Filler
The Twenty-Credit Insult
Behind them, Kniya and Salesh were trying so hard to muffle their laughter that they were rustling the bushes aggressively. Leaves snapped and branches shook loudly.
Antues whipped his head around, hearing the noise. "Who is there?!" "Oh, shit," Kniya whispered.
Antues marched directly up to the bushes and yanked the branches apart. He found Kniya, Malesh, and Salesh crouched in the dirt. Because they were sitting in the shadows, he didn't recognize Kniya or Malesh under their masks and goggles.
But Salesh had pulled his mask down to breathe. And Salesh was still wearing his cheap, ruined clothes, covered in dust from the amusement park and wrapped in hospital bandages.
Antues looked at Salesh. A look of sudden, arrogant recognition crossed his face.
"Oh! I know you!" Antues pointed a finger at the multi-billionaire President of Kavilson Steel. "I know you from the street! You are the beggar from 31st Street! I gave you twenty credits last week!"
Salesh, Kniya, and Malesh completely froze.
Kniya's eyes practically bulged out of his skull. He called him a beggar.
"Okay, hey beggar," Antues sighed, reaching into his expensive wallet. "I am going to give you twenty more credits because my fucking day has been so incredibly bad. If it was a good day, I would have paid you more. But my date got farted on, almost crushed by a chandelier, and the river literally just evaporated. So here. Buy yourself a sandwich."
Antues carelessly tossed a crumpled twenty-credit note directly into Salesh's lap.
He didn't even wait for a thank you. Antues turned around and walked back toward Filoska, complaining loudly about the mud.
In the bushes, the silence was absolutely deafening.
Salesh looked down at the twenty-credit note sitting on his lap. He slowly picked it up. His hands began to shake. The veins in his neck bulged. His chaotic, uncaring demeanor completely shattered, replaced by a dark, murderous, world-ending rage.
"This guy is going to get crushed," Salesh whispered, his voice vibrating with pure venom. He turned to Kniya. "I want to know about his company. Right now."
Kniya swallowed hard, actually a little terrified of Salesh's face. "Salesh... his company is very large. He runs a massive international freight brokerage. The valuation of his company is around 7.6 trillion credits. You cannot just do anything about it in one night—"
"Fuck this shit!" Salesh snarled, his eyes burning. "I am going to close his company tonight!"
The Financial Nuke
Salesh ripped a sleek, diamond-encrusted phone out of his pocket and dialed the central emergency line for the Salvesh Industries trading floor.
"Salvesh Trading, midnight desk," a broker answered.
"This is Salesh," he growled. "Listen to me, and this is the time to show my powers. The target is Doate Freight Brokerage. Destroy it right fucking now."
"Sir? The 7.6 trillion valuation firm?" the broker asked, stunned. "How do you want to proceed?"
"I want this company to be destroyed and melted into dust!" Salesh roared into the phone. "Take three trillion credits from our liquid reserves! I want you to violently short-sell their stock across every global market to trigger an immediate panic! Call our logistics subsidiaries and cancel every single client deal they have! Buy out their massive debt creditors and instantly demand full repayment to force a liquidity crisis! Sell their shared assets at a massive loss just to bleed them out! I want this company financially annihilated by midnight, you fucking shit! Do it!"
"Executing hostile market takeover and short-dump, sir!" the broker yelled, slamming keyboards in the background.
Salesh hung up the phone, breathing heavily. He crushed the twenty-credit note in his fist.
To destroy a 7.6 trillion credit company in an hour, you had to be willing to lose billions of your own money just to cause the crash. Salesh didn't care. It was the principle of the thing.
Exactly three minutes later, out on the walkway, Antues's phone started ringing frantically.
Antues picked it up. "Hello? What? What do you mean our stock is crashing?! What do you mean Kavilson Steel and Salvesh Industries just canceled all our freight contracts?!"
Antues's face turned completely white. His knees buckled.
"Fifty percent?! We lost half our valuation in three minutes?!" Antues screamed, tears literally welling up in his eyes. He dropped the phone on the pavement.
He looked at Filoska, his eyes wide with absolute, superstitious terror.
"You!" Antues cried, pointing a trembling finger at her. "Ever since I met you, my life is ruined! We got gassed! We got crushed! The river disappeared! And now my family's legacy is bankrupt! You are a curse! You are a fucking curse!"
