Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 141: : The Legacy Market

Chapter 141: : The Legacy Market

Ava was halfway through bolting a vibration-dampened shock cage to the undercarriage when the soft chime hit her ear.

Not the garage alert.

Not the security sensors.

Lucas.

She didn’t even look up as she muttered, "I’m in the middle of something."

The chime came again—this time, sharper.

More persistent.

She exhaled and turned her head, fully expecting to see a messenger bot or one of the house’s internal relay screens lighting up.

Instead, Lucas Bai stood there in person, coat half-draped over his shoulder, looking smug and mildly out of breath.

"You’re filthy," he said.

"I’m busy." Ava shoved a wrench into a toolbox with too much force. "Go away unless you’re bringing me something I can weaponize."

"I’m bringing you me." He tilted his head. "And a fast favor."

Ava stood slowly. "That sounds like a problem disguised as a bribe."

Lucas grinned.

"It is. Come on. I need your backup for a quick deal. Five minutes."

"I’m in the middle of re-coding your car."

He leaned against the wall casually. "Then this counts as quality control."

She narrowed her eyes. "What kind of deal?"

Lucas stepped forward, sliding a data slip into her hand. "Legacy trader space. Small tier. Private bid. We’ll be in and out before your wrench cools."

Ava blinked.

"You’re joking."

"Nope."

"You’re dragging me into a psychic warzone in the middle of a parts rebuild?"

Lucas’s eyes glinted. "Would you rather I take my father?"

Ava groaned. "Fine."

She peeled off her gloves, pulled her bracer tight, and dusted her hands off.

"Let’s go."

The world blinked.

One moment they were in the garage.

The next—they stood in a strange half-light.

It wasn’t digital, not quite. And not physical either. The Mindspace wasn’t a VR sim, nor was it a shared neural map. It was... memory-encoded space. Consciousness architecture.

Some called it ghost code.

Others called it god’s spreadsheet.

Ava had only seen glimpses—brief licks of it when traders pushed sync points during high-risk deals.

They stood in a vast, circular plaza of white and gold, lit by sunless glow. Floating screens spun above them, etched with ancient trader marks and encrypted bidding codes.

Each "booth" was just a sphere of thought—opaque to outsiders, translucent to those invited in.

The rules here weren’t about who had money.

They were about who remembered what value looked like.

Lucas stood beside her like he belonged here.

Because he did.

"Explain," Ava said, eyes flicking to each glowing sphere.

Lucas’s voice dropped low. "Legacy traders aren’t just veterans. They’re... imprinted."

"Imprinted?"

He nodded. "Not that. It means their deals leave echoes. Impressions. Permanent trails in the Mindspace. If you’ve made a deal big enough, dangerous enough, costly enough, you leave something behind. Your name becomes a frequency."

Ava scanned the surrounding symbols. Each one pulsed slightly, like a living heartbeat in a dead system.

"You’re saying this place only opens for the people who’ve bled currency into the bones of the system."

"Exactly," Lucas said. "That’s what legacy means. You didn’t just trade. You traded so hard it rewrote the architecture."

Ava looked at him sideways. "And you’ve been here before."

Lucas smirked. "Four times."

She rolled her eyes. "And you live."

"Barely. But I get good discounts."

One of the spheres flickered. Lucas turned sharply.

"That’s our mark. Merchant code Nox-El. I traced a rare blueprint through him—early iteration weapon prototype, pre-Bunker Era. He won’t show it in public. This is the only place we’ll see it without drawing blood."

Ava stepped beside him, bracer glowing.

"I’m in. But I want to watch how you trade in here."

Lucas grinned. "Then pay attention."

He move and the sphere accepted them with no resistance.

Inside, it was quiet.

Cold.

A single figure stood at the far end—tall, robed in digital ash, with no visible features except for a face carved out of static and fractured light.

Lucas stepped forward. "Nox."

The figure inclined its head. "Bai."

Ava stayed a step behind, eyes scanning every pulsing echo of the trader’s thought-cloud.

Lucas got straight to the point.

"I want the R-0 schematic. The original."

Nox-El didn’t blink. "Too hot. Too flagged."

"I’ll burn the flag. You get three thousand legacy weight in private circulation credit, two bunker passes, and a firewall patch that ghosts you from every Tier-2 net crawler still running in Sector 5."

Silence.

Then the figure said, "And your partner’s system?"

Lucas’s shoulders tensed.

Ava stepped forward. "Not on the table."

Nox-El turned its fractured gaze toward her.

"You’re new."

"I’m mean," Ava replied.

The trader shifted.

Lucas smirked. "You want the currency or not?"

Nox-El tilted its head, that crackling static face shifting in faint flickers. "Deal."

