Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
DO NOT READ DOWN #ONLY FOR WORD COUNT
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.
Manhattan at night was a different beast entirely. From a distance, it was a jewel box of shimmering lights, but down on the street, it was all grit and exhaust. In Hell's Kitchen, that grit turned to pure grime. The neighborhood was the undisputed heavyweight champion of New York crime, a place where the air felt thick with the smell of old garbage, cheap oil, and the metallic tang of impending violence.
The sounds were a constant, jagged rhythm: the distant, sharp pop-pop-pop of a handgun, the screech of tires on damp asphalt, and the muffled roars of a domestic dispute spilling out of a fourth-story window. It was a den of chaos that made even the most seasoned NYPD detectives think twice before stepping out of their cruisers after midnight.
Yet, amidst the anarchy, there was a pocket of unnatural silence.
Standing tall against the bruised purple of the night sky was Fisk Tower. It loomed over the surrounding tenements like a gargoyle, pristine and terrifying. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the city's power structure knew the silence wasn't a sign of peace—it was the silence of a graveyard. This was the fortress of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He was the man they called the "Emperor of the Underworld," and he didn't just rule New York's shadows; he owned them.
At the main entrance, security guards stood like statues. These weren't your average mall cops. They were wide-shouldered men in tailored suits that strained against the bulk of the tactical vests and concealed sidearms beneath. Their eyes were cold, scanning the street with a predatory focus that deterred anyone with a shred of self-preservation.
But Rosen wasn't exactly feeling the fear tonight.
Dressed in matte black from head to toe, a mask concealing his features, Rosen stood perfectly still in the shadow of a brick alleyway across the street. He could feel the cool night breeze tugging at his clothes, but he didn't move a muscle. His breathing was slow, measured. To any passerby—and more importantly, to the armed guards across the way—he was just another patch of darkness.
Come on, he thought, his pulse a steady drumbeat in his ears. Any second now.
Ten minutes dragged by, marked by the distant chime of a clock tower. Then, the rumble of heavy engines broke the quiet. A convoy rolled up to the front of the Tower: a nondescript box truck flanked by two sleek black SUVs.
The choreography that followed was military-grade. Guards poured out of the SUVs, hands hovering near their waistbands, while the truck's rear doors swung open. Hand-trucks were wheeled out, laden with heavy, reinforced briefcases.
Rosen's eyes narrowed, a predatory glint appearing behind his mask. He knew what was in those cases. It wasn't gold or jewels—not yet. It was stacks of crisp, green, non-sequential hundred-dollar bills. This was the "tribute," the weekly harvest from Fisk's sprawling criminal empire.
Look at all that beautiful, dirty laundry, Rosen mused.
In the modern world, the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) and federal regulators were like sharks smelling blood when it came to digital footprints. You couldn't just drop ten million bucks into a Wells Fargo account without the feds kicking down your door by breakfast. For a man like Fisk, cash was both a necessity and a burden. It had to be moved, stored, and slowly bled through front corporations before it could be "clean." Until then, it sat in the dark.
And according to Rosen's intel, Fisk Tower housed the mother of all vaults in its second basement level.
As the last of the freight carts disappeared into the building, Rosen felt the familiar hum of energy under his skin. Time to move. A faint, dark shimmer rippled across his body, like heat haze on a highway, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was breathing in the smog of Hell's Kitchen; the next, he was inhaling the sterile, refrigerated air of the Fisk Tower basement. He was tucked into a narrow corner, a surveillance blind spot he'd scouted days ago.
He knelt, his gloved hand reaching down to pick up a small, palm-sized object from the floor. It looked like a toy—a sleek, mechanical mouse with glowing fiber-optic "eyes."
"Good job, little guy," Rosen whispered, his voice a low rasp.
He tucked the mechanical mouse into a pouch on his belt. This little gadget was his tether. His Blink ability allowed him to teleport within a range of about three thousand feet, but it had a catch: he needed a line of sight. He couldn't just teleport through a foot of reinforced concrete unless he had "eyes" on the other side. The mouse acted as his God's-eye view, transmitting a five-foot radius of visual data directly into his mind.
He'd spent weeks getting that mouse into this basement. Now, it was paying off.
