Chương 43: The Corporate Squeeze

The price of a single weapon repair voucher in the Upper City market square spiked by forty percent in less than three server hours. Ethan sat deep in the unpaved limestone fault line, his massive fifty-four points of Perception tracking the frantic corporate trade logs scrolling across his visor. His visual feed zoomed through the cave aperture, locking onto a three-man corporate patrol limping back from the northern hills.

At their head stood a Level 35 Pixel Rex heavy vanguard soldier, his polished bronze cuirass covered in deep scratches, his hands trembling as he stared at his shattered Naue II sword. The blade had snapped cleanly at the hilt, the fracture line dull and porous, caked with brittle white sulphur bubbles. The elite frontline squads had pushed their levels, but their rapid martial velocity had run headfirst into a brutal, hard-coded material wall.

Because the syndicates had locked the northern timber lines, the palace pit furnaces lacked premium charcoal. The smiths were forced to melt ore using wet local brushwood, filling the new weapon batches with brittle sulfur inclusions that slashed the equipment's structural durability by half. To purge the brittle slag, the furnace masters desperately needed high-purity roasted sulphur flux cakes to stabilise the casting temperatures. They didn't have any. Ethan had already cleared the ledger.

"Etan, bro, this is total madness," Loban whispered, dragging three massive flax sacks through the narrow cave opening. His face was caked in a pungent, yellow powder, but his digital eyes were glowing with a predatory, penny-pinching thrill.

"I ran your micro-buy order across every single tannery pit and lower-ward scrap heap. We paid the lowest-tier NPC street-sweepers pennies to scoop the unrefined sulfur crust that accumulates on the waste pits. The corporate brokers thought I was harvesting garbage! They didn't log the transaction because the engine tags sulphur-slag as environmental waste."

"They track the copper weight because it sits on the royal tax rolls," Ethan said, his voice a flat, clinical whisper as he stood up within his Wilderness Camouflage.

"They are vegetable-brained fools who only look at the finished blades. They don't monitor the flux." Ethan turned his gaze toward Emmett-02_Choresh. The low-stat Golem was operating with a tireless, mechanical, synchronized predictability. Its blunt hands were furiously kneading the raw yellow sediment, compressing the pungent sulfur sludge into uniform, hard-baked fuel bricks.

Behind it, Emmett-01_Oved and Emmett-03_Yotzer were continuously stacking the completed cakes into tax-free Keli Cheresh jars, filling the limestone cavities with a massive, untaxable monopoly over the server's entire metallurgical processing engine. Ethan had created a total industrial chokehold for absolute zero maintenance cost. He didn't lock down the copper mines; he locked down the only chemical catalyst that could turn their brittle copper into actual weapons.

The syndicates are bleeding durability points, Ethan calculated, his inner math engine running the numbers with a cold, stingy precision. A Level 35 vanguard soldier cannot deploy to a dungeon raid with a sword that fractures on the first block. Every hour their forge fires sit cold, their premium contract timelines decay, costing them thousands of real-world dollars in guild maintenance penalties.

"Stop the production line, Emmett-03_Yotzer," Ethan commanded, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. The three Golems instantly froze, their stone-hard joints locking with a heavy shhhk against the gravel. Ethan stepped up to the massive mountain of vitrified clay jars, his eyes turning into cold rows of data cells as his master inventory confirmed the total volume of his hoard. The market was completely starved. The corporate weapon reserves were snapping. It was time to execute the squeeze.