A night breeze rose, dragging dry leaves that scraped the pavement with a rough sound, momentarily breaking the sepulchral silence that enveloped the property.
The Goode mansion was simply dead.
No crickets were heard, nor the hooting of owls.
It was an absolute auditory vacuum, as if the house had been excised from reality.
As Lief and Jennifer advanced along the cobblestone path, the air became charged with a peculiar mixture, the sweet smell of flowers and alcohol competing with a subterranean stench of sulfur and flesh.
On both sides of the path, the automatic sprinklers continued their monotonous cycle. In the ornamental pond, the Japanese koi carp, which cost thousands of dollars each, floated belly up.
The huge solid oak front door was ajar, inviting them to pass with a crack of golden light spilling onto the porch.
Lief pushed the wooden slab with his boot and the door opened without a creak, revealing the horror.
The foyer gave way to an obscenely luxurious ballroom.
Under the light of gigantic chandeliers, a banquet worthy of royalty was spread out: long tables covered with linen tablecloths, sparkling silverware, and bottles of exclusive vintage wine.
But the party had turned into an instant mausoleum.
Dozens of people, the elite of Sunnyvale and relatives of Nick Goode, lay scattered inert on the floor throughout the room.
There was no blood... nor signs of struggle.
Death had claimed them in the middle of a blink.
A man in a silk tuxedo was slumped over the table, his face sunken in a plate of caviar.
An older woman, laden with diamonds, hung inert from a velvet armchair, with a glass of champagne still clutched in her hand.
Near the fireplace, a young couple was frozen in an embrace and she, in a provocative cocktail dress, had died while whispering something into his ear. Now, both were empty shells with their mouths open in a silent scream.
But the disturbing thing was not the position of the bodies, but their state.
Despite having died just a few minutes ago, they seemed to have been in dry decomposition for years.
Their skin had a grayish and parchment-like tone, clinging to the bones as if something had sucked every drop of moisture from the inside.
Their eyes, cloudy and sunken in their sockets, stared at the ceiling with an expression of absolute horror, as if in the last second they had seen something.
"So this is what happens when the deadline is up...", murmured Lief, his voice lacking surprise while observing the massacre.
The Devil does not do charity.
Nick Goode mortgaged his lineage... Upon Nick's death, the contract was annulled due to non-compliance.
Jennifer stopped next to one of the bodies, a corpulent man who seemed to have collapsed while laughing. With an expression of curiosity she extended a finger and pressed the sunken cheek of the corpse.
At the slightest contact, the skin cracked like burned paper.
The flesh and bone crumbled, turning into a pile of ash that spread over the designer suit.
Jennifer shook the dust from her fingers with a grimace of disgust.
"They took every last drop. Soul, vital energy... they drained it all," she said looking around the room full of corpses.
Lief advanced through the ballroom ignoring the gallery of corpses. There was no space in his mind for pity, these people had lived feeding on the blood of innocents and their end was simply the closure of an expired contract.
They crossed the foyer until reaching a long and dark corridor, whose walls were lined with panels. On both sides, the oil portraits of the Goode family ancestors watched them from the gloom.
From Solomon Goode, the original architect of sin, to Nick's father, every painted face shared the same expression: an arrogance and an empty gaze that seemed to despise anyone who did not carry their surname.
"..."
Lief stopped in front of a double door at the end of the hallway.
Something told him that the real prize was behind that wood.
They entered.
Nick's private study was an extension of his ego: floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with books, heavy furniture, and a massive desk.
On the table lay an open diary, a handwritten record of the atrocities that guaranteed the family fortune, but Lief did not even give it a second look.
The history did not interest him... the wealth did.
He walked directly toward the stone fireplace.
During his last seconds of life, between pleas and desperate negotiations, Nick had vomited every secret he had with the hope of buying one more minute.
The location of the vault had been the first.
Lief counted the bricks on the edge of the mantel and pressed one that looked identical to the others.
Click
A mechanical sound broke the silence.
The entire fireplace and the back wall slid sideways, revealing the entrance to a security chamber.
A circular reinforced steel door, similar to that of a bank, with a complex combination dial in the center.
"The combination is..." started Jennifer, remembering Nick's words.
"I do not need it," interrupted Lief.
He rested both hands on the cold surface of the metal and...
Rumble
The steel groaned under the invisible pressure.
He forced the mechanism and the ten ton locking bolts screeched upon being pushed brutally backward by telekinesis, and the huge door began to swing outward.
A gust of air escaped from the interior, laden with the unmistakable smell of money.
When the door was completely open and the light of the study illuminated the interior, Jennifer stifled a cry of incredulity.
There were no antiques, nor art, nor documents.
The room, of about thirty square meters, was dedicated exclusively to liquidity.
Money and gold.
To the left, wooden pallets lined up supporting towers of one hundred dollar bills, new and used bundles stacked with a density that took the breath away, forming green walls that reached almost to the ceiling.