Rosen stood still, holding his breath as a patrol of guards walked past the far end of the hallway. He activated Shadow Fade.
This was his bread and butter. As long as it was night and he remained motionless, he was effectively a ghost. He watched the guards—two guys in tactical gear, looking bored—stroll by without a second glance toward his corner.
Too easy, he thought. If only the vault door wasn't three feet of solid steel, I could've just blinked inside and been out in time for late-night tacos.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Then, the heavy industrial elevator groaned. The doors slid open, and the money-transport crew stepped out. They were flanked by even more muscle, including a guy with a scarred neck who looked like he chewed glass for breakfast. They began the tedious process of disarming the vault's multi-layered security. Keypads beeped, biometric scanners hummed with green light, and the massive circular gears of the vault door began to rotate with a heavy, metallic clack-clack-clack.
As the door swung open, revealing a cavernous interior, Rosen moved.
He didn't use Blink—too much noise. Instead, he reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a shimmering pink liquid. He popped the cork with his thumb and downed it in one gulp. It tasted like artificial strawberries and ozone.
Immediately, his body felt light, almost buoyant. This was a genuine Invisibility Potion. Unlike Shadow Fade, he could move while using this, though it only lasted for a measly two minutes.
He didn't waste a second. He slipped out of the shadows, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. He moved like a predatory cat, weaving between the guards who were busy grunting under the weight of the cash carts. He passed so close to the scarred-neck guard that he could smell the man's stale tobacco breath.
He slipped through the threshold just as the last cart was wheeled inside.
The interior of the vault was a monument to greed. It was massive, the size of a suburban house, and it was filled with more than just cash. Rows of gold bars caught the dim light; velvet-lined cases held diamonds the size of walnuts. But the centerpiece was the mountain.
A literal mountain of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Holy hell, Rosen thought, his brain momentarily short-circuiting at the sight. This has to be, what, three hundred million? Four? He felt a manic urge to laugh, to dive into the pile like a cartoon duck, but he caught himself. The potion was wearing off. He could see his hands starting to regain their opacity.
The guards finished their work quickly. They weren't paid to loiter in the vault. As they filed out and the massive door began to hiss shut, Rosen retreated to the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He remained perfectly still, triggering Shadow Fade the exact microsecond the potion's effect expired. The transition was seamless.
The vault door slammed shut with a finality that would have terrified a normal man. He was trapped in a steel box, forty feet underground, in the heart of the world's most dangerous criminal's headquarters.
Rosen just grinned under his mask. "Now the fun starts."
He waited for thirty minutes. He wanted the basement to be clear, the guards to be back at their posts, and the tension to settle into a dull routine. Silence reigned in the vault, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system.
Finally, he exhaled and stepped out of the shadows, breaking his invisibility.
Instantly, the silent alarms triggered. He didn't need to hear them to know they were ringing in the security room upstairs. On the walls, the high-def surveillance cameras swiveled, their red "recording" lights blinking rapidly as they locked onto his position.
"Smile for the camera, boys," Rosen muttered.
He reached behind his back and drew a sleek, circular weapon—a high-tech disk that pulsed with an angry red light. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the room.
The disk moved with impossible speed, a blur of crimson. CRACK. SHATTER. SMASH. In a heartbeat, every camera in the room was reduced to scrap metal and glass shards. The feeds upstairs would be nothing but static now.
Rosen knew he didn't have long. It would take the security team at least ten or fifteen minutes to bypass their own lockdown protocols and manually override the vault door. That was more than enough time for a man with his "cheats."
He turned back to the mountain of cash, his heart racing with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated greed.
"Haha! After this haul, I can finally stop scraping by," he said, his voice bouncing off the cold metal walls. "Most of my high-tier skills should be extractable after this, and I won't have to worry about the shop prices for a long, long time."
He didn't bother with a bag. He didn't need one. He stepped toward the pile of money and began to work his "cheat," raking in the bundles with frantic, joyful energy.
Outside, he could hear the muffled sound of heavy boots sprinting down the hallway and the shouts of armed men. They were coming for him, but Rosen didn't even look at the door. He just kept grabbing the cash, a wild, triumphant grin hidden beneath his mask.VV