Sparks sat with her eyes closed, her pale little feet propped on the edge of the desk, swinging back and forth in perfect contentment.
The Elation Points panel in her head was still glowing, that absurdly long string of digits casting a soft golden light behind her retinas, like a bank passbook.
Comfortable.
Contract signed. A backer behind her. Money in hand.
For the first time in three years, tomorrow wasn't going to be about what she could afford to eat.
And more than that, she had a goal now. A toy interesting enough that even a Masked Fool like her wanted to take it seriously - wanted, in fact, to swallow it whole.
What could possibly be more delightful than that?
She hummed some nameless little tune, settling in to enjoy the quiet, when the door was knocked on again.
A different knock this time.
Fast, no pauses, knuckles slamming hard against the wood.
Sparks opened one eye.
She didn't move.
"Sparks! Open up! It's me!"
Sparks recognized the voice.
Sister Zhou.
She dragged herself out of the chair at her own leisurely pace and pulled the door open.
The woman standing outside did not look well.
Sister Zhou was still in the dark work suit she'd worn at the office that day, but the top button of her collar had popped open at some point, half her low ponytail had come loose, and stray hairs clung to her temples.
She had a stack of papers clutched in one hand, gripped hard enough to crumple the corners.
Sparks leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, and looked her up and down.
"Old hag, it's the middle of the night. Why aren't you asleep instead of showing up at my dog kennel?"
Sister Zhou didn't answer. She pushed straight past her into the room.
The rental was too small. With two people standing in it, the space turned cramped.
Sister Zhou's heel came down on an empty Red Bull can and sent it rolling across the floor to clang against a table leg.
Her lips moved, like she wanted to say something about "living conditions," but in the end she said nothing.
She slapped the stack of papers down on the desk.
Sparks glanced at it.
A contract.
She knew the format far too well.
The tacky logo of that no-name MCN agency was printed on the cover, and the title read, in bold letters, EXCLUSIVE MANAGEMENT AGREEMENT. And in the field marked Term, someone had filled in a number that made her stomach turn.
"Ten years." Ten years.
An indenture so bad a dog wouldn't sign it.
"The Boss sent you?"
Sister Zhou stood on the far side of the desk, both hands braced on its edge.
She didn't nod. She didn't shake her head either.
"Sparks, listen to me." Her voice dropped low, as if she were afraid the neighbors might hear. "You're famous now. Because of that Su Yu, you've blown up across the entire internet. But you need to understand something - the contract you're still under is our company's garbage starter deal. The three-year term isn't up yet, and the breach penalty is… three hundred thousand."
Sparks rolled her eyes. "Obviously I know that."
"What you don't know is-" Sister Zhou sucked in a huge lungful of cold air. "The second the Boss saw your numbers this afternoon, he had Legal draft this ten-year exclusive overnight."
Sister Zhou stared hard at Sparks' utterly unconcerned face, the words tumbling out fast: "If you sign this today, every yuan you make from streaming, every commercial partnership, every brand endorsement for the next ten years - the company takes sixty percent! And there's a brutal non-compete buried in it. For the entire term you'd never be able to sign with another agency, not once!"
She shoved the stack of paper across at her. "It's a death trap! He saw you catch fire, and now he wants to use this thing to lock you in that cesspit for the rest of your life!"
Sparks looked down at the contract, and the corner of her mouth curved with amusement. "So?"
Sister Zhou stared at her.
And the next second, she did something Sparks would never in her life have predicted.
She reached out and seized the contract off the desk.
Two hands, one left, one right - and tore it straight down the middle.
RRRIP.
The sound of paper splitting rang out with unnatural clarity in the tiny rental.
Shreds fluttered down. A few drifted onto the keyboard. A few landed inside the empty Red Bull can.
Sister Zhou crushed what was left in her hands into a ball and threw it on the floor.
"Sparks."
Her voice was shaking.
"Find yourself a real lawyer, fast, and get out tonight. The breach penalty… I'll figure out how to stall it. As long as I can, I'll stall."
