Season 3 chapter 64
The Rhetoric of Poverty
Malesh adjusted his tailored sleeves, his exhausted deadpan baseline remaining perfectly steady as he entirely refused to accept Kniya's public reprimand about his financial status.
"Kniya, do not lecture me like that," Malesh flatly defended. "I have clearly seen a standard one hundred-credit note before. It was simply a minor fault in my counting. Drop the attitude."
Kniya rolled his eyes loudly, leaning back into the leather cushions of the safehouse sofa.
"Don't slip that much, bro," Kniya dismissed patronizingly. "You literally never understand basic rhetoric. It was an obvious hyperbole! A classic figure of speech, I think so, just to emphasize to you that your personal bank account isn't robust enough to demand a hundred trillion liquid credits out of nowhere."
Mantouse Adeius leaned forward in his metal chair, resting his elbows on the polished mahogany table.
"Okay, I don't have a problem with how you two frame your personal bank accounts," Mantouse interrupted smoothly. "But yeah, I can officially provide you a loan of thirty trillion credits."
Kniya and Malesh instantly lit up, throwing their fists in the air with immense, unified relief. "Yes!"
"At a flat one hundred and fifty percent interest rate per annum," Mantouse added ruthlessly.
Kniya's celebratory grin instantly slammed into the floorboards. He jumped up from the sofa in sheer CEO outrage.
"What?!" Kniya shrieked. "That is literal extortion! That interest rate is way too fucking much!"
"It is really, really required for my personal finances," Mantouse shrugged coldly, entirely unbothered by the screaming.
"But still, bro, come on!" Kniya argued passionately, clutching his chest. "We are literally friends! We are basic childhood friends!"
Mantouse's eyes narrowed into a lethal, unyielding glare.
"Listen to me," Mantouse deadpanned coldly. "You two first met my network when you were nineteen years old. You were absolutely not fucking children at that period of time, so we were never fucking childhood friends. Plus, I am significantly older than both of you."
Revisionist History
Seeing the timeline logic failing, Kniya shamelessly pivoted to manufacturing massive, highly unhinged historical debts.
"We literally provided you with your starting properties!" Kniya yelled, pointing an aggressive finger at the strategist. "We even personally secured you a highly lucrative job as a male stripper in a capital brothel! You know exactly how much we helped you survive your difficult times!"
Mantouse slammed his hands onto the mahogany table, his face flushing pure red with absolute, unfiltered fury.
"Do not create completely fake scenarios straight out of your own fucking minds!" Mantouse roared. "You absolutely never helped me a single day in my life! My operational contracts were infinitely better than yours! I never worked in a fucking brothel, you absolute idiots! Unlike you guys obsessing over your fucking pegging novels!"
Kniya instantly dropped his aggressive stance, forcefully arranging his face into an expression of deeply tragic, entirely fake emotional betrayal.
"Okay, fine," Kniya sniffled dramatically, wiping a completely imaginary tear from his eye. "But Mantouse, have you forgotten our second meeting? We literally cleared the overgrown grass out of your entire yard just for your personal ease! You know exactly how much hard manual labor we dedicated to your estate when we met that second time!"
Mantouse let out a harsh, deeply desensitized scoff of pure disbelief.
"I literally never asked you for that!" Mantouse spat ruthlessly. "I never asked you guys to touch my landscaping! It was your own absolute fucking misunderstanding! You intercepted a highly classified, top-tier syndicate transmission, assumed I was calling you in for an urgent, life-or-death tactical extraction, and you two heavily armed idiots just showed up and started pulling weeds out of my front yard! That gives you zero leverage!"
The Gutter Flattery
Realizing that revisionist history and fake tears were completely useless against the shadow commander, Kniya and Malesh seamlessly shifted their strategy to absolute, shameless gutter-tier begging.
Sitting side-by-side on the sofa, they actively widened their eyes until they were practically shining with cartoonish, desperate admiration. They aggressively folded their hands together in perfect synchronization, leaning across the table to deliver the most highly vulgar, transparent flattery humanly possible.
"Please, bro! Please, please, please reduce the interest rate!" Kniya begged loudly, entirely abandoning his billionaire dignity. "Please, Mantouse! You are the absolute greatest! You are the best strategist in the world! Your dick is incredibly super long! You are packing absolute heavy artillery down there, bro, and you have a magnificently super large asshole! Please, please, please reduce the percentages for us! You are the king!"
Mantouse stared at the two corporate warlords, his face contorting into a mask of absolute, soul-deep disgust. He rubbed his face aggressively, thoroughly drained by the sheer degradation of the meeting.
"Okay, fine. Shut your mouths," Mantouse grumbled bitterly. "I am going to reduce the interest rate. But it will strictly drop to one hundred percent per annum. Final offer."
