Chapter 187: Dismantling the Syndicate
The vault doors came open with a scream of ruined metal.
creeeak. CRASH.
They hit the walls on either side and stayed there, hanging from hinges that would never close again. The noise echoed through the underground chamber like a gunshot in a cathedral.
The vault was huge, the size of a ballroom, carved out of raw stone and lit by recessed amber lights. The ceiling was low and arched, braced with steel beams. Safety deposit boxes lined the walls, hundreds of them, each marked with a number and a lock. The floor was polished marble. Even underground, the Crimson Syndicate had taste.
But the walls weren’t the main attraction.
A huge carved mahogany desk dominated the center of the room.
Behind it sat a man.
The Crimson Boss.
He wasn’t what Holden had expected. He wasn’t a thug or a brute. The man was elegant. Late fifties, silver hair slicked back with oil, a tailored black suit that fit him like a second skin. His long, thin fingers glittered with rings: gold, ruby, emerald, diamond, each worth more than what a soldier made in a year.
His face was what stood out most. A scar ran from his left eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. It pulled his left eye into a permanent squint and gave his smile a crooked, almost cruel look.
He’d been counting money when the doors came down. It was stacked in neat piles, with an open chest of gold coins beside it.
The bounty money, five million credits, paid by House Sterling to kill Holden Voss.
The Boss looked up. His right hand froze mid-count, while his left rested on a control panel built into the desk.
He stared at the figure standing in the doorway, taking in the black cloak, the gold mask, and the ruined doors hanging behind him.
The Boss was no fool. Forty years in the Capital underworld had taught him when to fight, when to run, and when to talk.
He set the money down carefully and leaned back in his chair. The lopsided smile appeared.
"Well." His voice was smooth and confident, like a man who had talked his way out of trouble more times than he could count and fully expected to do it again. "You just walked into the wrong room, freak."
Asura didn’t move.
"Do you know where you are? This is the Crimson Syndicate’s inner sanctum. The most protected room in the most protected building in the Capital. I’ve got Rank 2 guards on every floor above us, wards on every entrance, and enough firepower in the armory to equip a small army."
He folded his hands on the desk, and the rings glittered.
"And you just kicked my door in. That’s bold. I respect bold." The smile widened. "So let’s talk. Who sent you? The Diamond Dogs? The Iron Fang? Or are you a freelancer looking to make a name for yourself?"
Asura didn’t speak.
"I said, let’s talk." The Boss’s voice had lost some of its smoothness, a hint of desperation slipping through. "Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it. Triple it if you want. The money’s right there. Take a look."
He gestured at the stacks of cash, the gold in the chest, the rings on his fingers.
"Name your price."
Asura walked towards him.
The Boss’s smile dropped.
"I’m talking to you." The smoothness was gone now, and his voice hardened. "I said I’d pay you. That’s a generous offer. Don’t be stupid."
Asura kept walking.
"Stop."
Asura didn’t stop.
"I said STOP!"
The Boss slammed his palm down on the desk’s control panel.
A deep hum rose from the walls, low enough to make the marble floor tremble. Energy began gathering from emitters built into the ceiling and walls, each one feeding into the same point until the air itself seemed to vibrate.
A kinetic force field bloomed around him, dense and shimmering, visible to the naked eye as a faint blue sphere of compressed energy. It wrapped around him in every direction, extending six inches from his body, and the air inside it crackled with concentrated power.
The Boss leaned back in his chair, and the smile returned, bigger this time.
"Now." He adjusted his cuffs. "Let me show you what you’re dealing with. This is a Thorne-Class kinetic barrier. Cost me eight hundred thousand credits on the black market, and it can take a direct missile strike. A Rank 3 attack would bounce right off it. Nothing short of a Rank 4 powerhouse is getting through this shield."
He rapped his knuckle against the barrier. It gave off a clear, bell-like ring.
ting.
His left hand settled back onto the panel, palm flat.
"So, here we are. You can’t touch me, and this hand is sitting on a panic button that brings forty Rank 2 enforcers down that stairwell in about ninety seconds. Do you want to talk now?"
Asura stopped walking.
He stood five feet away from the force field. Five feet from the man who had taken five million credits to kill him and everyone on his train.
His 10,000x processor activated.
The world slowed. The hum of the force field became a visible waveform, each pulse breaking down into data as his processor mapped the energy frequency, oscillation pattern, harmonic resonance, and every other detail in real time.
The Thorne-Class barrier ran on a fixed frequency: 7.3 megahertz, oscillating in a stable sine pattern. Its energy was spread uniformly across the spherical surface, built to redistribute any kinetic impact across the entire field. That was how it shrugged off missiles. The impact point didn’t matter because the force got shared across the whole bubble.
But the frequency was fixed.
And anything with a fixed frequency could be matched.
Asura raised his right hand and opened his palm. He simply aligned the energy in his hand with the barrier’s exact frequency, using the same wavelength, the same oscillation, and the same harmonic signature.
His hand began to glow. Not red or gold, but the same faint blue as the barrier.
His fingers touched the surface, and the barrier sparked where skin met energy. Blue light flickered violently as the hum changed pitch, climbing from a low drone to a high-pitched whine.
The Boss’s eyes went wide.
"What are you..."
Asura pushed harder.
