Chapter 82: Chapter 79 — Denied Entry by a Man Already Dead

The transition was violent enough to make my teeth ache.

We stepped out of the sweltering, toxic heat of the canyon floor and crossed an invisible, humming threshold. Instantly, the oppressive yellow smog vanished. The temperature plummeted to a crisp, perfectly regulated sixty-eight degrees.

The air no longer tasted of sulfur and dissolved bone. It smelled of synthetic jasmine, chilled champagne, and the crisp, clean scent of newly printed currency.

We had reached the VIP promenade at the base of the Flesh Exchange.

It was a wide, sweeping avenue paved entirely in seamless white marble, curving gently upward toward a towering, gilded elevator shaft bolted directly into the fossilized ribcage of the dead god. The architecture was deliberately designed to make you feel small. It was a monument to the Zhang Clan’s absolute financial supremacy.

Above us, sleek, anti-gravity palanquins hummed quietly as they glided toward the private landing pads. Through the tinted glass of the hovering vehicles, I could see the silhouettes of the Upper Layer elite. They wore flowing silks that practically glowed with embedded defensive arrays. They drank wine that cost more than a slum district’s yearly gross domestic product.

And then there was us.

We walked right up the center of the pristine avenue.

My black wool suit was stiff with dried mud, scorched by factory heat, and visibly crusted with the black blood of the corporate enforcers we had slaughtered the night before. With every step I took, the dried acid and ash flaked off my boots, leaving a trail of dirty, dark footprints across the flawless white stone.

To my left, Lingshan looked like she had just crawled out of a trench. Her tactical armor was scuffed and dented, her dark hair pulled back in a severe, messy knot.

To my right, Red Dog was a walking environmental hazard. The seven-foot Myrmidon dripped condensation and rusted flakes onto the marble. The sleek, silver briefcase in his massive claw was the only clean thing on our side of the perimeter.

The ambient chatter from the nearby elites died.

Aristocrats stepping out of their palanquins stopped and stared. Women draped in high-tier spiritual jewelry pulled their silk shawls over their mouths. Men in tailored suits pointed, their expressions shifting from confusion to profound disgust. They looked at us the way a homeowner looks at a feral rat that just dragged itself across a clean kitchen floor.

I didn’t slow my pace. I kept my black umbrella resting against my shoulder like a walking stick, ignoring the stares.

We reached the end of the promenade.

A thick, golden velvet rope hung between two heavy brass stanchions, blocking the entrance to the gilded elevator. The doors of the lift were made of polished obsidian, reflecting the neon flashes of the colossal stock tickers far above.

A man stepped out from behind a sleek, marble podium to block our path.

He was a mid-tier broker for the Traitor Zhang Clan. I knew this immediately because he wore their crest—a platinum lapel pin shaped like a Bleeding Coin—fastened to the lapel of an immaculate, tailored white silk suit. His dark hair was slicked back flawlessly. His skin was pale and aggressively moisturized, completely untouched by the acid rain and smog that defined the lives of the ninety-nine percent just two miles away.

He took one look at my ruined suit and immediately pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket.

He pressed the silk against his nose and mouth, his eyes narrowing in undisguised revulsion.

“Stop right there,” the broker snapped. His voice was muffled through the handkerchief, but the aristocratic arrogance rang through loud and clear. “You have crossed the security perimeter. This area is reserved for Tier-Three stakeholders and above.”

I stopped a foot away from the velvet rope. Lingshan and Red Dog halted smoothly on my flanks.

“We are here to access the Skyboxes,” I said, my voice perfectly level.

The broker blinked. Then, slowly, he lowered the handkerchief. A cruel, mocking smile stretched across his face. He looked me up and down, taking in the frayed cuffs of my jacket and the black blood flaking off my collar.

“Lost your way, slum rat?” the broker sneered. He gestured sharply toward the massive, muddy trench far off to the left, where millions of starving ghosts were currently rioting against electrified fences just to get a glimpse of the arena pit. “The gutter entrance is two miles down. I don’t know how you slipped past the outer checkpoints, but you are tracking biohazardous waste onto my marble. Do you have any idea how much it costs to sanitize this stone?”

I didn’t answer. I just looked at him.

My silence seemed to irritate him. He expected me to cower, to beg, or to realize the grave social error I had made. When I did none of those things, his smile vanished, replaced by a cold, bureaucratic spite.

“Oh, I see. You think because you found a slightly less rusted suit in the garbage, you can play pretend with the board members,” the broker mocked. He took a step closer to the rope. He turned his attention to Lingshan. “And what is this? A discount street mercenary? Did you pay her in rat meat to follow you around looking grim?”

Lingshan didn’t blink. Her expression remained completely blank, but the ambient temperature around her boots dropped five degrees.

The broker ignored her, emboldened by our lack of response. He turned his gaze to Red Dog.

He pulled a thin, polished silver cane from beneath his podium and reached across the velvet rope. He tapped the silver tip against Red Dog’s heavy, First Era iron chest plate.

Tink. Tink.

The sound was hollow and sharp. The kinetic energy of the tap didn’t even register on the Myrmidon’s mass, but the disrespect was absolute.

