Up on the fourth floor, Yuto heard the crash of the cinderblock wall. He winced. That's coming out of the security deposit I never paid, he thought.
Suddenly, the floorboards directly beneath Yuto exploded.
Director Graves hadn't taken the stairs. The squad leader used a pair of grav-boots to smash straight up through the ceiling of the third-floor apartment, bypassing Kurenai and Ayase entirely.
Graves landed in Yuto's living room, his thermal blade humming with lethal heat. He locked eyes with Yuto, completely ignoring the terrified Rin and the hissing gladiator.
"Yuto Kurosawa," Graves stated coldly. "Your account is officially frozen."
Graves slammed a heavy, cylindrical device onto the floorboards. It was a Kinetic Dampener—a billion-dollar piece of Omni-Corp tech designed to completely neutralize all movement and energy within a ten-foot radius. It was meant to freeze Yuto in place so his Vault could be surgically extracted.
The dampener hummed, projecting a massive, suffocating blue dome of heavy gravity over the room. Isabella gasped, dropping to her knees as her body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
"You can't fight physical law, kid," Graves sneered, walking slowly toward Yuto, completely unaffected by his own gravity field. "Your digital mass means nothing if you can't move your muscles to use it."
Yuto was sitting cross-legged on the bed. He didn't look panicked. He looked annoyed.
"Physical law," Yuto repeated, his voice straining slightly under the artificial gravity. He looked at the glowing blue dampener on the floor. "You're spending a billion dollars' worth of corporate energy just to hold me down."
"It's a necessary operational expense," Graves raised his thermal blade.
"I hate expenses," Yuto whispered.
He didn't try to stand up. He didn't try to fight the gravity. Instead, Yuto opened his Vault just a microscopic fraction and let his hoarded, offline mass "leak" directly into the floorboards.
He didn't spend the Fragments. He just temporarily parked them in the physical structure of the apartment, treating the building as an offshore holding account.
[System Echo: Structural Investment Initiated.]
The cheap linoleum floor beneath the Kinetic Dampener suddenly absorbed the conceptual weight of seventy-five thousand Vita-Fragments and a Mythic Boss Chest. The floorboards instantly gained the durability of a late-game raid boss.
The dampener's artificial gravity, which was pushing down with the force of a hydraulic press, suddenly met an immovable, infinitely dense floor.
The Omni-Corp device violently whirred, trying to output more energy to compensate for the impossible resistance. It sparked. It smoked.
"What are you doing?!" Graves yelled, stepping back as his billion-dollar device began to overheat.
"Trickle-down economics," Yuto grunted.
CRACK.
The Kinetic Dampener couldn't handle the mathematical paradox of Yuto's hoarded density. It violently imploded, shattering into a shower of useless, expensive sparks.
The heavy gravity vanished instantly. Isabella gasped for air, springing to her feet.
Graves stared at his destroyed device in absolute disbelief. "That dampener was rated for military sieges!"
"Your tech is built on spending," Yuto said, finally standing up from the mattress. The Stigma on his right hand burned with a dark, terrifying crimson light. He walked toward the squad leader. "My build is based on saving. You can't bankrupt a man who doesn't buy anything."
Graves panicked, swinging his thermal blade directly at Yuto's neck.
Yuto casually reached up with his heavily bandaged right arm and caught the blazing hot blade barehanded. The monomolecular edge, capable of slicing through titanium, completely failed to cut through the localized black hole of Yuto's unspent wealth.
Yuto twisted his wrist, snapping the million-dollar sword in half like a dry twig.
He then grabbed Graves by the collar of his stealth suit, lifting the heavily augmented corporate assassin off his feet.
"Tell Omni-Corp," Yuto whispered, his eyes entirely black, "if they break another wall in my building, I'm not just going to foreclose on their bank. I'm going to foreclose on their headquarters."
Yuto tossed Graves out the shattered window, sending the squad leader plummeting into a nearby dumpster in the alley below.