His hand passed through. The field didn’t break or shatter. It simply gave way, rippling around his wrist, then his forearm and elbow, as the energy that could stop a missile flowed around him instead of resisting. His hand was vibrating at the exact same frequency as the barrier, making it impossible for the field to tell him apart from itself.
crack. crack.
Structural fractures spread across the blue sphere, spreading out from the point where Asura’s arm disappeared into it.
The Boss scrambled backward in his chair until it slammed against the wall. Trapped, he clawed across the desk, knocking over stacks of cash and sending gold coins scattering across the floor.
"No. No no no no. That’s impossible. That’s IMPOSSIBLE."
CRACK.
The barrier shattered.
The force field burst apart in a shower of blue sparks that rained across the marble like dying fireflies. The hum died and emitters overhead sparked once and went dark.
Asura stood over the desk, his right arm still reaching through the space where the barrier had been. The Boss was two feet away, pinned against the wall in his chair, his tailored suit suddenly soaked with sweat.
"This... this can’t... you can’t..." he stammered. "That shield cost me eight hundred thousand credits. You can’t just..."
Asura’s left hand snapped out and slammed the Boss’s wrist flat against the desk, far from the panel. Then his right closed around the man’s throat.
The Boss’s aura flared in a desperate burst of energy, spreading outward in a wild, uncontrolled wave. He poured every bit of power his Rank 3, 1-Star body could muster into one desperate attempt to survive.
Asura’s hand squeezed tighter around his neck.
The aura cracked and splintered under the pressure before shattering completely. The Boss’s energy core buckled beneath the grip of a Rank 3, 2-Star hand reinforced with Aether-Steel and backed by the power of the 10,000x multiplier.
CRACK.
The Boss’s eyes rolled back. His body went limp, and the hand that had been clawing at Asura’s wrist dropped to his side.
Asura slammed him into the floor.
BOOM.
The marble floor cracked beneath the impact, fractures spreading outward in a spiderweb pattern. The desk jumped from the shockwave, sending gold coins into the air before they came raining down around the unconscious Syndicate Boss.
The deadliest crime lord in the Capital, the man who had taken five million credits to kill Holden Voss and everyone on his train, now lay unconscious on his own floor. Gold coins and stacks of cash surrounded him, all brought down by a single bare hand.
Asura released his grip on the Boss’s throat and straightened.
[Crimson Syndicate Boss (Rank 3, 1-Star) Defeated!]
[+10,000 KP!]
[2x KP Booster Active! KP Doubled!]
[+20,000 KP!]
Asura looked at the desk, the stacks of cash, the open chest of gold, the control panel set into the mahogany, and sat down in the Boss’s chair.
He reached for the control panel and studied it. Simple interface: account access, transfer logs, vault inventory, communication records.
He pulled up the vault inventory first, and the numbers that scrolled past were impressive. The Crimson Syndicate kept a liquid reserve of roughly twelve point four million credits spread across multiple accounts, years of revenue from illegal gambling, weapons trading, and contract killing. And that wasn’t even counting the bounty sitting in the vault with him: five million from House Sterling, paid in cash and enchanted gold.
Asura took all of it.
He routed the digital funds through a ghost chain Maeve had taught him to build, using a series of dummy accounts to make the money untraceable before it reached its destination. Then he opened his System Inventory and started sweeping.
The cash on the desk went in. The gold in the chest went in. The safety deposit boxes lining the walls he opened one by one: jewelry, uncut gems, black market vouchers, rare pills, forged documents. One box held a Rank 2 energy core worth a small fortune all by itself.
Everything went into the Inventory.
[Gold credits Acquired: 12,400,000]
[Uncut Gemstones Acquired: x34]
[Black Market Vouchers Acquired: x18]
[Rank 2 Energy Core Acquired: x1]
[Stolen Bounty (House Sterling Payment): 5,000,000 Credits]
Asura tore a sheet of letterhead from the tray, the red fang insignia printed across the top, found a pen, and wrote four words.
He left the note on the Boss’s chest, weighted down with a single gold coin he’d kept out of the Inventory for this purpose.
He walked to the door without looking back.
The stairwell was still empty, and the guards on the third level hadn’t moved. Above, the casino was still churning with noise, light, and money. Nobody knew what had happened in the vault, and nobody would know until the Boss woke up, if he woke up, and found his empire stripped clean.
Asura climbed back up through the armory, through the VIP rooms, and out across the casino floor, where the gamblers kept gambling and the guards kept watching. Not one of them saw the shadow slip between them.
He took the service entrance, cut through the alley, and melted into the night. Holden Voss walked back into the villa at two in the morning.
He found Maeve at her monitors.
"Done," he said.
She looked up at him, then at the Inventory readout he was sharing through the party link. Her eyes went wide.
"Twelve point four million credits."
"Plus the five million Sterling paid for the bounty."
"That’s seventeen point four million, Holden." A short, disbelieving laugh escaped her. "That’s more money than the academy’s annual budget."
"I know."
"Where’s the Boss?"
"Unconscious. On his own floor. With a note on his chest."
"What does the note say?"
Holden smiled. It was warm and genuine, the kind of smile that looked completely out of place after everything he’d just done.
"’Tell Sterling I’m coming.’"
Maeve stared at him for a long moment. Then she shook her head, pushed her glasses up, and started typing.
"The hunt is on," she said.