"Seven days until the Spire scrubs us like mildew in an outhouse," Orikas hissed, ducking behind a pillar of jagged basalt. His burlap tunic smelled pungently of goat dung and wet straw—a disguise so foul even dungeon rats avoided their boots. "And your master plan involves breaking into the Iron Exchequer Vault on Floor 30 without telling Yenna?" "Yenna would mobilize half the Ironclad Coalition," Tiras whispered back, gently re-taping the cracked handle of his rusted iron hoe. "Which takes forty-eight hours of paperwork. We have cabbages to water, Orikas. Besides, the World-Tree Sapling isn't going to germinate itself in a cold steel safe. It needs loam. Rich, loamy nitrogen." [System Alert: User is attempting Grand Larceny against the Spire's Banking Consortium under the guise of 'repotting.' Congratulations, you absolute degenerate. Committing felony-tier trespassing grants +20% Root Resilience to brassicas.] "Shut up," Tiras muttered under his breath. Floor 30 was a labyrinth of calcified bank vaults and petrified limestone, ancient administrative ruins where dead empires had hoarded their soul-gems. Overhead, pale blue stalactites dripped liquid nitrogen onto marble cobblestones. Before Orikas could take another step, three curved heavy-crossbow bolts struck the flags between his toes with ear-splitting clangs. "Hold it right there, compost monkeys," a slick voice echoed from the gallery above. Down dropped six figures clad in mirror-polished platinum plate, cloaks lined with azure silk. Their insignia—a scales balanced over a broadsword—glowed with expensive enchantments. The Silver Vanguard. Leading them was an officer with slicked hair, his sneer looking chiseled into his cheekbones by an artisan who hated peasants. He aimed a glowing repulsor wand at Tiras's chest. "Tiras Vangalos. The guild registries call you an F-rank vagrant, yet your little patch on Floor 15 pumps out high-grade restorative tubers that crashed the capital's alchemical exchange by forty percent this morning." "They're just starch," Tiras said pleasantly, digging a hand into his pocket. "Would you like a roasted radish? It clears sinus blockages." "I want your deed of territory," Brencis snapped, his wand humming to a high-pitched whine. "You sign over Floor 15 to our brigade, or my boys turn your friend into dog lard and hang your corpse from the city gates. The free market doesn't tolerate unlicensed dirt-farmers." [Warning: Hostile extortion detected. Recommend offering them the special chili. The one that melts granite.] "We don't need violence," Tiras pleaded, taking a step forward with an open palm. "Look at your aura, sir. The bile in your spleen is completely out of balance. You're suffering from acute mana-constipation. Two pickled parsnips—" The officer didn't fire. Instead, the man jerked violently. A sickening sound of cracking bone ripped through the hall. His spine arched backward at an impossible, ninety-degree angle. His pupils dilated until the whites of his eyes vanished under ink-black obsidian glaze. "Captain?" one of his footmen stammered, stepping back. "Sir, your armor—" Crimson data-glyphs tore through the metal of his breastplate, shredding silver steel into razor confetti. From the open meat of his torso, calcified white coral sprouted in violent spurts, blooming like carnivorous orchids. The air temperature plummeted twenty degrees in half a second. "ANOMALY IDENTIFIED," the puppet's mouth tore sideways as three separate vocal registers spilled from his throat—one human, one metallic, one echoing from the deepest belly of the Spire itself. "UNREGISTERED BIOMASS CYCLE. DELETION PROTOCOL COMMENCING." "Apex Core hijacking!" Orikas shrieked, stumbling back. "The Spire automated security found you!" The soldiers scattered, screaming as the thing that had been their leader lashed out with an arm transformed into a six-bladed scythe of pure red mineral. One swing split the marble colonnade in two, sending tons of masonry crashing toward Tiras’s head. Tiras didn't dodge backward; he lunged forward, trying to slap a poultice of chewed bitter-leaf against the horrific rupture in the possessed man's chest. "Hang on, friend! The parasitic mana-shock will invert your ventricles if I don't vent the pressure!" "Tiras, you idiot, he's trying to decapitate you!" Orikas roared. The jagged scythe whistled down, aimed directly at Tiras's neck, moving faster than human reflexes could track. Orikas snapped. The scrawny, trembling farmhand expanded like a detonating star. His skin peeled back into gleaming, viridian scales; his jaw unhinged to reveal three rows of obsidian fangs; two massive, leathery wings ripped through his burlap tunic with a sonic boom that pulverized every pane of glass within fifty paces. No longer a frightened laborer, Orikas became what he truly was: the Scourge of Floor 40, the Emerald Wyrm Vermithrax. "GET AWAY FROM MY GARDENER!" Orikas bellowed. A torrent of virulent, jade-colored atomic fire erupted from Orikas’s maw. The breath weapon slammed into the Apex-possessed officer with the force of a falling moon, vaporizing polished armor, incinerating the marble foundations, and blasting the corrupted horror through three consecutive bank vault doors in a deafening scream of twisting steel and boiling rock. The floor shuddered. The Spire groaned in protest. Tiras coughed in the swirling green soot, dusting ash off his dungarees. He stared up at the forty-foot dragon towering over him, smoke billowing from nostril vents the size of beer kegs. "Orikas," Tiras said, genuinely touched. "Your scale coat is so shiny. You've really been eating those zinc-rich squash leaves I gave you, haven't you?" Orikas shrank back, smoke still leaking from his snout, his great reptilian eyes wide with absolute panic. "I... I mean... that was a trick! An illusion scroll! Don't tell Yenna, please, she'll mount my skull in the guild tavern—" A discordant chime rang through the vault. From the smoking crater where the possessed officer had landed, the red mineral did not die. It multiplied. Like bloodthirsty ivy, jagged crimson vines shot from the rubble, feeding on the leftover dragon-fire. They snaked up the walls, knitting together at terrifying speed, pulsing with systemic malice. "CRITICAL THREAT REGISTERED," the Spire's hollow voice boomed from the walls. "QUARANTINE LOCKDOWN INITIATED." A solid barrier of thorned carnelian shot up from the fractured floor between them, moving with the speed of a guillotine blade. "Tiras!" Orikas lunged forward, claws scraping against the sudden barricade, but the crimson thicket fused into an impenetrable, four-foot-thick fortress of anti-magic slag. On the other side of the red glass, Tiras turned around to find the vault's shadows writhing—and the reconstructed Apex entity rising from the ash behind him, scythe already raised.

Tax Evasion on Floor 30