Governments discovered that alien contracts were more dangerous than alien weapons because bullets at least announced their direction. By Day Seventeen, forty-three countries had created emergency contract authorities. Several were already too late. Cities had sold water rights. Companies had sold mineral rights to resources that did not yet exist.
Private citizens signed labour agreements with terms measured in decades. A hospital network in South America accepted free alien medical equipment and later discovered the maintenance contract granted the supplier ownership of all anonymised biological data generated by patients. The definition of anonymised under Concordance law included genetic templates. A regional government elsewhere accepted defensive assistance from the Talari Mutual Protection Consortium. The soldiers arrived, killed thousands of breach creatures, stabilised three cities and became wildly popular.
The contract required payment. The region had no Standard Exchange Marks. The Talari accepted a ninety-nine-year lease on two mana wells instead.
People cheered anyway.
They were alive.
Elias understood.
That was what made the contracts dangerous. Many were good deals in the moment. Food now in exchange for land later. Protection now in exchange for resources later. Medicine now in exchange for dependency later.
The apocalypse turned future exploitation into present rescue. Elias could not tell starving people to refuse bread because the fine print was predatory. So Vale created another archive.
Not magical research.
Contracts.
Myrddin, Harcourt's legal teams and volunteer lawyers from thirty countries began collecting translated examples.
They annotated traps.
Compared jurisdiction clauses. Identified recurring shell companies. Published known external entities and complaints against them. The project became known online as DON'T SIGN THAT.
Elias hated the name.
Everyone else loved it.
Sikren called him personally.
"You are interfering with commerce."
"Excellent."
"The phrase 'predatory integration contractor' appears two hundred and eleven thousand times in your new database."
"Only?"
"Veylan Frontier Resources has filed a defamation notice."
"Against whom?"
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"You."
"Where?"
"Concordance commercial arbitration."
"Can they arrest me?"
"No."
"Then wonderful."
Sikren's scales darkened slightly.
"You treat legal exposure too casually."
"You offered to buy my silence before explaining the law. I have inferred your priorities."
"My principals did not employ Veylan."
Elias paused.
"I didn't say they did."
"You were about to imply it."
"Was I?"
Sikren stared.
Elias smiled.
"Who are your principals?"
"Still restricted."
"Then stop being helpful accidentally."
The projection terminated.
Myrddin spoke.
"That interaction produced measurable satisfaction indicators in your facial expression."
"Thank you."
"It was not praise."
Later that day, the first contract war became an actual war. Two human groups claimed the same mana well outside a city in southern Europe. One held rights issued by the national government. The other held extraction rights purchased from the landowner before the emergency legislation passed. Both had external sponsors.
Both sponsors provided equipment classified as occupational safety technology. The result looked remarkably like armoured infantry. The sponsors never fired a shot.
Humans did.
Two hundred and eleven people died in six hours. The international news called it the first Concordance-backed conflict.
Elias disagreed.
It was simply the first one large enough to be named. Vale Institute received footage for analysis. Priya watched a man in alien armour throw a vehicle with a strength-enhancement rig.
"We can't compete with that."
"Not individually," Elias said.
"He picked up a car."
"Forklifts do that."
"Forklifts aren't bulletproof."
"Some are."
"You know what I mean."
He did.
External powers possessed centuries or millennia of magical engineering. Earth's rune lamp was impressive only because Earth had invented it quickly. In absolute terms, they were primitive. So Elias refused to compete in absolute terms. He asked a different question.
How many alien enhancement rigs existed on Earth? Myrddin estimated fewer than fifty thousand.
How many cars?
Hundreds of millions.
How many electrical generators?
Millions.
How many smartphones, processors, machine tools, factories, drones, radios, cameras, batteries and kilometres of cable?
Billions of components.
Earth's strength was not magical excellence.
It was scale.
They began adapting the barrier plate for mass production.
Not a powerful barrier.
A weak one.
Cheap ceramic. Printed conductive ink. Minimal reservoir material. It stopped fragments, slowed projectiles and reduced some magical impacts. One plate was unimpressive. A thousand changed a battlefield. Factories in Britain, Germany, Japan, India and the United States began producing versions within days.
Because Elias published the design, they competed to improve it. A Taiwanese manufacturer reduced cost by half. An Indian engineering group replaced silver with a layered copper alloy. A university in Poland discovered a better conditioning cycle. A Ukrainian drone team strapped the plates to quadcopters and created mobile barrier nodes.
The first footage appeared online twenty hours later. A convoy trapped by breach creatures survived behind overlapping drone shields until soldiers arrived.
Elias watched it twice.
"Good," he said.
Priya smiled.
"You mean actually good this time?"
"Yes."
The smile faded when Myrddin displayed the next report. Veylan Frontier Resources had purchased three barrier manufacturers.
Priya stared.
"They bought our own technology back."
"Capitalism remains operational."
"Can we stop them?"
"Why?"
"They're Veylan."
"If they manufacture the plates, more plates exist."
"And they profit."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Priya shook her head.
"I never know which political ideology you have."
"Neither do I. It's inefficient to keep one for every problem."
Myrddin interrupted.
"Urgent security report."
A map appeared.
Manchester.
Arcane saturation had doubled in six minutes.
Elias stood.
The same pattern had preceded Vale-One's activation.
Only this was larger.
Much larger.