Season 3 chapter 80
The Cardboard Estate
As they drove further away from the city center, the smooth asphalt roads completely vanished, replaced by deeply rutted mud streets. The tall, imposing steel buildings of the capital transitioned into sprawling, desolate slums. The houses here were barely standing, patched together with rusted iron sheets and rotting wood. The poverty was suffocating.
Kniya carefully navigated the heavy SUV through the narrow, waterlogged alleys until Shuntesh pointed out the window.
"Stop here," Shuntesh instructed casually. "We have arrived."
Kniya threw the car into park and stepped out into the mud alongside Salesh and Filoska. Malesh killed the engine of the motorcycle right beside them.
The four corporate billionaires stood in the dirt, staring up at the exact coordinates Shuntesh had given them.
Kniya's jaw dropped.
"Is... is this your house?" Kniya asked, thoroughly bewildered.
It wasn't a house. It was a literal treehouse.
Suspended between the thick branches of a massive, dying banyan tree was a sprawling, highly chaotic structure built entirely out of thick cardboard boxes, stolen industrial tarps, and jagged scrap metal. To get up to the front "door," there was a terrifyingly fragile-looking wooden ladder nailed directly into the tree trunk.
"Yeah, this is my place," Shuntesh nodded calmly, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. "Let's go inside. Here is the ladder."
Shuntesh casually grabbed the first wooden rung and started climbing.
Kniya aggressively grabbed the side of the ladder, violently shaking it. The entire structure groaned and creaked.
"Hey, wait a minute!" Kniya yelled up at him, pure panic in his voice. "Are you absolutely sure that this thing is going to uphold the weight of all of us?! I am a multi-trillionaire! If this cardboard box collapses, I am going to break my neck in the mud!"
Shuntesh paused halfway up the ladder, looking down at Kniya with a deeply unimpressed, flat expression.
"Don't you doubt my structural engineering, Kniya," Shuntesh warned smoothly. "It is mathematically balanced perfectly. It is absolutely going to uphold the weight of all of us. Just climb up."
The Corporate Parasite
With deep, unfiltered hesitation, Kniya, Malesh, Salesh, and Filoska slowly climbed the creaking wooden ladder, hauling themselves through the makeshift trapdoor and into the main room of the treehouse.
Inside, the space was surprisingly massive, though it was lit entirely by hanging, battery-powered salvage bulbs. The walls were lined with hand-drawn blueprints, strange mechanical components, and jars of what looked like glowing, unstable sand.
Kniya dusted off his knees, looking around the walls of the structure with absolute, unapologetic arrogance.
"Goddamn," Kniya judged loudly, kicking a piece of cardboard on the floor. "This house is so fucking poor. I have seen literal dog kennels with better insulation than this scrap-heap."
Shuntesh Hawada casually placed his assault rifle on a nearby workbench. He didn't even flinch at the insult. Instead, he turned around and looked Kniya dead in the eyes, his expression completely chill but loaded with absolute intellectual superiority.
"This house is vastly better than you," Shuntesh fired back smoothly. "I made this entire structure purely out of my own mind. I calculated the load-bearing tension, sourced the materials, and built an off-the-grid sanctuary with my bare hands. It is an architectural marvel of survival."
Shuntesh leaned against his desk, crossing his arms.
"So don't talk shit about my walls, you bloated corporate parasite," Shuntesh deadpanned coldly.
The Treehouse Reactor
Kniya cautiously hauled himself through the makeshift trapdoor, stepping onto the surprisingly solid cardboard and scrap-wood floor of the treehouse. Malesh, Salesh, and Filoska followed right behind him, ducking their heads to avoid the low ceiling.
Inside, the space was cramped, illuminated by a single flickering battery bulb.
Kniya looked around, his sharp eyes immediately locking onto two other guys occupying the small room. One guy was lazily dragging a rusted broom across the floor at a snail's pace, entirely devoid of motivation. The other guy was lying flat on a stained mattress in the corner, snoring loudly, deep in a mid-day sleep.
"Hey, who the fuck are these two guys?" Kniya asked, pointing a finger at them.
"They are my friends," Shuntesh replied calmly, setting his heavy Stone Assault Rifle down on a crate. "They are just resting now. We all share this place."
Malesh completely ignored the roommates, his dark, calculating eyes scanning the chaotic workbench in the corner. It was covered in copper wiring, glass tubes, heavy lead shielding, and thick, black residue.
"Where is your reactor thing, or whatever you called it?" Malesh asked flatly.
Shuntesh walked over to the bench. "Right here."
He connected a pair of frayed cables from a heavily shielded, metallic cylinder directly to an ordinary filament light bulb hanging from the roof. He flipped a heavy brass switch.
HUMMMMMM.
The cylinder vibrated intensely. In a fraction of a second, the light bulb flared with a blinding, intensely bright white light that completely illuminated the entire treehouse.
