"Leaving?!" the Auditor shrieked. The faceless entity in the grey suit scrambled backward, its cracked golden-eye halo sparking. "You are in the Quarantine Zone! There are no exits! The server is preparing a hard wipe of this sector in three minutes!"
"Then we better open a door," Yuto said. He turned to the hovering, purple-haired succubus. "Shion. You're a Mythic glitch. How do I use the Admin Key?"
Shion flew down, her magenta eyes scanning the unrendered environment. "The Admin Key is a consumable item, Master! It contains the backdoor coordinates to the Zenith Bank's central hub on Floor 50. All you have to do is select it in your inventory and hit [CONSUME]. It will generate a portal!"
Yuto froze.
The entire party stared at him. Ayase, Kurenai, and Isabella all realized the problem at the exact same time.
"Wait," Isabella whispered, horror dawning on her face. "Consume? Like... spend it?"
"I don't spend," Yuto said, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. "I don't consume."
"Master, we are in the literal recycle bin of the universe!" Shion screamed, pulling her hair. "The server is going to wipe us in two minutes! Just spend the stupid key! It doesn't even have a monetary value!"
"It resets the multiplier!" Yuto yelled back, clutching his chest as the Vault's internal gravity pulled at his ribs. "If I consume an item, the System registers a transaction! My 1.42% compound interest resets to zero! I lose the tension! I lose the mass!"
"Then we are going to die!" Shion sobbed.
"No, we aren't," Yuto said, his eyes narrowing. He looked at the grey, textureless wall of the Backrooms. He looked at his heavily bandaged right hand.
"Shion, what is an Admin Key, fundamentally?" Yuto asked.
"It... it's a string of raw bypass code!" she stammered.
"And I have raw offline mass," Yuto muttered. He walked up to the invisible boundary wall of the Backrooms. He didn't open his UI to click Consume. Instead, he temporarily opened his Vault just a fraction of a millimeter.
He didn't withdraw the key. He just let the shape of the Admin Key's data press against the inside of his fist, using the astronomical 25% gravity of his hoarded wealth to push the key's code outward without actually removing it from his inventory.
"What is he doing?" Kurenai asked, her Oni eyes wide.
"He's... he's picking the lock from the inside of his own soul," Ayase breathed in awe.
Yuto slammed his fist into the unrendered wall.
CRUNCH.
He didn't spend the key. He physically bludgeoned the server wall with the raw, encrypted shape of the item, backed by the weight of twenty-five thousand Vita-Fragments.
The wall screamed in dial-up agony. Golden cracks spider-webbed across the grey void. With a final, violent twist of his wrist, Yuto tore a jagged, glowing hole in the fabric of the Backrooms.
Through the tear, they didn't see another dungeon floor. They saw an immaculate, hyper-modern lobby with marble floors, golden chandeliers, and rows of pristine teller windows.
[CRITICAL ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED FORCED ENTRY TO FLOOR 50 - ZENITH BANK CENTRAL HUB.]
"He kept his multiplier," Shion whispered, utterly defeated by his sheer, psychotic stinginess. "He literally used a digital key as a physical crowbar."
"Vanguard," Yuto said, his voice echoing with absolute authority as he stepped through the tear in reality. "We have a bank to rob."