Sparks looked at the torn paper on the floor.
Then she raised her head and looked at this woman standing in front of her, breathing in ragged gulps.
For the first time, something like genuine astonishment flickered in her eyes.
"Do you have any idea what you're doing?"
For once, there wasn't a trace of that mocking singsong in Sparks' voice.
"The Boss sent you here to get a signature. You didn't get one - you shredded the contract instead. And now you're telling the company's cash cow to run? You planning on ever working in this industry again after tomorrow?"
Sister Zhou's lips pressed together tight, the muscle along her jaw drawn hard.
"Back then… I couldn't protect you." Her voice had gone terribly hoarse.
"These three years, the company threw you into the worst recommendation slots like garbage, snatched away every deal that might have actually paid you and handed it to someone else, buried your channel's weighting at rock bottom. All of it… I knew about all of it."
"Back then I'd just joined. No seniority, no connections, no voice. I watched you go from a small streamer who made a decent living to a has-been who couldn't even cover rent."
Sister Zhou lowered her head and looked at the scraps of paper scattered around her feet, as if they were every compromise and every act of cowardice from the past three years.
"Not this time."
She lifted her head, and what was welling in her eyes finally refused to be held back.
But she swiped the back of her hand across them, hard and fast - so fast that Sparks barely caught it.
"This time… I am not going to stand here and watch you jump into that pit again."
The rental was very quiet.
The half-broken neon sign outside the window had gone completely dark. Only the corridor light in the apartment block across the way was still flickering.
The on-off, on-off glow slipped in through the gap in the shower curtain and fell across the particleboard desk between them.
Sparks studied Sister Zhou's face for a long, long time.
This Earth auntie.
Had her brain flooded?
The Boss had given an ultimatum: come back with a signature or get lost.
She hadn't just destroyed the contract - she was telling Sparks to run.
What did that mean?
It meant that when the sun came up tomorrow, Sister Zhou could forget about ever working in the MCN industry again.
Blacklist, industry-wide ban notice - the full package, no doubt about it.
At her age, with her resume, shattering that rice bowl was practically social death.
She had destroyed the entire foundation she stood on in this city, and for what? So that some has-been streamer who always called her "old hag" in that snide voice, a girl she wasn't related to by a single drop of blood… wouldn't get screwed over?
Sparks didn't understand it.
She was an avatar of the Masked Fool.
In her worldview, every action anyone took had a transactional logic behind it.
You give me elation, I give you entertainment.
A fair exchange, no cheating the old or the young.
But what Sister Zhou had just done had no transactional logic at all.
She wasn't after money. She wasn't after traffic. She wasn't after this body.
She wasn't even after a cheap little "thank you."
This stupid, utterly unreserved kindness.
"It's… absolutely absurd."
The corner of Sparks' beautiful mouth pulled upward in an exaggerated arc she couldn't seem to control.
It wasn't mockery.
It was the ecstasy that erupts from witnessing something so perfectly, gloriously ridiculous.
"Run?"
She stood up from the chair.
"Old hag, I'm afraid that word has never existed in my dictionary."
Sister Zhou froze, staring at her blankly.
Sparks turned around, her back to her.
She closed her eyes and opened the interface only she could see - the Mask Terminal System.
The Elation Points balance glowed golden on the screen, a long string of digits.
Sparks' gaze swept down the Store listings and locked onto one item.
[Punklord Lite Edition - Cyber Ransack Trojan]
Price: thirty thousand Elation Points.
The corner of Sparks' eye twitched.
Thirty thousand.
That was the blood-and-sweat money she'd scraped together after fourteen hours of the System torturing her while several million people across the internet watched her suffer for laughs.
Sparks looked at that enormous sum, and there wasn't a trace of stinginess in her eyes - only the fever of a gambler about to shove in every chip she owned. All in.
A sound of pure delight ground its way out of her throat.
"Thirty thousand Elation Points… to buy a top-tier farce where a smug little no-name agency boss gets his reputation burned to the ground?"
