Master of Lust-Chapter 334 - -

Chapter - 334

The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended with the sound of a piece of paper fluttering to the floor.

Nadia stared at the note. The words burned themselves into her retinas.

Rick.

The name echoed in her skull like a curse. The realization hit her, not like a slap, but like a landslide.

The vault. The darkness. The confusion of pushing the door. Rick had bumped into her. He had handed her the waterproof duffel bag for the cash. He had been "adjusting" the straps on the balloon packs.

He hadn’t been adjusting them. He had been swapping them.

He knew.

He had known the entire time. He hadn’t trusted her for a second. While she was plotting her betrayal, planning her escape, looking at him with what she thought was a hidden dagger in her smile, he had been looking right back at her and loading a case full of rocks.

He hadn’t just outsmarted her. He had let her play her hand, let her think she won, let her fly all the way here to deliver a punchline to his enemy.

She wasn’t the player. She was the delivery girl.

"This..." Valerius’s voice was a whisper, a sound of such profound, vibrating rage that the mercenaries by the door took a step back. "This is... garbage."

He looked up at Nadia. His human eye was bloodshot, bulging. His mechanical eye was spinning wildly, cycling through combat protocols.

"Where are they?" Valerius roared, slamming his fist onto the table, denting the steel. "WHERE ARE THE ASSETS?"

"I... I don’t know," Nadia stammered, her composure shattering. The ice queen melted into a puddle of terror. "He swapped them! I didn’t know! I swear! He played me too!"

"You lie!" Valerius screamed. "You work for him! This is a trap! You brought a bomb into my command center!"

He pointed at the small wooden box sitting innocently among the rocks.

"That box! What is it? Is it a nuke? Is it poison?"

"I don’t know!" Nadia shrieked, backing away. "I’ve never seen it before! It’s his! It’s one of his System things!"

Valerius grabbed his pistol from the table. He aimed it at her chest.

"Open it," he commanded.

"What?"

"OPEN IT!" Valerius bellowed. "If it is a trap, you will die first. Open the box!"

Nadia looked at the gun. She looked at the box. She had no choice. Her hands shaking so badly she could barely function, she reached out.

Maybe it’s nothing, she prayed. Maybe it’s just another note. Maybe it’s empty.

She unlatched the small, ornate clasp of the wooden box.

She lifted the lid.

[System Effect Triggered: RANDOM CHAOS.] [Item: Pandora’s Box.] [Effect Rolled: 099 - ’The Disco Inferno’.]

There was a tiny, electronic click.

And then, the box began to play music.

It wasn’t ominous chanting. It wasn’t a countdown.

It was the Bee Gees. "Stayin’ Alive."

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive...

The tinny, 8-bit melody filled the tense, silent command center.

Valerius stared at the box. Nadia stared at the box. The mercenaries stared at the box.

"Is this..." Valerius whispered, his voice trembling with fury. "Is this a joke?"

Then the second phase of the effect triggered.

The box didn’t explode outward. It shot upward.

A high-intensity, multi-spectrum laser array popped out of the box like a jack-in-the-box. It spun rapidly, projecting thousands of blinding, multicolored laser beams around the room. It was a disco ball from hell.

Green, red, blue, and violet lasers swept across the room, blinding the sensors, dazzling the eyes.

And then came the gas.

Thick, pink, glitter-infused smoke began to pour from the box, pumped out by high-pressure jets. It smelled like bubblegum and burning hair.

"MY SENSORS!" Valerius screamed, clawing at his mechanical eye as the lasers overloaded his optics. "I CANNOT SEE! IT IS A JAMMER!"

The mercenaries panicked. "Gas! Gas! Breach!"

Nadia coughed, waving the pink smoke away. She saw her chance. Chaos. Confusion. This was her element. If she could just reach the door...

She turned to run.

But Valerius wasn’t just a machine. He was a paranoid, homicidal warlord who had just been humiliated for the second time in twenty-four hours by the same man. And he had a target right in front of him.

He didn’t need to see. He knew where she was.

"YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?!" Valerius roared over the sound of the Bee Gees.

He lunged.

His cybernetic arm, the one Rick hadn’t blown up, shot out through the pink smoke. His metal fingers clamped around Nadia’s throat.

She gagged, her feet lifting off the floor. She clawed at the metal hand, her nails breaking against the chrome.

"Valerius... wait..." she choked out. "I can... I can fix this... I can find him..."

Valerius pulled her close. His human eye was wide, manic. His mechanical eye was a sparking ruin.

"Fix this?" he hissed, his face inches from hers. "You brought me a box of rocks and a disco party. You are incompetent. You are a failure. And you are fired."

He didn’t shoot her. That would have been too quick.

He squeezed. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The servos in his arm whined. The pressure was immense. Hydraulic power against flesh and bone.

Nadia looked into his eyes. She saw her reflection in the shattered lens of his optic. She saw the fear. She saw the regret.

She thought of Rick. She thought of the pool in Fiji. She thought of the moment on the cliff when she had held the gun on him. He had looked disappointed. Not angry. Just disappointed.

"You’re too chaotic," she had told him. "You’re going to burn out."

The irony was the last thing that went through her mind. She wasn’t burning out. She was being crushed by the cold, unfeeling machinery of the game she thought she could control.

CRACK.

The sound was loud, final, and sickeningly wet.

Nadia’s body went limp. The light faded from her eyes, leaving them staring blankly at the swirling laser lights.

Valerius held her there for a second longer, his chest heaving. Then he tossed her aside like a broken doll. She landed in a heap next to the box of rocks, the Bee Gees still playing cheerfully in the background.

Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me...

Valerius stood in the swirling pink smoke, the lasers dancing over his ruined armor. He looked down at the box. He stomped on it, crushing the mechanism, silencing the music.

He looked at the dead woman. He looked at the rocks.

He picked up the note Rick had written. He crumpled it in his metal fist.

"Rick Smith," Valerius whispered, the name a vow of eternal hatred. "You think you are clever. You think you have won."

He turned to his confused, glitter-covered mercenaries.

"Mobilize everything," Valerius ordered, his voice cold and dead. "The air fleet. The ground units. We are not going back to base."

He looked out the window at the dark mountains.

"We are going hunting. Find the skiers. And bring me Rick Smith’s head. I want to see if his brain laughs when I crush it."

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