God Of Crafting

"Log the target's successful entry into the staging area."

Cassie's chin rested on her knees as she sat curled up. As unhealthy as it was, she found this position strangely relaxing.

Her grandpa, as strict as he could be with everyone else, wouldn't care how she sat as long as she did her job well. As long as his expectations were met, he pretty much gave her complete autonomy in how to use the clan's resources for whatever ends she wanted to pursue.

And right now, it was Cassie's time to shine.

"Grandfather," Cassie turned to the old man sitting in a massive, active-foam chair while observing a selection of screens mounted on the high-rise apartment's wall.

Cassie herself sat on her gaming chair with her legs curled up, her hands gently and leisurely tapping at her filthy expensive floating keyboard.

"Proceed."

The old man's voice filled the high-end office/apartment.

Quite notably, there wasn't a hint of hesitation in his tone.

Cassie sighed, leaning back in her chair as she dragged her arm up… before dropping it down, stretching her finger, and theatrically pressing the confirmation key.

A small smirk blossomed on the girl's otherwise bored lips.

"The article is up. Starting the delay," Cassie clearly narrated her actions, her eyes jumping between the lines of code on some of her screens and the live feeds recorded by the military-grade scoping equipment mounted all over the apartment's massive windows that overlooked most of the city.

"Forty-three minutes, right?" one of the clan's officers asked to confirm while fiddling with his phone.

"Yup," Cassie gently nodded her head before putting it back down on her knees. "You can get some of the groups started already, though. Common idiots will never move as fast as you'd want them to."

The clan's lackey caught Cassie's sudden, intense glare.

"Yes, young miss," the man stood up and bowed, "I'll see to it, young miss."

Cassie watched the man as he opened the door, her eyelids drooping halfway, her face growing increasingly ugly and disgusted.

"Boring."

Snapping her eyes back to the screen, Cassie quickly fixed some notes before performing a quick check of all the running algorithms.

As the wonder daughter of the clan, she was as much a formidable cultivator as she was a child of her age. With the patriarch himself being the one who discovered her secular talents, it didn't take long for the clever young girl to become his favorite.

"I'm picking up some calls," one of the men gathered in the shadows at the back of the room reported through the locked communication network wired directly into the earpiece in Cassie's ear.

"They're starting to make quite a bit of noise…" another report soon rang in her ear. "It's like they're… building something?"

'Inconclusive!' Cassie's eyes snapped to the man hidden in the shadow.

Hubert, one of the youths from the clan's facility, had been a ward of the clan ever since his parents died while trying to save victims of a flash flood that wiped out their village.

"Keep your reports conclusive. If you're unsure about something, run it through the analytics first," Cassie lectured the young man through the intercom before leaning back into her chair.

This whole operation wasn't some kind of movie mission filled with tense moments and high stakes, packed into a few minutes of action at the story's climax.

At this level, war was fought patiently… and silently.

Or, by creating circumstances so loud, no one could hear the sound of the war being fought.

And mere moments later…

"Half an hour to the deployment phase."

The narrator, hidden in the back of the room with the rest of the staff, announced.

"Good," Cassie said, stretching her fingers and snapping her joints before laying her long, slim fingers over the keys. "I want the strike group in position in T minus five." She then snapped her head over to the staff side of the room, deciding to shout rather than use her earpiece. "How's the crowd coming along?"

A moment of silence.

"No response from the leader, trying radio."

"Radio contact, ten-minute delay on the crowd."

"Tsk…" Cassie clicked her tongue, turning her eyes back to her screen. "And I even told him to take a closer look at it…!" she muttered under her breath, resisting her childhood urge to bite her nails as the incompetence of certain clan members began to impede the carefully planned operation.

"Hurry him up!" Cassie called out, locking her eyes on the magnified image the telescope mounted on the northern window picked up with ease.

The factory stood silently, everything now pointing toward some sort of grand remodeling.

Whatever the people over there were doing, they clearly had no intention of hiding it.

'Good,' Cassie thought, smiling slightly. 'That makes things easier.'

"Got a tip from the plant," a familiar voice rang in Cassie's earpiece.

'Calipso?' Cassie's face twitched as she raised her eyes to a separate, heavily windowed office on the apartment's second floor, overlooking the operation floor.

The hired expert from a friendly clan—and the best information broker of this generation.

Cassie caught her friend's reluctant stare through the high-up window.

Clearly, she had no desire to be here and take part in this. But in the world of high clans, obligations were the strongest currency.

And Calipso… no, her entire clan couldn't afford to refuse this favor.

'It's for the good of the clan,' Cassie thought, pressing her lips together as she turned her eyes back to the factory.

In the short few minutes that passed, all the outside activity had vanished, leaving nothing but an array of changing lights coming from the brightly lit and clearly busy interior of the factory.

"The surge grows," Calipso's voice once again rang in Cassie's ear.

'Wait, why is she so stressed about it…?'

Cassie raised her eyes to the office again and met Calipso's serious stare once more.

'They're doing something…' she thought, connecting the dots as she quickly turned her head back to her screens.

"I'm getting those reports too," one of the staff called out. "It's big enough for it to fade over to my chair."

For something Calipso reported to soon come from Cassie's usual information channels…

It could only mean one thing.

Whatever they were doing inside the staging area, they weren't shy about it at all.

"The crowd is moving, ETA ten minutes."

Another report quickly lifted Cassie's spirits.

"The office is moving too, ETA twenty-five minutes."

Piece by piece, everything was falling into place.

The many screens before her perfectly reflected the live tracking of each part of the operation.

From the city's direction, a huge crowd of civilians and hired mouths moved in, carrying the kind of banners everyone had long since grown tired of, representing one of those organizations created more to make its members feel good about themselves than to effect real, positive change.

On the highway, one of Cassie's automated telescopes tracked the path of the car likely to be holding two rather important gentlemen with enough authority behind them to bring any law-abiding citizen to a ruin.

And from the direction of the ruined depths of the mostly abandoned secondary industrial park, a team of the clan's best men silently closed in, taking positions in the blind spots Cassie had identified over the past several days.

Bit by bit, all the pieces of her scheme were falling into place, closing in on the lively factory…

A factory that, at that very moment, suddenly went dark.