The news of the eight-hundred-billion-coin auction fiasco spread through the core sectors like wildfire.
Inside the High Spire of the Blood-Tax Star Chamber on Capital Planet Kronos, the central board of directors was in full panic. The marble halls echoed with frantic shouting, broken crystal goblets, and slamming doors. Three regional banking branches had collapsed on stage in a single afternoon. Two thousand aristocratic accounts were frozen, and Vice-Chairman Malakor was sitting in a Citadel detention cell with Prince Kael’s finger-marks bruised around his throat and black sulfur soot smeared across his face.
The Chamber’s executive directors paced across the plush velvet carpet, their faces pale with terror and humiliation.
“Eight hundred billion coins gone in five seconds!” an elderly director shrieked, tearing at his powdered wig. “Our credit rating has been downgraded by five levels! The banking syndicates are demanding fifty billion in emergency margin calls! If we don’t crush this Taichu Group immediately, our entire monopoly will dissolve before the month is out!”
Standing at the head of the boardroom table was Toll Commissioner Garrick.
Garrick was a heavy-set, red-faced man in an embroidered crimson cape, with a braided mustache and small, piggish eyes. His moral integrity score festered at an abysmal 3/100.
