"What the—!" Agent Sterling stumbled back as his transport crashed into a brick wall, alarms blaring. "They're not bound by real-world physics! They're retaining their server density!"
"My turn," Ayase whispered softly. She didn't sprint; she simply glided across the wet asphalt. To the corporate agents, she was nothing more than a silver blur.
Swish. Swish.
Ayase's wireframe katana sheared perfectly through the barrels of their suppression rifles, slicing the dense, real-world metal as easily as wet paper. She didn't kill the agents—her blade stopped a millimeter from their throats, a masterclass in ascetic restraint.
"Do not move," Ayase instructed serenely, standing amidst the ruined weaponry.
Sterling panicked. He slapped a red emergency button on his wrist communicator. "Code Black! The assets are hostile! Deploy the Repo-Mech!"
From the sky above, a massive, unstealthing cargo ship dropped a heavily armored, bipedal combat mech directly into the street at the end of the alley. It stood fifteen feet tall, bristling with gatling guns and glowing with a highly unstable, synthetic mana-core. It wasn't a game monster. It was a billion-dollar piece of military hardware designed for urban pacification.
The mech locked its targeting lasers entirely on Yuto.
"You can't outpunch a tank, Kurosawa!" Sterling yelled, backing away. "Surrender the assets!"
Yuto didn't look at the mech. He looked at his right hand. The 50% Vault pressure was no longer actively killing him because the real world didn't know how to process his digital debt. Instead, the pressure was bleeding outward. Puddles of rainwater near his boots were defying gravity, floating upward. The pavement beneath him was turning to fine dust.
"I'm not going to punch it," Yuto said quietly.
He walked toward the massive, heavily armed machine.
The mech opened fire, unleashing a hail of armor-piercing rounds.
"Yuto!" Rin screamed.
Yuto didn't dodge. He simply raised his glowing, bandaged arm.
He didn't cast a protective shield. He didn't spend a single Vita-Fragment. He just let the sheer, absolute, offline mass of seventy-five thousand hoarded fragments, a Mythic Boss Chest, and a 1.65% compounding interest rate assert its physical dominance over the environment.
The bullets hit the invisible gravity field surrounding Yuto's arm and instantly flattened into metal discs, completely unable to penetrate his net worth.
"What is that barrier?!" Sterling gasped. "The readings... his mass is heavier than a neutron star!"
"Withdrawal: Inflation," Yuto whispered.
He took one heavy, deliberate step forward and slammed his open palm against the armored leg of the mech.
The mech didn't explode. It crumpled.
The sheer density of Yuto's unspent wealth forcefully injected itself into the physical space occupied by the machine. The billion-dollar mech couldn't withstand the conceptual weight of four trillion dollars of hoarded, offline assets. Its titanium armor folded like aluminum foil, the synthetic mana-core shattering instantly as the entire fifteen-foot machine collapsed into a flat, compressed disk of scrap metal on the street.
Silence fell over the alleyway, save for the patter of the rain.
Yuto stood over the crushed mech, the glowing gold barcode on his left hand pulsing in the dark. He looked at Agent Sterling, who was now on his knees, trembling uncontrollably.
"You wanted an audit?" Yuto asked, his voice cold and absolute. "Tell Omni-Corp that the Zenith Bank is under new management. And I'm collecting on all outstanding debts."
Isabella walked up beside him, a fierce, proud smile on her face. Kurenai cracked her knuckles, and Ayase sheathed her sword. Shion hovered above them, finally realizing that being bound to the stingiest man in the universe had just made her a shareholder in the most powerful entity on Earth.
The Vanguard hadn't just escaped the Tower. They had inherited the world.