Inside, she was howling with laughter.
"That trade… is worth every point!"
"Exchange!"
She practically roared the command inside her own head.
[Ding - Exchange successful!]
[Friendly reminder: this higher-dimensional item is a single-use causality consumable. Once activated, it cannot be reversed. Happy hunting~]
The number on the Elation Points panel jumped, dropping by a large chunk.
But because of that steep price, a long-missed shiver crawled up Sparks' scalp.
This was the moment she could finally shed this shabby, penniless shell - the moment she could pick the Masked Fool's scepter back up in this excruciatingly boring low-dimensional world and personally direct one perfect production of chaos. Rapture.
She dragged in a deep breath of the stale air, snapped her eyes open, and turned around.
There was a manic hunger for destruction burning in them.
"Let's go."
Sister Zhou was still rooted where she stood, her brain nowhere near able to keep up with Sparks' deranged leaps of logic.
"Go… go where?"
"Your company."
Sparks scooped her phone off the desk, spun it once between her fingers with a flourish, and shoved it into the pocket of her pleated skirt.
She shuffled toward the door in those ridiculous fuzzy slippers, moving like she was performing some kind of dressage routine.
"Three years, and three more years… I've finally waited this day into existence."
She looked back over her shoulder and stuck her tongue out at Sister Zhou with wicked glee, her red eyes full of dangerous laughter.
"Since that balding Boss of yours wants a show so badly, then I, Sparksy, will go deliver one myself… the kind he'll never forget as long as he lives. The U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E E-L-A-T-I-O-N."
Fifteen minutes later.
The office building of that no-name MCN agency.
One thirty in the morning, and the lights in the open-plan floor were still on.
The Boss hadn't gone home. He sat in his glass-walled office waiting for news.
Through the slats of the blinds you could make out his silhouette in the executive chair, a cigarette pinched in one hand while the other kept refreshing Sparks' backend analytics.
When Sparks pushed open the front doors, the receptionist had long since clocked out.
Sister Zhou followed behind her, face bloodless, lips clamped shut.
In her wrinkled JK uniform and fuzzy slippers, Sparks walked the cheap carpeted hallway like it was a red carpet.
She didn't knock.
BANG!
She kicked the door of the Boss's office clean open.
The glass door slammed into the wall with an enormous crash.
The handle punched a hole in the drywall.
The Boss shot out of his chair, scattering ash across his desk. "You-"
Sparks walked in and pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her pocket.
Taixu Media's S-rank exclusive signing contract.
A photocopy.
She unfolded it and slapped it down in front of him. "Care to look?"
The Boss glanced at the cover page.
His face went from red to white to a sick shade of green in under three seconds.
"You - you actually signed with another agency behind my back?! That violates the exclusivity clause! You'll have to pay-"
"Violates what?"
Sparks yawned and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.
"Go dig up the non-compete terms in that garbage contract of ours and see who breached it first. Three years of burying my recommendation weighting in the sewer, intercepting my high-value sponsorships and handing them to your mistress, making life hell for me and Sister Zhou every single day."
"Care to guess whether Taixu Media's terrifying legal team already has every last one of those things saved on their hard drives, in full detail?"
"Want to sue? Any time. That elite legal team Boss Su keeps on retainer is a whole lot more expensive than the intern in your legal department who only knows how to copy-paste statutes."
The Boss's face twisted.
Realizing he'd get nothing out of this ungrateful little animal, he whipped his head around and fixed a venomous glare on Sister Zhou, standing in the doorway.
"You backstabbing piece of trash! You sold her to them, didn't you?!"
There wasn't a drop of color in Sister Zhou's face. Her lips were pressed into a thin line.
"Let me tell you something!" The Boss jabbed a finger in her direction. "You walk out that door today, and you are finished in this industry. The connections I have are enough to make sure you can't even land a job scrubbing toilets in a public restroom in this city!"
Sparks slid both hands into the pockets of her pleated skirt and watched this trashy workplace drama with open interest.
