Chapter 2

Crunch... Crunch...

It was a nerve-grating chewing sound, like rusted gears frantically grinding down raw meat and cartilage.

When Brad let out that unearthly, agonizing scream, I very calmly took a half-step backward.

That half-step was crucial. Not only did it demonstrate my exceptional risk-aversion awareness as a financial drone, but more importantly, it preserved my $39.90 cheap synthetic suit from the discount mart.

"Ahhhhh! My hand! Something inside is eating my hand!"

Brad's obese body collapsed backward at an incredibly twisted angle.

With every ounce of his strength, he managed to rip his right hand out of my "Hell's Paper Shredder" briefcase.

Accompanied by a nauseating squelch, Brad's hand finally saw the light of day again.

Or rather, what used to be a hand.

His index, middle, and ring fingers—gold rings included—had completely vanished. The stumps showed no clean cuts from human blades; instead, they looked as if they had been gnawed off alive by some jagged, blunt instrument.

The wounds weren't bleeding. Instead, they were coated in a layer of fizzing, dark-green slime that gave off a pungent stench of sulfur mixed with stomach acid.

But physical mutilation was clearly not the most lethal part.

That genuine leather briefcase, connected to the stomach of a hellhound in the Seventh Circle of the Abyss, came with severe mental pollution side-effects.

Brad collapsed onto the floor, his eyes rolling to the back of his head, furiously foaming at the mouth. His remaining thumb and pinky twitched neurotically as he began mumbling bizarre, garbled trills that absolutely did not belong to the realm of human language:

"R'lyeh... the unspeakable debt... Great Old One... he is short-selling my soul..."

A perfectly sound Human Resources manager had completely lost his mind in this moment, reduced to a madman praising the abyss.

"Brad!"

Vincent was utterly paralyzed by the sudden bloody spectacle before him.

The face that had just worn the haughty smile of a capitalist was now twisted into a chaotic mix of extreme terror and rage.

As a corporate prince who could summon the wind and rain on Wall Street, the concept of the "supernatural" simply did not exist in Vincent's cognitive framework.

Inside his secular brain—stuffed with trust funds and leverage principles—he rapidly processed the sudden temperature drop, the anomalous skull paperweight, and Brad's severed hand, arriving at a conclusion perfectly aligned with "mortal logic."

"You damn bottom-tier peasant!" Vincent suddenly pointed at me, his voice cracking from fury. "You actually dared to illegally deploy high-dose hallucinogens and miniature bioweapons in the company?! Are you trying to destroy my firm?!"

I sighed helplessly, trying to make one last disclaimer using business terminology he might understand: "Mr. Vincent, from a procedural compliance standpoint, what just occurred can be entirely attributed to Mr. Brad forcefully accessing my third-party hazardous material storage unit without authorization. This is a textbook operational violation. I personally bear no liability for worker's compensation."

"To hell with your compliance!"

Vincent thoroughly tore off his "Ivy League Elite" facade, revealing the brutal true colors of his North American Mafia lineage.

He snatched the phone off the desk and smashed the big red emergency button—a feature restricted to senior partners only.

"Everyone in here! Lock the doors tight!" he roared frantically into the intercom.

In less than three seconds.

With a muffled thud, the heavy, solid wood double-doors of the executive office were deadbolted. Outside the frost-covered floor-to-ceiling windows, bulletproof metal blinds slammed down automatically.

The entire space instantly became a locked room.

A hidden door on the side of the office burst open.

Four muscle-bound giants—averaging 6'3", wearing tactical Kevlar vests over their suits, and reeking of gunpowder—filed into the room. They were Blackwater mercenaries kept by Vincent's family, or in genteel Wall Street parlance, "Special Non-Performing Asset Disposal Specialists."

Without a word of nonsense, four silenced Glock pistols were drawn in a flash.

A bald, scarred bruiser stepped forward, roughly pinning my arms behind my back and smashing my face down hard against the solid mahogany desk.

Simultaneously, a cold, hard gun barrel was pressed ruthlessly against the back of my head.

"Now, how come that mouth of yours that spews poor-man's jargon is shut?"

Vincent walked up to me. Stepping on my scattered M&A proposals with his custom alligator shoes, he looked down at me from above.

The fear in his eyes had receded, replaced by the arrogance and madness of a man who had regained total control.

