Chapter 18: A Beautiful Night for Arson and Despair
The banquet hall was in ruin.
Fire raged across the floors, crawling up the walls, swallowing everything in its path. Smoke filled the air, thick and suffocating.
Chandeliers crashed, their crystals shattering like broken dreams. The velvet curtains were nothing but ash, the golden tables twisted from the heat.
The buffet was gone.
The roasted ducks? Double roasted. The wagyu beef? More charcoal than meat. The lobsters? Cremated. The caviar boiled in its silver dish, reduced to black sludge.
And then, the wine racks exploded.
A chain reaction of bottles bursting, their precious contents spilling into the inferno. Decades-old vintages, the kind only billionaires could afford, reduced to a flaming cocktail of despair.
Somewhere in the madness, a waiter screamed in horror.
"NOT THE 1787 CH?TEAU LAFITE—!!!"
Rich people ran, clutching jewels over their children, wallets over their dignity.
Some just stood there, stunned.
Because for them, fire wasn’t a threat.
It was just something the poor suffered from.
And right in the middle of it all, Don sat on a burning chair, still relaxed, observing the emergent chaos.
Deep inside the ventilation ducts, Grim and Lazaro crawled for their lives.
Grim: "We are never doing this again."
Lazaro: "Not unless we get paid more."
Grim: "WE’RE NOT GETTING PAID AT ALL!"
The air was hot as hell, every breath tasted like regret.
The metal under them groaned, threatening to collapse at any moment. But there was no turning back.
They kept crawling, deeper and deeper down.
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Lazaro: "At least we skipped past the hard part."
Grim: "Yeah… at least—"
Then, the duct gave out beneath them.
They fell.
And landed in hell.
Floor -15.
The room was a metallic nightmare.
Rows of massive servers hummed, blinking with an eerie glow. Thick black cables ran across the floor like a nest of digital vipers.
The air was cool, clear. And at the very center of it all—
The security console.
A monster of a system. Screens flashed endless lines of code, security footage, encryption logs.
It was the heart of the building’s defenses. The kind of tech that would take a genius to crack.
And Fortunately enough, they had one with them.
Grim dusted himself off and sighed. "Alright. We made it. Now, do your thing."
Lazaro cracked his knuckles, walked up to the console, and got to work.
The screens flickered. The data shifted.
His fingers moved with precision, working through layers of digital defenses with an ease that should’ve been illegal.
Then he stopped.
Stared.
And then sighed.
Lazaro: "We’re screwed."
Grim blinked: "What."
Lazaro turned, scratching his head "The security connections we need… the ones that let us access the system…."
Grim: "What about them?"
Lazaro: "They’re all in the top 10 floors."
A long silence.
Grim leaned against the wall, sliding down into a soul-crushing squat. His head nodded with a deep sigh.
Grim: "So we just crawled through fire, almost died, and broke every bone in my body for NOTHING?!"
Lazaro: "Hey, at least we’re not dead."
Grim: "I’d RATHER be dead!"
Meanwhile, in the banquet hall, Ash was thriving in the chaos.
She stood amidst the flames, arms crossed, watching rich people lose their minds.
A businessman was sobbing over his burning Rolex collection. A woman in a fur coat was hitting a butler with her purse for not carrying her to safety. Some guy in a tuxedo was screaming at the fire, demanding to speak to its manager.
Ash smirked. This was fun.
She turned to a frantic security officer.
Ash: "Alright, listen up. I’m an expert in emergency situations."
Security sighed: "Wait, really?!"
Ash: "No. But you don’t have a choice."
The man looked like he was about to cry, but Ash had zero sympathy.
She grabbed a megaphone from a nearby table and climbed on top of an overturned champagne fountain.
Ash: "LISTEN UP, YOU OVERPRICED HEADLESS CHICKENS!"
Silence.
Everyone turned.
Even the fire seemed to hesitate.
Ash: "I need ALL security to focus on evacuating the VIPs first! The rich ones! If they die, we’re all unemployed!"
The guards nodded aggressively.
Ash: "And while you do that, DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE FIRE! It’s a controlled burn!"
A waiter, already half-conscious from the smoke: "IT IS NOT CONTROLLED!"
Ash ignored him.
Ash: "For the rest of you, if you’re still breathing, keep moving! Find an exit! Or a window! Or a hole in the wall! I don’t know, Be creative!"
A man in a Gucci suit tried to dive into the chocolate fountain, thinking it would protect him.
It did not.
Ash: "NOT LIKE THAT!"
The security was panicking even more now, but at least they were too distracted to focus on anything else.
Exactly as planned.