According to the tired formula of Earth's TV dramas, this was the moment she was supposed to step imperiously in front of Sister Zhou and deliver some noble line like "I'll take care of her for the rest of her life."
But Sparks was a Masked Fool.
So certain things had to be handled her way.
She yawned a second time.
"Whatever you say."
She didn't consider the raging Boss worth even one more glance. She turned, indifferent, and walked out without looking back.
She didn't so much as pause when she passed Sister Zhou.
She only raised her right hand behind her, flippant, and waved it twice like she was shooing a fly.
"Old hag, I already tore up the contract for you. The mess that's left is yours to play with. Bye-bye~"
And she was gone.
The slap of slippers faded down the corridor.
The elevator chimed, then the doors slid shut.
Sister Zhou stood in the doorway of the Boss's office, looking at the empty hallway.
Behind her the Boss was still cursing. She didn't hear a word of it.
She looked at the empty hallway.
Then she spun around and ran after her like a woman possessed.
At half past one in the morning, the office building's sensor doors sat firmly shut.
When Sister Zhou shoved through them and stumbled out onto the front steps -
A black Maybach with an expensive metallic sheen sat quietly at the curb beneath a streetlight.
The door was open. Sparks was bent over, climbing inside.
The "driver" in the front seat was a young man, early twenties by the look of him. Almost unreasonably young.
He had a pair of deep black eyes, and at this moment they were surveying the whole scene with obvious interest.
"Sparks!"
Sparks stopped, half her body already settled into the back seat.
Sister Zhou stood on the steps.
The pre-dawn wind was cold, plastering her loose hair across her face. She didn't reach up to brush it away.
"From now on… rein in that temper a little."
Her voice was so hoarse it sounded like she'd swallowed a handful of sand.
"Taixu Media runs deep. Don't… don't go making enemies everywhere the way you did here."
Sparks, seated in the car, rolled the window down.
The dim yellow streetlight stretched Sister Zhou's disheveled shadow long across the pavement.
In that cheap suit with its popped button, she looked like a sponge that had been wrung dry, radiating a kind of hopeless deadness.
Sparks watched her in silence.
Something glimmered in her eyes - the look a higher-dimensional being gives an ant, a light Sister Zhou could never hope to read.
Then Sparks smiled, radiant.
"Old hag."
"…Hm?"
"In a little while - don't blink."
The window slid smoothly upward and sealed.
The dark ballistic glass cut off Sister Zhou's view entirely.
The Maybach's V12 let out a low, surging hum, and the long body glided out of the streetlight's halo like a ghost, merging smoothly into the boundless dark.
Two crimson taillights shrank smaller and smaller, and finally vanished at the end of the street.
Sister Zhou stood on the steps, looking at the place where the car had disappeared.
The night wind poured in through her popped collar, chilling her skin.
She stood there for maybe ten seconds.
Then she turned and pushed the glass doors of the office building open.
The elevator climbed.
The floor numbers ticked upward one by one.
Sister Zhou leaned back against the metal wall of the elevator, staring at the numbers flicking across the display, her mind completely blank.
She knew what was coming.
The Boss would tear into her in front of every night-shift employee left in the company, then tell her to pack her things and get out.
Tomorrow, her name would appear on the industry blacklist.
The day after, every resume she sent out would vanish into a void.
Thirty-eight years old.
Single.
No savings.
No connections.
No way back.
Her life was thoroughly finished.
The elevator arrived.
Sister Zhou drew a deep breath and stepped out.
She had just pushed open the company's glass doors, one foot not yet across the threshold.
The lights overhead flickered.
Across the entire floor, hundreds of bright fluorescent tubes began strobing wildly, with no pattern at all.
As if some lunatic ghost had mistaken the main breaker for a DJ's turntable and was working it in a frenzy.
Sister Zhou stopped in her tracks.
SHHK.
Every computer monitor at every workstation on the floor dropped into absolute, dead blackness.
One second later.
