The afterimage of the flash still burned behind Huo Yunting’s eyelids. The shriek, raw and unrestrained, vibrated through the floorboards, scattering plaster dust from the ceiling beams and rattling the wall of funeral floral rings that had shielded them. Qingzi, her collar still flush against his lapel, let out a soft, amused murmur into the crook of his collarbone. From the main hall, a furious thrashing intensified. The slatted storage closet exploded outward. Dried cane needles shot across the chamber, sticking into paper lanterns and far plaster with dull thuds. Burial silks, once tightly bound, unfurled in a violent cascade of pale ivory, revealing a figure that was no longer gagged, no longer merely contained. Manager Zhu, her visage a mask of contorted rage, her eyes glowing with an incandescent, sickly green light, erupted from the wreckage. Her features, beneath the shredded silks, contorted into livid white planes. Shredded prayer slips spun around her in a grinding vortex. Her first utterance was a sustained, wet snarl that set the air humming. Her gaze locked directly through the torn floral stands, pinning Yunting against the wall. His delivery app’s background monitor spiked straight to an S-tier entity alert. “My… wedding,” Zhu rasped, her voice like grinding stones, her gaze flicking between Yunting and Qingzi, still locked in their compromising embrace. “My… groom. You… *fraud*!” Qingzi, far from cowering, merely leaned back against Yunting, her head tilting upwards, a wide, mischievous grin splitting her face. “Oh, she’s so dramatic, isn’t she?” she whispered, her voice a warm breeze against his ear, completely at odds with the imminent danger. “I told you she wouldn’t like sharing her toys.” Before Yunting could process Qingzi’s blasé commentary, Zhu let out another ear-splitting roar. The very ground beneath them shuddered. In an instant, the meticulously arranged funeral shop began to warp. Half-finished paper attendants, posed lifelessly with ceremonial fans and lanterns, lurched to life. Their painted faces, hitherto blankly serene, twisted into snarling caricatures of anger. Their stiff paper limbs, reinforced by internal cane framing, snapped into rigid angles, joints scraping like dry husks. These were not the clumsy, shambling constructs Yunting had seen earlier. These were animated, predatory effigies, dozens of them, emerging from every corner. From behind stacks of funerary paper money, from beneath draped shrouds, from within hollow palanquins – they converged, their movements swift and surprisingly agile. Each carried a miniature paper weapon: jagged paper knives, flimsy-looking but razor-sharp paper spears, or even just stiff, pointed paper claws that seemed capable of rending flesh. [DISPATCHER 404: RULE VIOLATION DETECTED. UNAUTHORIZED HOSTILE ENTITY ACTIVATED. GROOM FAILURE IMMINENT. 5-STAR RATING THREAT SEVERE.] Yunting's calculating instincts snapped clear. Manager Zhu was a Calamity-tier hazard, but the sheer volume of animated constructs presented the immediate bottleneck. Survival required pure pathing optimization. He had spent three years threading electric scooters through gridlocked alleyways and dodging rogue couriers on icy overpasses; this was merely rush hour with lethal penalties. “Run, darling,” Qingzi purred, her fingers tracing a playful path up his arm. “Unless you want to be redesigned into a permanent display piece.” He didn't need her prompting. Six paper servants lunged at their barricade. Yunting grabbed Qingzi's wrist and vaulted sideways, clearing the perimeter as the mourning rings collapsed under clawing white hands. Shelves of sandalwood incense toppled into gray drifts, blinding the corridor. Bolts of bleached burial hemp unrolled across the flagstones like tripwires. Overhead, oversized lantern gourds swung on creaking ropes, their green pilot lights flaring. A painted warrior lunged from behind a rack of spirit robes, swinging a serrated cardboard dao. Tracking the arc, Yunting dipped his shoulder, letting the blade slice through empty air an inch above his collar before driving his weight past a stack of blank memorial tablets. “A little to your left, sweetie! That one’s aiming for your hamstring!” Qingzi called out, her voice filled with unconcealed amusement. She didn't seem to be helping with physical evasion, but rather providing a running, delighted commentary. He heard a sharp *whoosh* behind him, followed by a wet tearing sound, and glanced back to see the paper warrior that had just attacked him now reduced to a confetti of shredded paper, its blade arm severed by an unseen force. Qingzi, still laughing, blew a kiss over her shoulder, a faint, shimmering red ripple of energy dissipating in the air. Manager Zhu, meanwhile, was a whirlwind of destructive energy in the center of the main hall, her ghostly green eyes tracking Yunting’s every move. She wasn't just directing her paper minions; she was actively reshaping the environment. The very walls of the shop seemed to breathe, paper screens sliding shut to block escape routes, cane display shelves warping to constrict the escape route. Her resentment fueled the transformation, turning a place of quiet mourning into a labyrinth of lethal intent. Yunting, using the ingrained muscle memory of countless near-misses on crowded streets, vaulted over a display table laden with imitation gold ingots. The paper servants, surprisingly, did not follow immediately. They were slower, more deliberate, their movements like a macabre dance, but their sheer numbers meant he was constantly encircled, constantly calculating his next impossible vector. “Such *loyalty*,” Zhu hissed, her voice dripping with scorn as Yunting zipped past a giant, open paper coffin. “You abandon your true client for… a distraction! A cheap, paper-thin imitation!” Her green eyes pulsed, and the coffin lid, moments after Yunting cleared it, slammed shut with a resounding thud, narrowly missing a pursuing paper drummer. “You really do have a type, don’t you, love?” Qingzi teased, her arm wrapping around his waist as he spun them around a corner, narrowly avoiding a paper tiger that sprang from the shadows. “All those long, silent, suffering types.” She leaned in, her lips brushing his ear again, a feather-light touch amidst the hurricane of destruction. “Don’t worry. I’m much more… *interactive*.” As they ducked under a collapsing archway of paper cranes, Yunting saw his phone screen flicker. He risked a glance. It was still cracked, but the notifications were persistent, glowing with an ominous red hue. [DISPATCHER 404: ATTENTION GROOM. IRREGULARITIES IN CLIENT INTERACTION DETECTED. UNAUTHORIZED ANOMALY PREVALENCE ABOVE ACCEPTABLE THRESHOLDS. MANDATORY IN-PERSON QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTION INITIATED. DISPATCHER ARRIVAL IN 00:05:00. FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH VERIFICATION PROTOCOL WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE ACCOUNT DELETION.] Yunting dug his sneakers into the floorboards, cold calculation racing against the prompt. Five minutes. Five minutes until Dispatcher 404, the passive-aggressive arbiter of his damnation, manifested physically in this chaotic, paper-shredding nightmare. And he was still, technically, eloping with the fraudulent boss. If Zhu found him, he was dead. If Dispatcher 404 found him with Qingzi, he was worse than dead. His five-star strategy had just entered uncharted, catastrophic territory.

Managerial Escalation