"Vanguard!" Yuto roared.
He didn't need the System's mana. His power was completely offline, locked entirely within his agonizing Vault.
With a deafening CRACK that shook the Backrooms, Yuto launched himself forward. The sheer, unadulterated density of his 18% Vault pressure warped the gravity around him. He didn't just run; he pulled the space between him and the Enforcers together.
Before the Enforcers' blades could touch the girls, Yuto was there.
He caught the first Enforcer's mythic-tier halberd with his bare left hand. The admin-level weapon completely stopped dead in its tracks. Yuto didn't even flinch. He just twisted his wrist, shattering the reinforced polearm into thousands of blue data shards.
"What?!" the Enforcer gasped.
"Withdrawal: Kinetic Spite," Yuto whispered.
Yuto drove his glowing, heavily bandaged right fist directly into the Enforcer's obsidian chest plate. The impact wasn't just physical. It was financial. Yuto forced a fraction of his localized, offline wealth to violently collide with the Enforcer's heavily financed, loaned armor.
It was the equivalent of hitting a balloon with a solid brick of gold.
The Enforcer's armor didn't break; it defaulted. The system couldn't reconcile the collision of Yuto's massive, unspent density with the Enforcer's fragile, borrowed stats. The man screamed as his body violently decompressed, scattering into a shower of premium loot drops.
[Ouroboros Elite Liquidated. Drop: 5,000 Vita-Fragments, 1x Admin Bypass Key.]
Vault it, Yuto commanded, his eyes completely bloodshot.
[Loot Vaulted. Current Stack: 1 Mythic Chest, 6 Fragments, 2,700 Tokens, 5,000 Vita-Fragments, 1 Hydro-Core, 1 Tear, 3 Dev-Strings, 1 Admin Key.] [Multiplier: 1.35%] [Vault Pressure: 22%. Warning: Cellular tearing imminent.]
"Alpha!" Kurenai yelled. Without her mana, she couldn't summon her flames, but she was still an Oni. She lunged at the second Enforcer, using pure, biological brute strength to tackle him to the grey floor, wrapping her arms around his throat in a brutal chokehold.
Ayase, stripped of her system-stats, didn't panic. She closed her eyes, remembering her training before the Tower existed. "The sword is not the System. The sword is the soul." She stepped forward, using a completely offline, physical martial arts throw to disarm the struggling Enforcer as Kurenai choked him out.
Vance stared in absolute horror as his two premium enforcers were dismantled in seconds.
"You're glitching the server!" Vance screamed, his diamond greatsword trembling as he pointed it at Yuto. "Your mass is too high! You're crashing the local economy!"
"You killed my sister for fifty thousand Vita-Fragments," Yuto said, his voice dropping an octave, sounding like two tectonic plates grinding together. The Stigma on his hand was bleeding freely now, the red mist hissing as it hit the unrendered floor.
"That was just business!" Vance shouted defensively, backing away. "The interest rates were agreed upon!"
"Then let's talk business," Yuto smiled, a terrifying, blood-stained grin.
He took a slow step toward Vance. The gravity of the 22% Vault pressure was so immense that the grey wireframe sky above them began to bend and distort around Yuto's silhouette.
"Your armor, your stats, your sword... none of it is yours. It's all borrowed from the Central Bank. You're completely leveraged." Yuto raised his fist. "You're a bubble, Vance. And I am hard currency."
Vance swung his diamond greatsword with all the admin-level strength he could muster.
Yuto didn't dodge. He just let the blade strike his bare, muscular shoulder.
CLANG.
The diamond blade shattered upon impact, completely unable to penetrate the absurd, compounded density of Yuto's hoarded stats.
Vance's arrogant expression melted into pure, primal terror.
Yuto grabbed the Executive Director by the throat, hoisting the heavy, armor-clad man off the ground with one hand.
"The Ouroboros Guild is officially bankrupt," Yuto declared.