Every screen lit up at once, erupting with a white glare bright enough to blind.
And on every single screen, the same eerie image appeared.
A face.
A grinning clown's face, dripping with mockery.
Before Sister Zhou's brain could even process that, the printer in the corner went insane.
Every printer on the floor began spitting out paper at maximum speed, all at the same time.
The sheets flew out faster than the trays could catch them.
Sheets of blinding white A4 paper swirled through the air like a blizzard, drifting down until they carpeted the entire office floor.
Sister Zhou picked one up.
A bank statement.
The Boss's personal account statement.
Deposits, withdrawals, amounts, dates, counterparties - all of it laid out in perfect clarity. Several six-figure transfers were labeled "consulting fee" -
But that familiar-looking recipient account number belonged to the shell company of an infamous click-farm outfit everyone in the industry knew about!
Before she could finish reading, a second sheet drifted down to her feet.
Chat log screenshots.
Private messages between the Boss and one of the female streamers - unmistakable quid pro quo, casting-couch arrangements laid bare.
A third sheet.
Scans of a dual contract.
One version for the tax bureau, one version actually in force. The amounts differed by a factor of eight.
And at that moment -
The company's projection screen lit up.
The Boss's voice came pouring out of the speakers.
It was a recording.
There was no telling when it had been secretly captured. The audio quality wasn't great, but every word came through crystal clear.
In the recording, the Boss was directing his subordinates to buy bot farms and mass-downvote a rival's stream, his tone arrogant and domineering, laced with several strings of unrepeatable profanity.
The recording looped through the company's PA system, audible throughout the entire building.
Loud enough that the glass partitions on the floor seemed ready to shatter.
The seven or eight employees still working overtime froze where they stood.
Someone stood up. Someone clapped a hand over their mouth. Someone pulled out a phone and started recording.
BANG!
The Boss came charging out of his office.
His shirt was half tucked in and half hanging out. His foot slipped and he went down hard, sprawling face-first across the carpet.
"Shut it off! Somebody shut the damn thing off, NOW!!"
He scrambled on hands and knees to the nearest computer and pounded the keyboard with his fists.
Useless.
That grinning clown was still there on the screen, as if laughing at his helplessness.
In desperation he went for the power cord.
Pop.
The plug came out. The screen went dark for two seconds.
Then the unplugged monitor lit up again.
The clown's face reappeared, mouth twisted to one side, sticking its tongue out at him with pure malice.
The Boss ran for the printers' power cables like a madman.
The printers jammed mid-sheet, protesting, and stopped.
But the PA system kept broadcasting, dutiful to the last.
His own voice echoed through the entire building: "If that Li bastard won't pay protection money, then hire people to dump ten thousand one-star reviews on his channel! I want him shut down by tonight!"
The Boss's face was completely contorted now.
Sweat ran down from his forehead, along the bridge of his nose, off his chin, and dripped onto the A4 sheet at his feet - the one documenting his tax evasion.
Outside the window, light bloomed.
Not dawn.
Alternating flashes of blue and red.
Sirens.
Three police cars.
Brakes shrieked below, followed by a rapid series of muffled thuds as doors opened and slammed, then the quick hammering of boots on concrete steps.
The footsteps in the stairwell came closer and closer.
The company's front doors were shoved open from outside.
Six economic crimes officers in body armor filed in, the one in front holding up his credentials, his voice loud enough to crack the glass partitions.
"Nobody move! Police! Hands behind your heads!"
The Boss stood frozen beside the printer, a fistful of bank statements still clutched in his hand, no time left to shred them.
His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, darting from the police to the evidence blanketing the floor.
From the evidence to the PA system still playing his recording, and finally to that grinning clown face on the screens.
His knees gave out.
Two officers took him by the arms, one on each side, and dragged him out from beside the printer.
As they passed Sister Zhou, his gaze swept over her.
That look held everything - rage, terror, suspicion, bitter refusal.
But his withered lips only trembled. Not a single word came out.
They dragged him out the door.
