Chương 135: First Strike

Meno stared at the old man behind the pizza counter and tried to negotiate with someone who had clearly dealt with too many drunk customers tonight to care about his problems.

"How about I pay you a hundred to make one with pineapple?" The old man did not even turn toward the kitchen.

"Pick from the slices on the counter."

"Two hundred." That finally earned Meno a look, although not the one he wanted. The old guy stared at him with tired disappointment.

"No."

"Fine. Salami it is. Give me six slices."

"I only have four." Meno looked down at the counter and felt genuinely betrayed. Nothing was going right. This was already a major setback, and when he asked for blueberry iced tea, the old man checked the fridge and informed him they had lemon instead. The entire walk from The Pearl started looking like a mistake.

"I'll take it." He carried the four slices and the inferior drink to a table in the corner of the mostly empty shop. Two other men sat far apart near the windows, both glued to their phones, while the old man went back to working behind the counter. At least nobody had recognized him, which was about the only thing the trip had delivered on. Meno ate the pizza quickly, every bite reminding him of the pineapple version he should have been having.

This had to be what healers felt like when they showed up for raid night and Seven-Day Absolution happened to be stuck on 1% Healing because the calendar trolled them. A tragic existence. The cheese was good, though, and the salami had the extra salty kick he remembered. By the fourth slice, Meno had almost forgiven the shop until he drank the iced tea and discovered it tasted like something that had heard rumors about lemons while never meeting actual tea.

He finished anyway, threw the bottle out, and turned toward the exit. Every instinct in his body tightened at once. Two black SUVs were parked outside the pizza shop. A middle-aged woman wearing glasses stood near the front vehicle, surrounded by seven security guards positioned loosely across the sidewalk and curb in a way that happened to cover basically every useful direction. Meno recognized one of them immediately as Aurelia's security guard. Aurelia herself was nowhere in sight.

Meno turned away from the door as casually as he could, walked back to the counter, pointed at the first random slice available, and bought it without comment. The old man looked at him like he had just witnessed a nutritional collapse, but Meno carried the slice back to his table and sat down while his brain started putting together everything he had been too irritated to notice earlier. Aurelia had come to The Pearl insisting they needed to talk privately.

She had refused to leave while he spent hours inside Veyrath, hijacked his stream, acted completely unlike herself, then fallen asleep in his chair rather than going home. Meno had written all of that off as some deranged extension of their relationship drama. It clearly was not. She had been trying to warn him about something involving her family.

"Damn." He had been an idiot. Nobody made a friendly visit with eight people at 4 AM, especially not to a random pizza shop Meno had not even been expected to visit. Either they had followed him from The Pearl or somebody had this place marked as somewhere he used to frequent. The way the guards were positioned made the rest obvious enough: they were waiting for him to leave so they could take him off the street without creating a scene. Meno had no idea why, and he had no intention of finding out without backup.

He took out his phone, opened the fake cleaner app, navigated into the hidden support menu, and called. If Grandpa did not pick up, Meno was going to have to improvise, and improvising against eight goons felt considerably less attractive than doing it inside Veyrath. The call connected after several rings. Grandpa sounded half asleep and deeply unhappy about being awake.

"What's that? This better be important."

"I'm about to be kidnapped. This is an emergency." The sleep vanished from his voice immediately.

"What?!" Meno kept his posture loose and looked down at the pizza rather than toward the window. Whoever was outside was clearly watching, and there was no reason to advertise that he had noticed.

"Sorell people. Seven security and a woman. Outside a pizza joint. It's four in the morning. Please make sense of it." Grandpa went silent briefly before answering in a completely different tone.

"Listen to me very carefully. Do not resist. We cannot let you get injured or damaged in any way. Pretend to cooperate. This is not my area, and I am contacting the person responsible as we speak. We have your location. Backup will reach you as quickly as possible." Meno took another bite of pizza purely to look normal.

"The fact that we are speaking means they want this kept quiet," Grandpa continued.

"If they intended immediate harm, they would not be standing outside waiting for you to finish. You are safe."

"The woman in charge is entering."

"Okay. End the call, go into the app, and press the update button. It will try to infect nearby phones. Their security should not have the hardware to stop it, and it will make things easier." Meno hung up, reopened the fake cleaner, and pressed Update just as the door opened. The spectacled woman entered alone. She wore a dark formal coat instead of anything tactical, and nothing about her looked especially threatening until she reached Meno's table and produced an identification badge.

"Mr. Varsh. I would like you to come with me." World Government. Meno looked from the badge to her face while doing his best to act like he had not just called in some kind of extraction team.

