"Get up, you miserable piece of trash, or I will let my guards use your ribs for target practice," Ghina said, her voice dripping with sheer amusement as she stared down from the wooden platform.
Richter kept his face pressed against the damp, filthy earth, letting his body tremble violently. He made sure his crippled right hand stayed visible, twitching unnaturally against the gravel. A soft, pathetic whimper escaped his throat, a sound he had spent weeks practicing in the dark corners of the iron crate. He needed her to see absolutely nothing but a broken creature, a useless piece of debris discarded by the upper city.
Ghina stepped down from the platform, her high leather boots clicking sharply against the stone. She used the tip of her leather whip to lift Richter's chin, forcing him to look up into her cold, calculating eyes.
"Look at you," Ghina sneered, turning back to face the small crowd of desperate slum-dwellers who were watching the scene. "This is exactly what happens when you think you can survive in Aethelgard without a master. You become a stepping stone for the strong."
"Please, merciful mistress," Richter whispered, his voice cracking perfectly on cue. "Just a crumb of bread. I can guard the scrap. I can sleep in the mud. Nobody will even know I am there."
One of Ghina's heavily armed mercenaries laughed loudly, kicking a cloud of dirt directly into Richter's face. "The freak thinks he can guard cargo. He looks like he would fall over if a stiff breeze blew through the alley."
"Silence," Ghina ordered, waving her hand carelessly. She looked back down at Richter, her mind clearly calculating the economic benefits of hiring someone who literally cost nothing. "A shadow is exactly what I need for my lower trade routes. Strong men have pride. Strong men try to steal my shipments or sell my secrets to Galileo's enforcers. But a broken dog? A broken dog stays where it is put because it knows it will die anywhere else."
Richter lowered his gaze, his heart beating with a cold, steady rhythm that contradicted his outward panic. "Thank you, mistress. Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet, beggar," Ghina stated coldly, turning her back on him and walking toward her waiting carriage. "If you lose even a single iron bolt from my shipments, I will skin whatever patches of healthy flesh you have left on your bones. Toss him into the back of the scrap wagon."
The mercenaries grabbed Richter by his tattered burlap cloak, dragging his dragging right leg across the stones before lifting him and throwing him brutally into the back of a large wooden cart filled with rusted pipes and dirty metal gears. The impact sent a sharp jolt of pain through his copper-stitched spine, but Richter locked his jaw, refusing to let out a real scream. He curled himself into a ball, buried beneath the garbage, as the wagon began to move through the narrow, crowded streets of the Slum Sector.
From his hiding spot beneath the rusted scrap, Richter watched the city pass by through the gaps in the wooden planks. The transformation of Aethelgard over the past few months was staggering, and the weight of his absence was visible on every street corner.
Galileo's rise to absolute prominence had rewritten the economic balance of the entire sector. Everywhere Richter looked, new bronze steam pipes bore the polished crest of Galileo's corporate house. The air was heavier now, choked with the thick, black smoke of the newly refitted refineries that were burning through fuel at an unprecedented rate.
"The price of kerosene has tripled," a street merchant shouted nearby, his voice full of desperation as he argued with a customer. "Galileo controls the entire supply now. If you want light for your lanterns, you pay his price or you sit in the dark."
"It is a total monopoly," the customer muttered, slamming a few copper coins onto the counter. "He squeezed out every independent engineer in the sector. Ever since Richter vanished, Galileo has been acting like a king."
Richter listened to the exchange, his eyes narrowing in the darkness of the wagon. Galileo was not just selling the Cruor-Steam formula; he was using the leverage it provided to systematically crush the economy of the Slum Sector. By controlling the energy supply, Galileo was forcing the lower districts into a state of artificial starvation, ensuring that no one could ever accumulate enough resources to challenge his authority.
The wealth Galileo was generating was immense. As the wagon rolled closer to the border of the shipping docks, Richter saw a massive new mansion being constructed on the upper tier, its marble pillars rising high above the smog of the factories. Galileo was celebrating his blood-soaked fortune by building a fortress for himself, funded entirely by the invention he had stolen from the man he thought he had dissolved in the toxic canal.
"He is expanding his territory," Richter thought, his mind working behind his dull, blank expression. "But he is greedier than I realized. He isn't just targeting the upper markets. He is squeezing the slums so hard that the smaller syndicates are starting to panic."