Without another word, the ruined millionaire turned around and sprinted away down the riverfront, loudly sobbing into his hands.
Filoska stood alone by the muddy, dried-up river. She watched him run away. Then, she let out a slow, deeply exhausted breath. She pulled out her phone, ordered an incredibly expensive private luxury taxi, and left the park.
Down in the bushes, Kniya, Malesh, and Salesh slowly stood up from the dirt, watching Filoska's luxury taxi pull away from the dried-up riverfront.
"Okay," Kniya gasped, ripping his dark aviator goggles off and wiping a massive smear of mud from his forehead. "She is heading back to the office. We need to beat her there right fucking now so we can pretend we were doing paperwork this whole time, or she is going to absolutely murder us."
"Agreed," Malesh said, stepping out of the bushes and aggressively brushing twigs and dried leaves off his dark trousers. "Let's get to the bikes."
Salesh, still clutching his diamond-encrusted phone and riding the absolute adrenaline high of completely annihilating a 7.6 trillion credit company in three minutes, aggressively kicked the dirt. "Fuck that guy! Twenty credits! I am going to buy the stone bench he just sat on and legally burn it!"
"Salesh, focus!" Kniya yelled, sprinting toward the dark alley where they parked. "We have exactly ten minutes before she takes the private elevator up to our floor! If she catches us covered in mud, wearing face masks and tactical gear, the HR nightmare is going to cost us another fifty million!"
They bolted down the street, practically jumping over trash cans in their cheap disguises. They reached the dark alley and violently scrambled onto the pitch-black RX 500 street motorcycles and Salesh's bike. The heavy engines roared to life, shattering the quiet night. They ripped out of the alleyway, breaking every single federal speed limit in the Seistain Capital District as they desperately raced the Vice President's taxi back to the Kavilson Executive Tower.
The Fake Apology
Time: 11:30 PM
Location: Kavilson Executive Tower
By the time Filoska walked through the shattered double doors of the executive office, Kniya, Malesh, and Salesh were already sitting at their desks. They were frantically shuffling completely blank pieces of paper around, pretending they had been working late the entire night.
Filoska crossed her arms and glared at the three of them.
"Okay, guys," Filoska said, her voice dripping with fake tragedy. "I know that you were the ones who destroyed my date. The fart gas was distinctly Malesh's level of biological warfare, and crashing a multi-trillion credit freight company in three minutes has Salesh's petty fingerprints all over it."
The three billionaires stopped shuffling their blank papers, looking slightly guilty.
"And I am really sad for this," Filoska continued, putting a hand over her heart and forcing her voice to tremble. "I am really sad. Why did you do that to me? I could have been happy."
Kniya, Malesh, and Salesh exchanged panicked looks. They rarely felt guilt, but completely ruining their Vice President's personal life just because they were bored actually crossed a minor ethical line.
"Okay, look," Kniya scrambled, holding his hands up. "We are going to increase your salary by forty percent! Effective immediately! And we are going to give you an unlimited corporate expense account as a bonus for the emotional damage!"
"That guy was not a good match for you, Filoska," Malesh added smoothly, trying to justify the terrorism. "He had a severe lack of situational awareness. He thought Salesh was a beggar."
"Yeah!" Salesh agreed aggressively. "He was an idiot! We did you a favor! Please take the salary increase and do not sue us for workplace harassment!"
Filoska looked at them. She let out a dramatic, sorrowful sigh. "Fine. I will take the massive raise and the expense account. But I am going home."
She turned around and walked out of the destroyed office.
As soon as she stepped into the private elevator and the doors slid shut, the tragic, sorrowful look on her face completely vanished.
A massive, wicked, incredibly victorious smirk spread across her face.
She wasn't sad. She was absolutely thrilled. She had wanted to reject Antues since the second he started talking about "souls and bodies" in the restaurant, because he was incredibly ugly on the inside and his dialogue was unbearable. But breaking up with a major corporate client was messy.
Thanks to her three idiot bosses, she had successfully gotten rid of the worst date of her life, didn't have to formally reject him, and just legally extorted a forty percent raise out of the situation.
Filoska leaned against the elevator wall and laughed. It was a good day to be a corporate executive.