"What is this?"

"This isn't the place." The old pizza-shop owner stopped working like he might say something, but one flash of the investigator badge changed his mind. The other two customers reached the same conclusion faster, pocketing their phones and leaving without looking back. Meno glanced through the glass at the seven guards outside.

"Okay. This seems a bit illegal, but I guess no is not an option." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"If you say no, I will have to arrest you."

"For what?" The woman gave him no answer, only a severe look that expected compliance. Grandpa had specifically told him not to resist, so Meno stood and followed her outside. One guard opened the rear door of the first SUV. Meno got in, the investigator took the front passenger seat, and several security personnel filled the remaining spaces while the rest entered the second vehicle. The convoy started moving, and the rear windows turned opaque almost immediately, cutting off any useful view outside.

"Are you taking me to Carl Sorell?" Nobody responded. That worried Meno more than a denial would have. The government investigator was not running this like an actual police operation. If she were, there would have been officers, charges, and some explanation of what he had supposedly done. Instead, she had arrived surrounded by private Sorell security and seemed to exist mainly so Meno could not refuse to come. Whatever this was, it had a lot of money behind it.

When the SUVs stopped, the door opened onto a private underground parking lot. The investigator stayed in the vehicle while the seven guards escorted Meno toward a large elevator, which gave him immediate flashbacks to the KKF operation. One guard scanned a card, the doors closed, and the elevator started climbing. It kept going long enough that Meno became reasonably sure they were inside one of downtown Vernova's skyscrapers, unless somebody had deliberately installed the slowest elevator in existence.

When the doors finally opened, they led directly into a penthouse. Floor-to-ceiling windows covered several sides of the room, with Vernova glowing far below like a circuit board. Carl Sorell stood near the glass, looking exactly as severe as Meno remembered from their single video call. Carl turned and greeted him like they had run into each other by accident.

"Ah, Meno. It's good to see you again."

"Yeah. About that. I'm really curious why you felt the need to kidnap me."

"Let's not use such barbaric words." Carl walked away from the window.

"I hadn't planned on this meeting either. I thought I was hiring a gamer. A popular one, certainly, but still simply a gamer to help launch a new product. One among many."

"I think that's exactly what happened. Were you unsatisfied with my performance?"

"Quite the opposite. The advertisement is one thing. Business as usual." Carl's expression sharpened.

"But then you entered our simulator." Meno already knew where this was going.

"The data from that run was something else. According to my engineers, it should not even be possible. They have reviewed the telemetry a hundred times since yesterday's shoot, and none of them can explain it." Carl stopped several feet away.

"So, Meno. Care to explain yourself?"

"There's nothing to explain. I just did it." Carl laughed, not because anything was funny. He crossed toward a counter, poured an amber drink into a short glass, smelled it once, and swallowed the whole thing before setting the glass down.

"Meno, this is not something one can simply do. I need to know who put you up to it and what your mission was. Were you after our data? The Nova X9? Were you attempting to infect our systems?" His stare hardened.

"Was the simulation itself a delivery mechanism for malware?" This guy had completely lost it. Meno had entered the simulator because the real driving shoot was boring and Steve had mentioned an XVector. Then he drove fast because crashing did not matter. That was the entire conspiracy. Unfortunately, he could already tell that answer was not going to satisfy Carl. The only part Meno found genuinely strange was that the simulator data should have been impossible.

Could it have something to do with the lingering performance fluid, or whatever post-mission drugs Grandpa and Teacher had injected him with after the KKF operation? That made no sense either. Feltforge had recruited Meno because of his capsule skill before they ever gave him anything. If the only thing special about him came from some drug or colorful capsule goo, they could have used somebody trained and avoided the whole secrecy circus. Whatever Carl's engineers had measured was probably just Meno.

"Honestly, zero clue what you're talking about," Meno said.

"But since you're never going to accept that answer, can I get a drink?" Carl reached for the bottle.

"Not that nasty stuff. Do you have blueberry juice?" His hand stopped halfway. Carl looked at Meno like he had stepped on his face.

"Certainly not. Please take a seat anyway." Meno sat on one of the sofas while Carl poured another glass of amber liquid regardless and placed it on the table between them before sitting opposite. Meno left it untouched.

"We don't have to make this more difficult than necessary," Carl said.

"Look, I'm sure you've done background checks. Do I look like some secret spy or special-ops agent? I'm just a normal dude. You're way off." Meno hoped his face looked controlled enough. Carl studied him for several seconds before changing directions completely.

"Meno, do you like my daughter?" The question caught him off guard.

"I used to. Then she told me to get lost. So that's that." Carl chuckled quietly.