Kniya dropped his folded hands, instantly whining. "Why is it still so fucking high?! Why cannot you just reduce the interest rate to a clean ten percent for this loan?!"
"It is strictly because of the reason that you two fucking idiots absolutely refuse to tell me the actual reason for the loan!" Mantouse snapped sharply. "Why do you suddenly need a liquid advance of thirty trillion credits?! Do you think I am a literal stage magician who can just randomly spawn that massive amount of money out of thin air? You guys just sit there telling me 'we need a loan of thirty trillion.' How am I going to source and bring that money? You don't know. How are you going to guarantee repayment? You don't know. You just want the cash flow."
Kniya crossed his arms tightly, lifting his chin with stubborn secrecy. "Mantouse, it is a highly personal reason. We absolutely cannot discuss that with you. It is really, really confidential."
The Deficit Valuation
Mantouse leaned back, crossing his arms to mirror the stubbornness. "Then I absolutely cannot provide you the loan at a lower interest rate than that. Especially since you are not providing me a single asset as collateral for this fucking loan, which carries a completely unlisted, confidential personal justification. I don't know why the fuck the two of you suddenly need so much liquid cash out of nowhere."
Malesh smoothly leaned forward, his delivery returning to a perfectly dry, unyielding deadpan anchor.
"But Mantouse," Malesh offered flatly. "We can easily provide the primary equity shares of our combined companies as collateral."
Mantouse let out a loud, ruthless bark of laughter, dripping with absolute economic condescension.
"Oh, don't even attempt to talk about that garbage to me," Mantouse dismissed ruthlessly. "I track the market index perfectly. Both of your corporate monopolies combined currently hold a total market valuation of approximately eighteen trillion credits due to the massive infrastructure losses you suffered in this fucking civil war. And you are sitting there asking for an unbacked loan of thirty trillion credits. Do you think I am a complete idiot?"
Mantouse reached deep into his overcoat, pulling out a crisp, red-stamped contractual dossier and smoothly sliding it across the polished mahogany wood.
"Here is the official document of the loan," Mantouse stated coldly. "Here are the exact terms and conditions. The full liquid amount will be routed directly into your primary accounts the exact second you physically sign the bottom of this document."
The Fill-in-the-Blanks Omission
Kniya and Malesh immediately leaned over the table, pulling the heavy contract toward them to thoroughly read through the dense legal framework.
While the two billionaires silently scanned the fine print, Mantouse Adeius entirely dropped his intimidating overwatch persona. He casually reached down, retrieved his tattered copy of *How to Become the Best Idiot in the World*, kicked his boots up onto the edge of the table, and peacefully resumed reading his paperback jokes.
The room remained deathly quiet for exactly two minutes, save for the rustling of paper.
Suddenly, Malesh's dark eyes froze dead on the final page of the contract. His deadpan mask tightened with intense, logical scrutiny. He slowly lifted his head to stare point-blank at the reading strategist.
"Hey, you reading idiot," Malesh flatly interrogated. "There is one highly specific thing I want to ask you about. Why is there absolutely no contractual condition documented here regarding the loan if it is not getting repaid? Meaning, if we are entirely unable to repay this cash flow, there is zero default penalty written on the page."
Kniya blinked in surprise, leaning over Malesh's shoulder to stare blankly at the empty legal footer.
"Wait, really?" Kniya muttered, scratching his chin. "Is this like some kind of interactive fill-in-the-blanks setup, Mantouse?"
Kniya aggressively tapped the blank space on the paper with his finger, an arrogant smirk instantly returning to his face. "Are we literally supposed to write our own penalty? Because if so, I am officially writing down that our absolute default penalty is paying you exactly one single copper coin and a discount coupon for a free haircut. Look at your split ends. You desperately need one."
Instead of reprimanding Kniya, Malesh slowly adjusted his bespoke cuffs and nodded in absolute, deadpan agreement. He leaned over the mahogany table, taking the absurdity to an entirely new, deeply uncomfortable corporate level.
"Actually, Kniya's interactive settlement proposal is highly logical," Malesh deadpanned coldly, locking his dark eyes directly onto the reading strategist. "Mantouse, if we are entirely unable to pay this loan, can we simply compensate you with compressed fart cylinders? I can personally guarantee you that premium, high-density fart cylinders are really, really expensive in the current market. We can easily calculate their gaseous volume and equate it directly to the missing liquid credits. It is a highly robust, organic collateral asset."
Kniya immediately pointed a finger at Malesh in absolute triumph, completely thrilled by the financial strategy. "Exactly! You can literally fill them up ourselves after a heavy cafeteria meal! It is a flawless, unlimited production pipeline!"