The sirens started up again down below, then receded fast, dissolving at last into Arc City's cold night.
The office floor was a disaster area.
Printer paper covered everything, like fresh snowfall.
The clown faces were still on the monitors, but they were winking out one after another now, like fireworks that had done their job.
Like a grand, brief pyrotechnic show.
The recording on the PA cut off, and the projection screen went black.
Two officers stayed behind to string up cordon tape and collect evidence.
The remaining employees huddled behind their desks. Nobody dared make a sound.
Sister Zhou stood in the company's doorway, in exactly the same spot where she'd stood when she pushed the door open.
Her right hand still gripped that bank statement, the paper's corner crushed into deep creases.
Her brain had crashed.
From opening that door to this moment, less than three minutes had passed.
Three minutes ago, she'd walked in expecting to be screamed at, fired, and blacklisted.
Three minutes later, the man who'd been about to fire her had been dragged away in handcuffs.
"Ms. Zhou?"
A voice came from her left.
Sister Zhou turned her head mechanically.
A young woman stood beside her.
Sharply tailored dark gray suit, a metal badge pinned to her chest.
Sister Zhou recognized the logo on that badge.
Taixu Media.
The same agency whose HR rep had come to Sparks' rental to deliver a contract the night before.
But it wasn't the same person.
This one was younger, and the folder in her arms was different.
"Ms. Zhou, apologies for the late hour. I'm from Taixu Media's Human Resources department."
She drew a gilt-edged letter of employment from the folder and offered it with both hands.
"President Su Mei admires the… " The young HR rep paused deftly, weighing her wording with professional care. "-the outstanding resilience and the admirable professional integrity you've demonstrated under high pressure in a hostile environment."
"Our core Artist Coordination division at Taixu Media is in urgent need of an experienced supervisor like yourself."
"Generous compensation and broad room for advancement are both detailed in this letter. We sincerely hope you'll consider us."
Sister Zhou stared dully at the letter held out in front of her.
Gilt edges.
Premium paper stock.
The Taixu Media logo.
The gold leaf was almost too bright to look at.
She reached out to take it. Her fingers shook so badly that the corners of the letter trembled in her grip.
At that moment, the phone in her pocket buzzed.
Sister Zhou fished it out with her left hand.
A new message had popped up on the screen.
Sender: Sparks.
She opened it.
The first message: "Well, old hag? Surprised? Shocked?"
The second: "Do you like the present Sparksy sent you? Is this gift… elating enough?"
At the end of the second message was a red heart emoji.
Sister Zhou stared at that heart.
The faint white glow of the phone screen lit up her haggard, bewildered face.
She thought of half an hour ago, when the Maybach's window had rolled down and Sparks had said one last thing to her.
"Old hag, in a little while - don't blink."
So that was what she'd meant.
That brat had arranged every single piece of it before she ever walked out the door.
The virus.
The police.
Taixu Media's offer.
All of it.
A drop of water landed on the phone screen, striking that red heart emoji dead center.
Sister Zhou raised her right hand and scrubbed hard across her face with the back of it.
The motion was fast - identical to the way she'd wiped away tears in secret in the company bathroom stall for three years.
So fast that the HR rep beside her barely noticed.
But a second drop fell anyway.
She clutched that gold-gleaming employment letter tight in one hand, and in the other gripped the old phone still lit with Sparks' message.
She raised her head and looked out the window.
In the pre-dawn Arc City, the distant CBD towers glinted with scattered points of light in the dark.
The top floor of Arc City Tower was still lit, like a golden lantern hanging in midair.
She didn't know the person who lived in that building.
But the white-haired brat who'd rolled down the window of a Maybach and stuck her tongue out at her - that one she'd known for three years.
Only today did she learn that the girl had understood exactly what was happening all along, better than anyone.
It wasn't that she wouldn't fight.
She'd just been waiting.
Waiting for a stage big enough. Waiting for a knife sharp enough. Waiting for a chance to settle every account in a single stroke.