Within one minute, the situation had quantum-leaped from "workplace bullying" straight to "gangland execution."

Honestly, the moment a real gun was pressed against my skull, I didn't even feel scared. I just felt an endless wave of exhaustion.

Why couldn't I even have the ordinary, everyday routine of being a normal office worker and getting yelled at by my boss?

"Mr. Vincent, utilizing private armed forces to orchestrate a kidnapping in the heart of Wall Street violates the fundamental spirit of labor laws..." I mumbled indistinctly against the freezing desk.

"Labor laws? In my empire, I am the law!" Vincent sneered, slapping a thick stack of documents from his drawer directly across my face.

"Since you love talking about contracts so much, let's sign a real one right now. This is a 200-million-dollar debt subscription agreement. I was nursing a headache over how to fill the black hole I created with that offshore hedge fund in the Caymans. Since you decided to have a death wish today, you can take the fall as the 'bottom-tier employee who triggered a bloody corporate massacre due to mental instability.'"

Vincent grabbed my hand and brutally shoved his Montblanc pen between my fingers.

"Sign it, and then get the hell out of this building."

I painfully rolled my eyes to glance at the terms on the subscription agreement. My professional instincts made me gasp: "The compound interest calculation here is straight-up loan shark logic, this will never pass the SEC's audit..."

Thud!

The bald bodyguard slammed a heavy punch into my stomach, the intense pain forcing me to swallow the second half of my critique.

"Make him sign," Vincent had lost his patience.

Under the duress of two guns, the bodyguard violently pinched my fingers, forcing down a highly distorted signature at the bottom of the contract.

In that moment, my Wall Street dream officially filed for bankruptcy.

"Excellent." Vincent snatched the contract away with immense satisfaction. He looked at me as if looking at a corpse. "Throw him in the car and take him to the underground casino at Warehouse Seven in Queens. Chop off his hands and feet, and feed him to the fishes in the Hudson. And remember, don't leave a single drop of blood in this office."

As soon as his words fell, I was hauled up like a ragged sack by the two giants and brutally dragged toward the president’s private elevator.

Before leaving the office, I cast one last look at Brad, who was still convulsing and foaming on the floor, and at the skull paperweight resting in a blind spot on the desk, its eye sockets still faintly flickering with eerie green light.

I only felt profound regret.

My perfect attendance bonus for the month was definitely ruined, and HR was absolutely going to dock my KPIs for "leaving work early and staining the carpets."

Fifteen minutes later.

Basement level four, the damp, gloomy ultra-VIP garage.

I was violently shoved into the backseat of a black, armored Ford Jeep.

Flanking me on the left and right were two mercenaries built like iron towers. The bald bodyguard in the passenger seat kept a loaded submachine gun trained directly on my abdomen the entire time.

The car door slammed shut with a heavy thud, the sound of the locks clicking into place exceptionally crisp in the cramped, sealed cabin.

The Jeep's engine let out a low roar as it slowly drove toward the exit ramp.

The cabin heavily smelled of expensive cigar tobacco and a suffocating aura of murder. In the eyes of these mercenaries who licked blood off knife edges for a living, I was just a frail retard they could crush at any moment—"living trash" on an easy transport gig.

"Don't shake, kid," the brute on my left grinned, revealing yellow teeth. "Once we get to the underground casino, the blade is fast. As long as you don't struggle, we promise you'll only feel a few seconds of pain."

I wasn't shaking.

I just slowly slipped my hand into my suit pocket. Through the fabric, my fingertips touched something incredibly cold and sharp.

It was the "Primordial Blood-Wolf Fang" bone whistle that my hot-tempered werewolf mom had forced around my neck before I left the house this morning. To avoid my colleagues thinking I was wearing some cheap, tacky Gothic accessory, I had tucked it inside my jacket.

"Um... fellas," I gulped, using an exceptionally sincere tone in the dim cabin to initiate my final attempt at workplace communication.

"If someone blows contraband exceeding 120 decibels in a confined space, does that invalidate a worker's compensation claim?"

The bald guy in the passenger seat frowned. "What crazy gibberish are you talking about?"

I sighed.

Under the bewildered stares of the two muscle-bound giants, I whipped out that ghastly pale bone whistle with the hand-speed of a man single for twenty-four years, and shoved it straight into my mouth.

Cheeks puffing out.

Using my entire lung capacity, I blew into it with everything I had.