RULE NUMBER ONE: DON'T MESS WITH MR. BURGESS

CHAPTER 7

"That is Brec Elsher, Boss," Garrick reported smoothly, leaning in to speak in a quiet, confidential tone. "You’ve been off the grid for a year, so you missed her meteoric rise, but she possesses a terrifyingly strong identity in the upper echelons. She is the youngest daughter of Prime Minister Elsher."

Slayde’s eyebrows raised a fraction. "A politician's brat?"

"Far from a brat," Garrick corrected gently. "She severed ties with her father's political dynasty two years ago, refusing to be a marriage pawn for the administration. With nothing but her inheritance and raw, ruthless ambition, she founded the Elsher Sovereign Group.”

A slight smile appeared on Garrick's face.

“In less than eighteen months, she hostilely took over three state-backed logistics conglomerates and centralized the entire maritime trade route. She’s a wolf in a silk dress. Rumor says she’s been hunting for the legendary architect of the shadow network to back her expansion."

Slayde’s lips twitched into a cold, knowing smirk.

‘So she’s looking for the puppet master,’ he thought, adjusting the silver band on his finger. ‘Too bad for her, the puppet master just got out of prison.’

Just as Garrick finished speaking, the sophisticated atmosphere of the Grand Ballroom shattered. 

A piercing, high-pitched scream sliced through the classical music.

“No! This can't be happening! Turn it up! Someone turn up the broadcast!”

The panicked screech came from the center of the ballroom, where a group of tech elites and hedge fund managers were crowding around a live news broadcast playing on a massive, embedded wall monitor. 

The screen, which usually displayed elegant corporate logos, was flashing a violent, crimson emergency alert.

Over the surround-sound speakers, the calm voice of a financial anchor was drowned out as a distorted, masked audio feed hijacked the local wavelengths.

“Good evening, elites,” a synthesized, chilling voice echoed throughout Luminary Plaza. “At exactly 4:00 PM today, the encrypted vault of the Apex Ledger was breached. Your offshore routing numbers, your shell companies, and the fabricated data used to frame your internal targets are now public domain. Enjoy the collapse.”

The ballroom fell into a brief silence. 

At first, everyone looked around in confusion. 

The warning had echoed through the speakers, but as guests checked their phones, their accounts remained stable. 

The global indices were still green.

"What kind of sick joke is this?" one executive scoffed, adjusting his bow tie. "The security on the Apex Ledger is military-grade. A script kiddie probably just hijacked the audio feed."

"Yeah, my portfolio hasn't moved a fraction of a percent," a tycoon agreed with a nervous laugh. "Who is this broadcast even talking to?"

The confusion shattered a second later.

A heavy thud drew everyone's attention. 

A prominent real estate tycoon went pale, his knees buckling as he collapsed heavily onto the white marble floor. 

His crystal champagne glass slipped from his fingers, shattering into a thousand glittering shards. 

In his open palm, his phone vibrated violently.

"N-No... no, no, no," the man whimpered, staring wide-eyed at the screen. 

A cold sweat soaked through his expensive designer tuxedo.

On the wall monitor, the live ticker for his parent conglomerate didn't just dip; it plunged off a vertical cliff. 

A staggering -35% flash-crash materialized in a matter of seconds, wiping out millions in valuation before anyone else could comprehend the breach.

The surrounding elites gasped, stepping back as the truth hit them. 

The mysterious entity wasn't targeting the entire room. 

This was a precision strike.

"My funds..." the targeted tycoon choked out, clutching his chest as the monitor began scrolling through a rapid, uncensored data dump of private routing numbers and hidden shell companies. "Everything is gone. I'm ruined!"

"Call the cybersecurity firms! Call Quantum Shield!" an elderly board member from his firm screamed, wildly waving his arms at his assistants. "Get them to freeze the trading floor! Lock down his ledger before the subsidiary stocks drop too!"

Within seconds, frantic assistants were placing desperate calls to top security teams. But the responses bleeding through their speakerphones only fueled the panic.

“Sir, we can’t stop it! The intrusion isn't a standard hack—it’s a dynamic, multi-layered algorithmic wipe! It's mutating every three seconds! Our global experts say this infrastructure is completely beyond human capability!”

Slayde’s eyes narrowed. “What’s happening?”

“A ghost hacker has been targeting the elite for the past three months,” Garrick replied under his breath, tracking the chaos. “He breaks into sovereign corporate accounts, wipes them out, and always coordinates the drop during high-society events like this.”

Slayde let out a low, raspy chuckle, a sound so devoid of amusement it made the hairs on the back of Garrick’s neck stand up. 

He didn't look at the ruined tycoon weeping on the marble, nor at the frantic others clutching their phones like lifelines.

"For fun?" Slayde murmured. 

He raised his left hand, casually inspecting the heavy silver signet ring on his middle finger. 

"Garrick, there is no such thing as hacking a sovereign vault for fun. True chaos requires infrastructure. This child isn't playing a game; he’s trying to build a throne out of stolen gravity."

Garrick adjusted his glasses. "The global security firms are already declaring him an untrackable anomaly, Boss. They're calling him a god of the digital dark age."

"A god?" Slayde’s lips curled into a razor-sharp smile. 

His eyes flicked up, capturing Brec Elsher’s intense gaze from across the room before settling back on the flashing red emergency monitors. 

"A god doesn't leave a three-second mutation window in his algorithmic sequence. That's not divine architecture, Garrick. That’s a sloppy, overconfident signature from an amateur who thinks because he found a skeleton key, he owns the house."

He took his hand out of his pocket, the silver band catching the brilliant light of the Austrian chandeliers.

"He's been running rampant for three months because the people he’s robbing are dinosaurs who think a firewall is a real wall," Slayde sneered softly. "He wants to turn a gala into his personal theater? Fine. Let's change the script."

Garrick’s chest tightened with a sudden, electric thrill. "Should I deploy the network, Titan?"

The silver signet ring caught the crimson glare of the emergency monitors as Slayde slowly slid his hand back into his trouser pocket. 

The mocking smile faded from his lips, replaced once more by flat, chilling indifference.

"No," Slayde said smoothly, instantly freezing the excitement in Garrick’s eyes. "Why the hell should we help them? This has absolutely nothing to do with me."