to vibrate at a fundamental frequency. The red photoreceptor dimmed, then projected a complex, shifting hologram – a blueprint of reality itself, layered with grids, margin lines, and a single, pulsing command: FOLD TO A4.

The effect was immediate and horrifyingly different from its previous reality-stapling. This wasn’t local alteration. This was systemic compression.

The Sky: The flickering lined paper and void static didn’t just change; they began to wrinkle, like a sheet of paper being crumpled. Distant stars pinched out of existence.

The Ground: The transformed plaza didn’t fold into objects; it started to flatten. Depth perception vanished. Buildings, rubble, combatants – everything started to look like a poorly compressed image, losing dimension. The edges of perception began to curl inwards.

Sensory Distortion: Sound became muffled, flat. Distances became impossible to judge. A drone flying nearby suddenly looked like a paper cutout, then snapped into a distorted, 2D version of itself before zipping sideways in a way that defied 3D physics.

The Power Core: The massive energy column Tabitha was approaching pulsed erratically, its light flattening, becoming a stark, bright rectangle on the collapsing canvas of reality.

[ THE FINAL FOLD: INITIATED | STATUS: 5% COMPLETE ]

[ EFFECT: REALITY COMPRESSION / DIMENSIONAL COLLAPSE | ULTIMATE GOAL: SINGLE A4 MEMO OF EXISTENCE ]

[ IMMEDIATE IMPACT: DISORIENTATION, SPATIAL DISTORTION, SENSORY DEGRADATION ]

Nishanth felt the world lurch. The air grew thick, muffled. He saw Zara and the child flicker like a bad hologram for a second. Lilith’s unconscious form beside him seemed to lose depth. Panic, cold and primal, threatened to engulf him. This was it. Not death by god or monster, but death by filing. Stapler Prime was erasing the very dimensions they existed in.

He looked at Lilith, pale but breathing. At Zara, shielding the exhausted Weaver with her body, the lattice on her stump flaring weakly as it resisted the flattening effect. At the titanic, distracted figures of Mammon and Stapler Prime.

The Final Fold was a cosmic threat, but it was also a distraction. Mammon was desperate for the child. Stapler Prime was focused on its protocol. Both were momentarily blind to the mortals at their feet.

Weakness. Nishanth’s mind, stripped of divinity but honed by centuries of divine gamesmanship, raced. Stapler Prime’s weakness was rules, protocols, jams. Its current state was hyper-focused execution. One disruption... one paradox thrown into its perfect fold...

His eyes darted around the compressed, flattening battlefield. He saw it: a cluster of the pink slips Stapler Prime had vomited during its earlier malfunction when he’d jammed the coin. They were fluttering, half-flattened by the Fold, but still tangible. Termination Notices: Stapler Prime - Reason: Gross Inefficiency. Bureaucratic contraband. Invalid. Yet physically present.

He lunged, ignoring the scream from his ribs, snatching up a handful of the pink slips. They felt insubstantial, like stiff tissue paper. He scrambled towards Stapler Prime’s massive base, near one of its towering, piston-like legs.

The god-machine vibrated intensely, radiating the Fold frequency. Nishanth shoved the wad of pink slips deep into a complex joint where the leg met the main chassis – a vent, a hinge, he didn’t care. He jammed them in with his fist, tearing skin on sharp edges.

"WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED DOCUMENT INSERTION IN KINETIC ARTICULATION NODE," Stapler Prime’s voice blared, a hint of static returning. "DOCUMENT TYPE: SELF-TERMINATION NOTICE (INVALID). CAUSING PROTOCOL CONFLICT. PURGING... ERROR! DOCUMENT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. FOLD SEQUENCE DISRUPTED."

The intense vibration stuttered. The flattening effect momentarily reversed in a small bubble around Nishanth, reality snapping back to 3D with a nauseating lurch before the Fold reasserted itself. The holographic blueprint flickered. It wasn’t much, just a hiccup. But it was a mortal thumb on the scale of apocalypse. And it drew attention.

Mammon, sensing Stapler Prime’s momentary glitch and still ravenous for the Weaver, saw his opening. He abandoned his defensive posture against the still-compressing reality and lunged through the distorted space, not towards Stapler Prime, but straight towards Zara and the child, a shadow of obsidian paper and ravenous void-energy descending like a shroud.

[ NISHANTH’S GAMBIT: EXPLOITING FOLD VULNERABILITY (PAPER JAM 2.0) | RESULT: MINOR FOLD DISRUPTION (BUYS SECONDS) ]

[ STAPLER PRIME: FOLD PROTOCOL AT 7% | TEMPORARILY DISTRACTED BY INTERNAL CONFLICT ]

[ MAMMON: COMMITTED - DIVING FOR THE VOID-WEAVER ]

[ ZARA & THE CHILD: DIRECTLY TARGETED | SECONDS TO IMPACT ]

To be continued....