Lucas didn’t move. He stood still, hands loose at his sides, golden eyes sharp—not accepting yet. Not even blinking.

Ava didn’t say anything, but she felt it in the air.

He wasn’t done.

"Not yet," Lucas said calmly.

The static pulsed once. "You offered a firewall patch, legacy credit, and passes."

"I offered a starting position," Lucas corrected. "And you accepted too fast."

Nox-El’s distorted hum wavered, like a throat clearing in three dimensions. "Your offer was more than fair."

"Exactly," Lucas said. "And people like you never take fair unless there’s desperation or misdirection. Which is it?"

The silence that followed stretched long enough for Ava to feel the market’s presence shift. The echo-patterns around the trade sphere slowed. Attention. That meant others were watching.

Lucas stepped forward—one, deliberate stride.

"I want the real R-0 schematic," he said. "Not the modded archive you cloned from a burned relay station. I want the raw data—original weapon core, not the processed variant."

Nox-El didn’t move, but the pulse around them dimmed.

"How do you know I even have that?"

"Because you didn’t flinch when I asked," Lucas replied. "You hesitated only when I offered too much. That hesitation wasn’t fear. It was guilt."

Ava blinked. The system read her elevated vitals.

Lucas kept going.

"You’re sitting on something black-market can’t touch. You’ve held it for years. I bet you were waiting for someone like me to show up. Big enough to buy it. Reckless enough to use it. But I’m not here to make you rich."

He leaned in slightly.

"I’m here to make you relevant."

The silence hit like a dropped coin in a quiet room.

Nox-El’s static face flickered. "You think you can do that?"

Lucas smiled, and it was all teeth.

"I already did. Your name just logged five new watchers in the space. All Tier 3 or higher. Half of them just flagged you as active. You’re back on the board because I walked in here and said your name."

Ava’s eyebrows went up.

Nox-El’s hum flattened. A sign of awareness. Humility. Or maybe... threat evaluation.

"And what do you want in return for this relevance?" the trader asked.

"I want the real schematic," Lucas said. "And I want exclusivity for seventy-two hours."

"Impossible."

Lucas didn’t blink. "Non-negotiable."

"Too costly."

Lucas smirked. "You’re talking to a Bai. Not a beggar."

He let the silence linger—just long enough.

Then added:

"I’ll throw in a full revalidation burst on your trade signature. Two legacy nodes. Unlocked. Plus one blank asset transfer certificate."

Ava turned to look at him. "That’s a lot, Lucas."

Lucas’s smile widened. "He knows what he’s holding. The real question is whether he’s brave enough to give it to someone who’ll actually use it."

Nox-El was still for a full ten seconds.

Then:

"Agreed."

The data fell into the air like molten silver—folded, encoded, and sharp enough to cut time.

Ava caught it with her bracer.

[SCHEMATIC ACQUIRED: R-0 CORE DESIGN (GEN ZERO)][UNIQUE BUILD PATH – STATUS: EXCLUSIVE]

Lucas nodded once, turned on his heel, and walked straight out of the trade sphere.

Ava followed, blinking from the aftershock.

They stepped out into the broader Mindspace—gold-lit and still.

She turned to him as the memory began fading.

"You’re terrifying."

Ava didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Lucas took it as one anyway.

"Finally," he said, "someone gets it."

She narrowed her eyes. "You done playing king of the marketplace?"

Lucas glanced upward—at nothing in particular, but Ava’s system caught the flicker of data nodes lighting behind his irises.

[LEGACY PATHWAY ACTIVE – THREADS: 3 REMAINING]

"Nope," he said. "Three more."

Ava folded her arms. "This was supposed to be a five-minute pit stop. You lied."

"I estimated," Lucas corrected. "Optimistically."

"You dragged me out of a half-assembled fusion bike build."

"You’re here as backup."

"I don’t even have a weapon in here."

Lucas turned and started walking. "Sure you do. Me."

Ava blinked. "Excuse me?"

He looked over his shoulder, smirking. "You’re the one with the kill switch on my bracer. You could fry my neural feed if I stepped wrong."

Ava’s eyebrows went up. "You installed that?"

"No," he said, eyes gleaming. "You did. Accidentally. Two weeks ago. While trying to repair the haptic sync line. You ran the code into my core driver without noticing. I left it in."

She blinked once. Twice.

"Why?"

"In case I ever stop being terrifying in the right direction."

Ava shook her head. "You’re ridiculous."

"And you’re armed," he said, stepping into the next ring of the Mindspace.

The environment shifted again—this time colder. Stripped-down. Tactical. No trader spheres, no shimmering code.

Just a table.

And two figures seated at it.

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