"Love is difficult, Meno. Let me tell you, I love my family very dearly, just as dearly as I love everything I have built. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, I will not do to protect them." The conversation was getting far too intense. Carl had entered full evil-corporate-overlord mode, which probably felt normal from his side of the sofa. Meno did not enjoy being on the receiving end.

"Cool. I'm not messing with any of it."

"Your sister is a schoolteacher," Carl said.

"And your mother works at one of my companies." Meno's expression changed immediately.

"Where are you going with this?" Carl did not answer fast enough.

"If you're going where I think you're going, I wouldn't recommend that." Meno leaned forward.

"I haven't done anything to your car, your simulator, or anything else you own. Your daughter is sleeping in my hotel room as we speak. We're all good. There is no need for pointless antagonism." His hand moved toward the drink, then stopped. He wanted a clear head for whatever came next. Carl's eyebrows drew together, and for the first time since Meno arrived he looked genuinely surprised, although apparently by the wrong part.

"She is a grown woman, and I am always left to clean up her mess. That is irrelevant." He leaned back slightly.

"Your 'wouldn't recommend that,' however, carried rather more conviction than I expected. As if you genuinely believe you could cause me trouble." Meno said nothing.

"That only reinforces my suspicion."

"Both can be true at once. Like my DPS is high, but I'm pulling around your route, not stealing your packs." Carl took another drink.

"Speak like a normal human being."

"It means I haven't done anything to you, but if you don't let me go right now, you're about to learn an ugly lesson." Meno glanced toward the windows as if he had any clue what that lesson would look like.

"In a few minutes tops." Carl became strangely thoughtful. He looked at Meno, then toward the city, and sat in silence long enough that Meno wondered whether Grandpa's backup had already shown up somewhere outside. Finally Carl leaned forward.

"I will risk it." Meno sighed and started casually mapping the penthouse in case Grandpa had badly overestimated how quickly help could arrive. Windows, exits, guards, furniture, anything remotely useful.

"This is sooo annoying. I just want you to know whatever happens next is totally out of my control." Carl narrowed his eyes.

"And who is in contr—" Every window in the penthouse exploded. Meno threw himself backward and hit the floor as glass burst inward across the room. Carl dove almost at the same time, while security rushed from the adjoining areas toward the shattered windows. Small drones flooded into the penthouse first, and a brutal high-frequency noise came with them. It hit Meno hard enough that he clamped both hands over his ears as the inside of his skull started vibrating.

Several guards staggered or collapsed immediately, while others apparently had some kind of protection and stayed upright long enough to turn toward the breach. Four people followed the drones through the open windows in full black tactical gear, AR headsets covering their faces while compact flight systems carried them into the room before cutting out. The remaining guards barely had time to react. The intruders fired directed electric weapons that cracked across the penthouse in bright arcs.

One guard seized up and dropped before reaching cover, and another made it halfway behind furniture before the same thing happened. The whole fight lasted only seconds, the security detail disappearing almost as fast as Meno's HP when he had ignored the Escape prompt in the dungeon. When the drone noise finally stopped, Meno lowered his hands slowly.

His ears were still ringing hard enough that everything sounded distant, but he could function again, so he climbed back onto the sofa while Carl did the same opposite him. Carl looked considerably less composed now. One of the tactical operators crossed the room, shoved him back into the sofa, and caught him around the neck with one gloved hand. The distorted voice coming through the equipment was calm enough to make the threat worse.

"Listen, small fry." The operator pointed toward Meno.

"Off limits. Do you understand? The next time, we won't be so polite." Carl stared at him while the grip tightened briefly.

"I need verbal confirmation that you understand your position." Carl coughed once.

"Crystal clear."

"This is your first strike. Cherish it. That's the only one you're going to get." Meno watched from the other sofa and decided Grandpa had a nice raid group. Top-tier DPS. The operator released Carl, crossed over, and grabbed Meno by the upper arm. Something locked around Meno's torso before he properly understood what was happening, strapping him directly against the front of the tactical harness.

"Uh—" They went through the broken window. The acceleration shoved air into Meno's face as Vernova dropped away beneath him. The guy's flight system carried them across the night far faster than anything Meno wanted to experience while strapped to another human being, and within seconds he was reconsidering every food choice he had made in the last hour: four slices of salami pizza, lemon iced tea, and the bonus spite-slice after spotting the SUVs. None of them felt especially secure anymore.

Meno squeezed his eyes shut against the wind and shouted over the noise.

"Drop me off close to The Pearl, would you? I need to sleep so I can hit seventy today."