And when that chance came, the first person she thought of wasn't herself. It was the "old hag" who had once tried to help her.
Sister Zhou put the phone back in her pocket, wiped her face on her sleeve, folded the employment letter, and slid it carefully into her briefcase.
"I accept," she said to the HR rep.
Her voice was still hoarse, but steadier than before.
It carried the strength of someone handed a second life.
The HR rep nodded and offered her a business card.
Sister Zhou took it and turned toward the elevator.
The corridor was quiet.
The sounds of the police collecting evidence and the employees murmuring were sealed away behind the glass doors.
The fluorescent tubes had stopped flickering. They'd gone back to steady white light.
The elevator doors opened.
Sister Zhou stepped in and pressed the button for the ground floor.
Before the doors closed, she took one last look at the office floor.
Printer paper still blanketed it, white as snow that had finally stopped falling.
The black Maybach hadn't driven far. It had circled back.
Like an elegant, arrogant phantom of the night, it lay in wait in an unlit patch of shadow across the street from the office building.
The cabin's soundproofing was exceptional.
As several police cars swept past, red and blue lights blazing, sirens howling -
That noise, which should have been deafening, was filtered by the heavy ballistic glass into nothing more than a muffled background hum.
Sparks had kicked off those ridiculous fuzzy slippers without a second thought. Barefoot, pale little feet tucked under her, she curled up in the wide, soft aviation-grade seat with absolutely no regard for posture.
She bit down on the plastic stick in her mouth and watched through the tinted privacy film as that "old hag" Sister Zhou walked back inside like a woman who'd lost her soul - and then watched the fully armed officers storm the building like troops descending from heaven.
"Not bad for efficiency."
Sparks turned her head, those red eyes glinting with dangerous light in the dim ambient glow of the cabin.
"A three-minute response time, plus an HR rep standing by on the front steps with a stopwatch."
"Producer Su, your pull in Arc City is a little more outrageous than I imagined."
The man in the driver's seat was, of course, Su Yu.
He still wore that well-cut shirt, no tie, collar slightly open, radiating the unhurried composure of a man who had already planned everything and a calm too deep to read.
"For an S-rank artist who's just signed her life away, arranging a small liquidation service for her former employer is nothing more than Taixu Media's most basic employee benefit."
Su Yu rested his hands, folded, on his knee.
"Besides, weren't you the one who personally hit Enter on the commands to call the police and notify HR?"
A pleased, throaty giggle bubbled out of Sparks.
And then, in the next second, she moved.
Like a boneless and profoundly dangerous cat, she vaulted over the broad hardwood center console between the two front seats and invaded Su Yu's personal space without a shred of restraint.
In an instant, the distance between them shrank to something lethal.
Sparks planted both hands on the leather seat on either side of him, poised almost astride him, hovering above.
Her white twin tails spilled down, strands brushing suggestively across Su Yu's cheek.
The cool, expensive cologne that had filled the cabin was overrun in a heartbeat by the candy sweetness coming off her and something else entirely - a wild rush of hormones.
"Employee benefit?"
Sparks tilted her head lower, the tip of her nose nearly touching his.
Her voice was soft and clinging, sweet to the point of cloying, and threaded through with undisguised killing intent.
"Even a 'Cyber Ransack Trojan' - a higher-dimensional contraband item you can't buy anywhere in the sea of stars - and you can casually route it past the firewalls and jack it into Earth's network nodes… Su Yu, what kind of monster are you?"
Faced with that suffocating closeness, a posture skirting the edge of something igniting, Su Yu didn't flinch.
He didn't show even a flicker of unease.
He simply lifted his eyes, calm, and met her gaze head-on - those eyes with their four-leaf clover pattern spinning madly.
No.
The fever and excitement had turned the four leaves into six.
"What kind of monster I am doesn't matter."
Su Yu raised his chin slightly, his gaze seeming to pierce straight through the Masked Fool's mask and into the soul beneath it, the one that hungered for perfect chaos.