The wagon finally came to a halt inside a heavily fortified courtyard near the lower docks. This was Ghina's primary distribution center, a maze of rusted iron warehouses and muddy paths where smuggled goods were sorted and hidden from official customs inspections.
"Get out, freak," a mercenary barked, banging his fist against the side of the wagon. "Time to earn your grease."
Richter tumbled out of the cart, landing awkwardly on his hands and knees. He quickly grabbed his wooden staff, pushing himself up with a pathetic, labored effort. He kept his head bowed low, looking at the mud as Ghina walked past him, flanked by her two highest-paid enforcers.
"The new taxes from Galileo's district are choking our profit margins," one of the enforcers complained, holding a ledger covered in greasy fingerprints. "He is demanding forty percent of our transit revenue just to let our boats pass through the Sector 9 locks. If we don't pay, his iron-clad cutters sink our cargo."
Ghina stopped in her tracks, her face twisting into a mask of pure fury. She slammed her fist against a nearby iron crate, the metallic ring echoing loudly through the courtyard.
"Galileo is getting too arrogant," Ghina hissed, her fingers twisting around the handle of her whip. "He thinks because he owns the high-tier formula, he can dictate terms to everyone who operates in the shadows. My family has controlled these lower routes for three generations. I will not let that corporate vulture bleed me dry."
"But what can we do, mistress?" the enforcer asked softly, shifting his weight uneasily. "He has the guards, he has the wealth, and his weapons are powered by the new steam drive. We don't have the strength to fight him directly."
Ghina gritted her teeth, her eyes flashing with a desperate, dangerous hunger for wealth. "We need a massive influx of capital. Something that belongs entirely to us. Something that Galileo doesn't know about. If I can find a secondary source of raw Cruor material, I can bypass his supply chain completely and sell directly to the southern ports."
Richter stood against the wall of the warehouse, completely ignored by the three figures as they argued. He looked like nothing more than a pathetic, crippled decoration, a piece of living garbage waiting for orders. But beneath his dirt-caked forehead, his brain was firing with precise, mathematical accuracy. He saw the crack in Ghina's defenses, the overwhelming greed that made her blind to the risks around her. She was starving for gold, terrified of being crushed by Galileo's expanding empire, and furious at her own lack of leverage.
"She is a vulture," Richter thought, his lips twitching slightly in the shadows of his cloak. "And a vulture will always fly directly into a trap if you bait it with a fresh corpse."
Ghina turned around, her eyes accidentally landing on Richter's shaking form. She sneered, walking over to him and using her boot to shove his wooden staff out from under his arm. Richter collapsed into the mud with a soft cry, holding his ruined right hand against his chest as if he were terrified of being beaten.
"Look at this trash," Ghina said, laughing bitterly to her enforcers. "This is what Galileo wants to turn all of us into. A city of beggars serving his grand design. Get up, you miserable i***t. Pick up those iron bolts and carry them into Warehouse 4. If you drop even one, I will let the men use your good hand for gambling chips."
"Yes, mistress," Richter whimpered, scrambling in the dirt to gather the heavy metal pieces. "Right away, mistress. Richter will do exactly as you say."
He deliberately used his old name in a mumbled, half-coherent phrase, making it sound like the confused rambling of an i***t who barely understood his own identity. Ghina didn't even blink. She didn't recognize the name, nor did she care about the history of the creature cleaning her boots. To her, he was just a tool to be used until it broke.
As Richter dragged his heavy leg toward the dark entrance of the warehouse, his mind locked onto the next phase of his design. The pieces were moving into alignment exactly as he had calculated during those miserable months in the iron crate. Galileo was celebrating his wealth, completely unaware that his aggressive expansion was creating desperate enemies in the lower rings of the city. Ghina was furious, greedy, and looking for a miracle to save her smuggling route from being consumed by the corporate monopoly.
"You want gold, Ghina," Richter murmured under his breath as he stepped into the cold darkness of the storage room, the heavy iron bolts clanking in his left hand. "I will give you exactly what you are looking for. I will give you a prize so massive that your greed will swallow your common sense entirely."
He set the metal down, his eyes staring through the small high window of the warehouse toward the upper tier of the city, where Galileo's new marble mansion gleamed under the heavy gray rain. The hunt had officially begun, and the vultures were already circling the bait.
Aksara