Infinite Cashback System: Every Loss Makes Me Richer

Interrogation of the Ancient

The warehouse smelled like copper and scorched concrete.

Ethan stood over the man he'd broken twenty minutes ago, watching blood pool beneath a body that shouldn't have still been breathing. Three ribs shattered. A collapsed lung wheezing with every inhale. By any normal measure, the enforcer should have already been unconscious.

Instead, he was smiling.

"You hit like someone who's angry," the enforcer rasped, blood painting his teeth pink. "Not like someone who understands what he's fighting."

Ethan crouched, forearms resting on his knees, expression unreadable. He'd learned long ago that silence pulled more truth out of people than threats did. Threats gave men something to brace against. Silence made them fill the gap themselves.

"Iron Crest Clan," Ethan said quietly. "Tell me what it is."

The enforcer laughed, and the laugh turned into a wet cough.

"You people. You climb your little towers of money and think you've touched the sky." His eyes, glassy with pain, still managed to hold something like pity. "You're livestock, Cole. All of you. Fed, sheltered, occasionally culled. The Clan doesn't fear men like you. We farm men like you."

Ethan's jaw tightened, but his voice stayed level.

"My parents."

Something flickered behind the enforcer's eyes. Recognition. Ethan caught it instantly ... the way a man's whole body goes still when a name lands somewhere it shouldn't.

"There it is," Ethan said. "You know something."

"I know a great many things." The enforcer's grin widened despite the blood. "I know your father screamed louder than your mother did. I know the debt collectors who broke you were the least of what was arranged for your family. I know..."

Luna's voice cut through Ethan's mind, calm but sharp.

He's stalling. Watch his hands.

Ethan's gaze dropped instantly. The enforcer's right hand had curled inward, two fingers pressed against his own sternum in a gesture too precise to be accidental.

"Don't," Ethan said.

The enforcer's smile didn't waver.

"You think you can stop what's already been set in motion? Foolish boy. Do you know how long the Iron Crest Clan has existed? Before your country had a name. Before your species built its first city of stone." His voice dropped, almost tender, almost mocking. "We don't die the way you imagine. We transform."

"I'm not asking about your history," Ethan said, stepping closer, voice low and hard. "I'm asking about my parents. Answer me, and this ends easier for you."

"Easier." The enforcer's laugh rattled wetly in his ruined chest. "You still think in terms of pain and mercy. Sweet. Almost human like you." His eyes, despite everything, held no fear. Only conviction ... the terrifying calm of a man who believed, completely, that something greater than death was waiting for him. "The Clan does not fall to accountants. It does not fall to men who count coins for comfort."

Ethan's hand shot forward, gripping the man's collar, hauling him half upright despite the ruined ribs. Pain should have made him scream. Instead, the enforcer only stared at him, almost curious, like Ethan was an insect that had unexpectedly learned to bite.

"Where is the Clan," Ethan said. Not a question anymore.

"Everywhere you've ever been," the enforcer whispered. "And nowhere you'll ever find."

Ethan. Luna's voice again, faster this time, edged with something close to alarm. His pulse just spiked. That's not fear. That's a trigger.

Ethan's eyes dropped again ... the two fingers on the enforcer's chest had pressed deeper, nails digging into skin over his sternum, drawing a thin bead of blood in a shape too deliberate to be panicked.

"Stop him," Luna said, no longer calm at all. "Now."

Ethan grabbed the man's wrist, but it was already too late. He felt it before he understood it ... a heat blooming beneath the enforcer's skin, not like fever, but like something igniting from the inside of his bones.

"You cannot own what belongs to the old blood," the enforcer said, voice suddenly steady, almost serene. "Not your enemy's secrets. Not your enemy's world."

"Talk," Ethan snapped, pressure rising in his own chest ... not fear, but the specific frustration of watching an answer slip away in real time. "Whatever you're doing, stop, and I'll..."

"There is nothing you can offer me," the enforcer interrupted, and for the first time his voice cracked, not with pain, but with something like reverence. "The Clan does not fear death. We feed it."

Light bled out from beneath his skin ... thin veins of orange fire tracing up his neck, across his cheeks, threading through his eyes until his pupils burned like dying coals. Ethan released his grip and staggered back on instinct, some ancient part of his brain screaming that whatever was happening was not something a human body should survive.

"Ethan, move!" Luna's voice cracked through his mind like a whip.

He didn't need to be told twice. He threw himself backward as the enforcer's body convulsed, spine arching unnaturally, mouth opening in something between a scream and a laugh.

"You'll remember this," the enforcer said, voice warping, layered, as if something older was speaking through him now. "You'll remember that ants do not interrogate gods."

The fire consumed him from the inside out.

It wasn't like burning. It was faster, cleaner, wrong ... flesh collapsing into ash in the space of a single breath, the concrete beneath him scorched black in a perfect circle. There was no smell of burning meat, no lingering smoke. Just heat, light, and then nothing at all.

Ethan stood in silence as the last embers died against the floor.

Where the enforcer's body had been, only one object remained.

A jade pendant, small, uncracked despite the inferno that had consumed everything around it. Ethan approached slowly, crouching beside the scorched circle, and picked it up. It was warm ... not from the fire, he realized, but as if it had a pulse of its own.

Carved into its surface was a crest: a stylized mountain wrapped in iron chains, ancient lines worn smooth by centuries of handling.

Luna, he thought. Do you recognize this?

For a long moment, she said nothing. That silence, more than anything the enforcer had said, told Ethan everything he needed to know.

I do, Luna finally answered, and for the first time since the System had awakened inside him, her voice carried something close to unease. That crest predates every record I have access to. Whatever the Iron Crest Clan is, Ethan… it isn't a rival organization. It's older than the categories I was built to understand.

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]

[Unknown Artifact Detected: Iron Crest Pendant]

[Origin: Unclassified ... Insufficient Data]

Ethan turned the pendant over in his fingers, studying the chained mountain glinting faintly in the dim light. A man had just burned himself to ash rather than answer a single question. Whatever the Iron Crest Clan protected, it was worth more to them than a life ... worth more, apparently, than the truth about two people who had already been dead for years.

He closed his fist around the warm jade, feeling the last of its heat fade against his palm.

"If they won't answer me," Ethan said quietly, to no one but the empty warehouse and the presence in his mind, "then I'll walk into their world myself and ask the ones who can't afford to burn."

Somewhere beneath the city, in places no ordinary map could show him, something ancient had just noticed his name.