To the right, gold ingots with stamps of international foundries were stacked like construction bricks, returning a golden and heavy shine that was hypnotic.
A predatory smile was drawn on Lief's face, extending from ear to ear.
"Bingo."
He walked until stopping in front of the wall of cash, feeling the magnitude of the fortune accumulated during three centuries of murders.
He raised his hand and rested it on the millions.
'System, convert all the paper money.'
A window flickered on his retina.
[Detected large amount of convertible currency. Exchange rate: 10 dollars = 1 coin. Confirm transaction?]
"Confirm."
Zooom
With the confirmation, a soft white light came out of his palm and swept the piles of money.
Al contacto con la onda, las montañas de billetes parecieron disolverse at a molecular level, decomposing into flows of energy that were instantly absorbed by Lief's hand.
It was a matter of seconds. The space that tons of paper previously occupied remained empty.
[Transaction completed. Congratulations, Host. You have obtained: 50,000,000 Coins.]
!
He did the quick calculation. Five hundred million dollars in physical cash....
However, upon seeing the empty space, he clicked his tongue with a grimace of annoyance.
"Damn it..." he muttered to himself, "Three hundred years of absolute control over the city and this is all he had in cash. Surely the bastard had billions more elsewhere that were lost the moment I put a bullet in his head."
He shook his head, lamenting the lost income due to his impatience when executing Nick, but quickly his gaze diverted toward the gold wall that still remained intact.
"Well... at least he left me dessert."
The cash was already history, but the gold was a completely different story.
Lief walked toward the golden wall, and touched it.
"System, store everything in inventory."
It was an instant quantum dematerialization.
Row after row, the mountain of gold flickered once and disappeared.
The process was fast and in less than thirty seconds, ten thousand gold ingots of standard purity vanished without a trace.
[Object: "Gold Ingot" (x10,000) successfully transferred to the backpack.]
Lief shook his hands with a casual gesture, as if he had just finished moving some old furniture instead of having disappeared the GDP of a small nation.
"Let us go, there is nothing left here that is worthwhile," he said, turning on his heels.
!
However, he stopped upon running into Jennifer head-on.
She was standing in the center of the vault, with wide eyes and open mouth, looking at the space where an incalculable fortune had been a minute ago. Her brain seemed to be having trouble processing the biggest and fastest robbery in history.
"W-what...?" she stammered, pointing at the empty air, "There were mountains of... Where did it all go? What did you just do?"
Lief walked past her without stopping his pace, winking at her with a charming smile.
"Let us just say I put it in a very safe savings account," he said with a teasing tone, and before she could demand a logical answer, he added, "Consider it the fund for our future wedding. You would not want us to skimp on expenses, would you?"
"..."
Jennifer stayed blinking, her cheeks subtly tinting red from the mixture of incredulity and audacity.
"Wedding? We do not even have a house of our own, we do not even live together... Hey, wait for me!"
Lief let out a short laugh while leaving the study.
He closed the heavy steel door of the vault and returned the fireplace to its original position, sealing the Goode's secret forever.
They crossed the ballroom for the last time, ignoring the dead who were still in their eternal party, and went out into the night.
Upon crossing the threshold of the front door, a fresh breeze hit them, but it was no longer the stale, omen-laden wind from before, this was clean air.
The smell of decay had dissipated, swept away by the night wind.
The Goode family mansion, now converted into a pharaonic tomb full of corpses and sins, would be left behind, destined to become one more urban legend.
They walked toward the motorcycle, which waited like a beast under the moonlight.
Lief stopped for a moment before mounting and looked toward the sky. The moon seemed to shine with a new intensity, as if someone had cleaned a dirty pane of glass that covered the whole town.
Jennifer inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with that renewed air.
"It feels... different," she murmured, closing her eyes, "It feels clean."
"Yes..."
While she got on the motorcycle and wrapped her arms around his waist, Lief stayed staring at the distant lights of the town.
At that moment, the interface panel materialized.
[Name: Leif Connor]
[Sex: Male]
[Age: 18 years]
[Main Mission: ???]
[Backpack: Ebony & Ivory, Pure Silver Cross x2, Gastronomic Tablecloth, One Star Sphere, Fenrir, Jason's Mask, Gold Ingots (x10,000)]
[Skills: Perfect Memory, Pure Yang Body, Charm, Charisma +1, Holy Light Effect, Purification, Ox Talisman, Telekinesis (Rank EX), Evil Containment Wave, Blessing of the Goddess of Seduction (Rank EX)]
[Pets: Lillith, Jennifer]
[Achievements: (Catch) — You got a ghost to trip over you three times in a row. (First blood) — Congratulations, you have become a man.]
[Coins: 50,050,999]
[Draws:
– Basic: 1,000 coins x 10 pulls. – Intermediate: 1,000,000 coins x 10 pulls. – Advanced: 10,000,000 coins x 10 pulls. – Supreme: 100,000,000 coins x 10 pulls.]
________
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