“And this rusted garbage disposal,” the broker laughed, shaking his head. “I didn’t think the Undermarket still used mechanical golems. It looks like it’s going to fall apart if the wind blows too hard. Did you drag it out of a landfill to carry your luggage?”

Click.

Lingshan’s thumb pushed against the crossguard of Winter’s Edge. The blade slid exactly half an inch out of its scabbard.

A violent wave of freezing, killing intent washed over the golden rope. The synthetic jasmine scent in the air instantly froze into tiny, glittering ice crystals.

Beside her, Red Dog’s optical sensors flared a sudden, blinding crimson. Deep inside his armored chassis, heavy gears shrieked as the First Era killing machine registered a hostile physical contact from the broker’s cane. The Myrmidon’s massive right claw twitched, calculating the exact trajectory needed to separate the man’s head from his shoulders.

The broker gasped, stumbling backward, his polished cane clattering against the marble. He finally felt the weight of the monsters he was mocking.

I didn’t shout. I didn’t move my head.

I simply raised the index finger of my right hand.

Clack.

Lingshan snapped her blade back into the scabbard instantly. She lowered her head a fraction of an inch, burying her killing intent so deeply it vanished completely.

Red Dog’s optical sensors dimmed back to a dull, passive red. The grinding gears inside his chest fell dead silent. He returned to the posture of a stone gargoyle, holding the silver briefcase with delicate precision.

My absolute control over the two terrifying entities confused the broker. He stared at me, his chest heaving, his manicured fingers trembling slightly. But in the Ivory Sky, arrogance was a fatal disease, and it blinded him to the reality of the situation. He didn’t see a Sovereign commanding his vassals. He saw a slum rat who was afraid of getting in trouble.

His fear quickly curdled into violent embarrassment. Several elite VIPs had stopped on the promenade to watch the exchange. He had lost face in front of his betters.

The broker’s face flushed an ugly, mottled red.

He snapped his manicured fingers in the air.

“Security,” he barked, his voice cracking slightly.

The obsidian doors of the golden elevator slid open with a soft chime.

Four elite syndicate guards stepped out. They were massive men, heavily gene-modded, wearing polished silver combat armor that gleamed under the artificial lights. But it wasn’t their size that mattered; it was the hardware they carried.

They leveled four high-tier, military-grade plasma rifles directly at my chest.

The weapons hummed with a terrifying, high-pitched whine. The ambient heat from the plasma coils warped the air around the barrels. These weren’t the cheap pipe-guns the thugs at the toll bridge carried. These were weapons designed to vaporize heavily armored transport vehicles.

“I gave you a chance to walk away, trash,” the broker spat, adjusting the lapels of his white silk suit to regain his composure. He stepped behind the line of armored guards, suddenly feeling very brave again.

He tapped the silver ID badge pinned beneath his Bleeding Coin crest.

“My name is Broker Lin. I manage the portfolios of men who own the air you breathe,” he sneered. “You have exactly five seconds to turn around, walk back to whatever hole you crawled out of, and scrub your dirty footprints off my marble. If you are still standing here at zero, I will have security execute you for aesthetic violations.”

The guards tightened their grips on the plasma rifles.

“Five,” Broker Lin counted loudly, his voice echoing off the surrounding marble.

Lingshan shifted her weight, preparing to draw. Red Dog’s internal furnace roared to life.

“Four.”

I didn’t raise my umbrella. I didn’t summon the Golden Ledger.

I reached into my ruined suit pocket and pulled out my smartphone.

The screen was heavily spider-webbed from the fight with the Alchemist Consortium. A chunk of glass was missing from the top left corner. It was a cheap, disposable piece of technology that belonged in a garbage bin.

“Three.”

I tapped the cracked screen, waking the device. The dim blue light reflected in my eyes.

I didn’t look at the guards. I didn’t look at the plasma rifles pointed at my heart. I looked at the silver badge pinned to the man’s chest.

Broker Lin. ID-4409.

I opened the Underworld’s open-market financial terminal app. It was a public ledger, accessible to anyone who knew how to read the data flow of the Hell Sectors. I typed in his identification number.

“Two,” Lin said, a cruel, satisfied smirk stretching across his face. He was enjoying this. He wanted to see me beg. He wanted me to drop to my knees and scrub the marble with my bare hands.

The data populated on my cracked screen.

I scanned the numbers. A cold, bureaucratic amusement flared in my chest.

The corporate facade of the Ivory Sky was so incredibly fragile. This man wore tailored white silk. He smelled of expensive cologne. He commanded elite guards and drank chilled champagne.

But his ledger was bleeding.

To afford his position at the golden elevator, to afford the silk suit and the networking parties necessary to maintain his status in the Zhang Clan, Broker Lin had borrowed heavily against his own lifespan. He was drowning in compounded interest. He was technically poorer than the starving ghosts throwing their own severed arms into the blast furnaces two miles away. They only owed their daily quota.

Broker Lin owed his next four centuries to the bank.

“One,” Lin declared, raising his hand to signal the guards to fire. “Time’s up, slum rat. Goodbye.”

I looked up from the cracked screen. I completely ignored the four plasma rifles humming inches from my chest.

I looked the man directly in his perfectly moisturized, terrified eyes.

“Broker Lin,” I said, my voice deadpan, carrying the absolute, crushing weight of an Auditor reading a final balance. “You are heavily leveraged.”

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