"What matters is - just now, when you pressed Enter, when you watched that balding boss get ruined and watched that old woman get a second life… did it feel good?"
Sparks' breath caught, just slightly.
"You gave me the highest privileges on purpose. You even built the police backdoor right into the trojan's detonation key…"
After that brief flicker of astonishment, a twisted, exhilarated smile bloomed across her exquisite face.
"Su Yu, you're not just a madman, you're a complete and utter deviant! Aren't you afraid this fire with no limits burns its way back to you tomorrow?"
"Afraid?"
Su Yu let out a low, quiet laugh.
He raised a hand, slowly.
He didn't push her away, not with her hovering inches from his face. Instead, naturally - indulgently, even - he tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
The rough pad of his thumb, warm with human heat, brushed lightly across her sensitive earlobe.
A tremor went through Sparks' body, so faint it was almost invisible.
"If even I won't burn…" Su Yu's voice dropped very low, carrying a lethal seduction and the madness of a man who had already chosen his death.
"…then how could you ever burn this boring world all the way down to ash?"
In that instant, Sparks' pupils contracted violently.
What arrogance. What insanity. What perfect resonance.
This man wasn't keeping her as a pet.
He was, fully aware of what he was doing, forging himself an ultimate scythe that might slit his own throat at any moment.
She surged forward, her warm breath breaking without restraint against the side of his neck.
Her red lips grazed his ear, and out came a low, panting laugh - delighted, and edged with something sick.
"Good… so very good…"
Sparks pulled back a little, looking down at him from above, and flicked out the tip of her small tongue to wet lips gone dry from sheer excitement.
Her eyes burned with a fire eager to drag everything into the revel.
"Well, if my honored Keeper is that self-aware…"
"…then before I wring the last drop of value out of you, I promise you this - I will never, ever let you be bored.~"
The driver's side of the Maybach was dark, and thick with a tension that made breathing difficult.
A madwoman and a gambler, in this steel cage reeking of gasoline and perfume, had just completed their first collision - intimate, and bright with the flash of blades.
Sparks hummed in satisfaction and, like a cat that had gotten exactly what it wanted, slipped nimbly back into the passenger seat and curled herself into a ball again.
Su Yu withdrew his hand and turned his gaze back to the deep night ahead.
It was then that Fenghuang's voice sounded.
"You were right, Su Yu. She is extremely dangerous. I tried to probe her mental world - it's pure chaos. And she is the same as you: someone who does not belong to this world."
She paused, and there was hesitation in her voice.
"Just as Sparks said herself - you're playing with fire, Su Yu."
Su Yu's fingers tapped lightly against the steering wheel.
He laughed quietly, inwardly. "Squad Monitor."
"Yes?"
"The apocalypse is almost here."
"Mm."
"Whether this fire burns me to ash, I don't know. All I know is that if the Honkai breaks through our line, the whole world goes down with us."
In the Sea of Consciousness, something in Fenghuang's eyes trembled, almost imperceptibly.
"Su Yu."
"I'm here, Squad Monitor."
"You've changed." There was a trace of bitterness in Fenghuang's voice. "Maybe you haven't even noticed it yourself. You're becoming more and more like the comrades I once knew."
"Comrades?"
"They were all people willing to burn themselves down to ash for the sake of the world."
Su Yu laughed out loud inside his own head.
"You flatter me, Squad Monitor. Save the world? That's a job for that popsicle Kevin. My ambitions have never run that lofty."
"Whether this world lives or dies, honestly… has nothing whatsoever to do with me."
He calmly pressed the ignition button.
The V12 answered with a low, savage roar.
"The only reason I sit in this seat, scheme over everything, and go so far as to cut a deal with a lunatic…"
Su Yu stepped on the throttle, eyes fixed on the road ahead.
"…is that the people I actually care about happen to live in this world."
The black Maybach, like a beast of the night finally fed to satisfaction, pulled away under Su Yu's own hand from that block full of sirens and chaos, and thundered off toward the deepest whirlpool at this city's core.
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