But exactly two seconds later, the humming violently sputtered out with a thick, mechanical wheeze. The light bulb flickered and completely died, plunging them back into dim shadows.
"It works perfectly," Shuntesh explained, unhooking the cables. "But as you can see, I have a very little amount of fuel left. It consumes the raw Mataenium rapidly, and because I don't have a high-grade filtration system, the sub-thermal chamber immediately chokes on the heavy sludge byproduct. So it stops instantly as the fuel burns out."
Filoska stared at the complex, heavily shielded cylinder and the thick sludge residue in absolute awe. "Did you make this entirely by yourself? All alone?"
"No, no, no," Shuntesh shook his head, gesturing to the two guys in the room. "I didn't make it all alone. I made it with the help of these two guys. You can see them."
The guy holding the broom stopped sweeping. He looked up, his eyes half-closed, and let out an incredibly slow, lethargic groan. "Yeah…"
The sleeping guy didn't even open his eyes. He just blindly raised a thumbs-up from the mattress and mumbled. "Yeah…"
Shuntesh's chill persona instantly vanished. He glared at them.
"Hey, what is that?!" Shuntesh barked, aggressively clapping his hands. "You should at least say it properly! 'We made it, we did it!' Have some energy in yourselves! You are acting like some lazy shits! We have guests!"
The Shift Logistics
Salesh crossed his arms, looking back and forth between the high-level energy reactor and the three guys living in a literal cardboard box.
"I have a serious question," Salesh intervened, genuinely confused. "How are you three even surviving if you are the only one actively working at that factory?"
"No, I am not the only one actually working," Shuntesh corrected, pointing to the guy snoring on the mattress. "This serious guy who is sleeping right now, he is also working. But he does the heavy night shift at the docks. I do the day shift at the factory. And the guy who is doing the chores with the broom, he maintains the home and sources the scrap. So we three are running this home together. That is the scenario."
The broom guy sighed heavily, leaning on his stick. "Yeah..."
The sleeping guy groaned from the mattress. "Yeah..."
Shuntesh's eye twitched. He picked up a small block of wood and threw it directly at the sleeping guy's head.
"Hey! Don't you have any energy at all?!" Shuntesh yelled. "Here are some guests! Bring them some tea! Both of you, get up!"
Grumbling lazily, the two roommates slowly dragged themselves up, fired up a small portable stove in the corner, and began boiling water.
The Hospitality of the Poor
Shuntesh quickly pulled out several wooden supply crates, gesturing for the billionaires to have a seat. Within minutes, the two lazy roommates handed Kniya, Malesh, Salesh, and Filoska chipped ceramic cups filled with hot, heavily spiced tea, along with a small, slightly stale packet of cheap biscuits.
Because the treehouse had no electrical fan and the Seistain humidity was suffocating, Shuntesh grabbed a large, handmade palm-leaf fan and began actively manipulating the air, fanning his guests while they sat on the crates.
Kniya held the chipped teacup, looking at Shuntesh fanning them. For the first time in years, a very rare, genuine sense of wholesome respect pierced through Kniya's unhinged corporate arrogance. Even though this guy lived in a scrap-metal box and had literally nothing, he was treating them with absolute, top-tier hospitality.
Kniya popped a piece of the stale biscuit into his mouth, his eyes wandering up from the teacup to inspect the structural layout of the ceiling. He looked at the way the thick cardboard sheets seamlessly interlocked with dented iron beams, completely amazed by the sheer craftsmanship of the shack.
"You know, Shuntesh, I am thoroughly looking around this place, and I am genuinely impressed," Kniya announced loudly, waving his biscuit in the air. "Look at those supports, Malesh! This isn't just random trash. This is high-level slum architecture! I thought we were walking into a basic garbage heap, but you actually built a solid fortress out of discarded boxes and pure survival instincts."
Shuntesh offered a faint, relaxed smirk, keeping the large palm leaf moving in a steady rhythm. "Yeah, well, it was a real bitch to set up, Kniya. It took a massive amount of hard manual labor. My boys and I spent weeks hauling heavy scrap out of the industrial dump sites just to stabilize the platform."
Shuntesh pointed the edge of the fan toward the main structural pillars supporting the roof framework.
"See those curved metal bars over there?" Shuntesh grinned casually. "Those are literal frames from destroyed steam-cars. The factory across the street was going to melt them down for scrap iron, but we smuggled them out under our coats in the dead of night. We used the vehicle frames to build the core chassis of the house so the wind wouldn't violently blow our beds into the mud bank."
Kniya's jaw dropped in absolute admiration. He clapped his hands together, completely energized by the unhinged engineering.
"Oh, magnificent!" Kniya cackled obnoxiously, popping his mint gum. "You literally stole the bones of a luxury transport vehicle to reinforce a cardboard treehouse! That is absolute peak corporate resourcefulness! If Kavilson Steel ever goes bankrupt, I am hiring you to redesign our executive lounges out of dented doors and old tires!"