Stat Crusher - Bounty Notices and Custom Gambles

Beer-soaked mahogany splinters flew across the booth before Julian even finished dry-heaving onto the rug. Raynor

“Thunder” Drake wiped a glop of vomit off his leather vest, his face turning the color of raw liver.

“Kill these Tempest shits!” he screamed, his voice cracking like a snapped cable.

Eight Wyrmslayer recruits surged forward at once. Glass smashed. Neon light tubes overhead flickered, buzzing with a sharp, electrical whine as a flying barstool hit the ceiling wiring. Mason didn’t bother getting up gracefully. He grabbed the heavy edge of the oak table, muscles bulging against his denim jacket, and flipped the entire three-hundred-pound slab sideways into two charging recruits.

The impact sounded like a car crash, throwing both boys backward into a row of brass spittoons.

“Garrett! Right!” Mason yelled, his big fist smashing straight through a leather chair back to catch another kid across the mouth.

Garrett didn’t yell. He didn’t even raise his chin. To his Bronze-Peak mind-core, the chaotic bar room moved in heavy, sluggish water. A Tier-3 recruit swung a jagged, broken beer bottle toward his throat—a wide, clumsy arc telegraphing through the boy’s shoulder three tenths of a second early. Garrett sidestepped half an inch.

The glass missed his neck by the width of a fingernail. Garrett reached out, grabbed the recruit’s wrist, and twisted it inward until the bone gave a sharp, wet pop. Before the kid could even scream, Garrett drove an open palm directly under his chin. The boy’s head snapped back; he went limp before his knees touched the hardwood.

Julian scrambled up from the floor, his face red and filthy, wild-eyed as he lunged with a pocket knife.

“You slum bastard—” Garrett didn’t even look at the blade.

He ducked beneath the wild slash, caught Julian by the front of his custom gi, and slammed a heavy knee straight into his liver. Julian’s breath left him in a wet, gagging whistle. His eyes rolled into his head as Garrett let go, letting him fold like an empty laundry bag onto the floor. A third Wyrmslayer recruit tried to jump Garrett from behind.

Garrett felt the displacement of air against the back of his ears. He dropped low, swept his heel across the floorboards, and took the kid’s legs out. As the recruit fell, Garrett caught him with a short, brutal elbow to the temple. Three down. Four seconds. Over on the far side of the brawl, Tristan Rhodes was moving with cold, textbook efficiency, cracking jaws with sharp, straight jabs while barely getting a speck of dust on his white warm-up collar.

Up on the second-floor brass balcony, three veteran Warlords stood holding heavy crystal whiskey tumblers, looking down over the railing.

“Look at the kid in the canvas jacket,” Hugh grunted, pointing a thick, scarred finger toward Garrett.

“Who recruited him?”

“Cross did,” a Rank-1 Warlord replied, leaning against the rail.

“Got him out of No. 6.”

“That ain’t high-school footwork,” Hugh muttered, watching Garrett dodge a flying chair without taking his feet off the floorboard seam.

“His neural reflex index must be sub-0.03. He’s reading their muscle twitches before they even flex. Kid’s fighting like a gore-stained ghost.” Below, the last Wyrmslayer recruit backed away, his nose bleeding, staring at the three groaning bodies piled around Garrett’s boots.

Garrett stepped over Julian’s unconscious arm, wiped a smear of stray foam off his forearm, and looked around the wrecked lounge. His pulse was barely elevated.

Brass-trimmed elevator cables hummed in the shaft, carrying the three of them straight up to the eighteenth floor of the Tempest Lodge regional spire. Mason kept wiping his palms on his track-pants, his knees visibly bouncing every time the altimeter on the display ticked up another fifty meters.

“Gar,” Mason muttered, leaning against the polished steel wall and wincing as his knuckles brushed his zipper.

“We’re actually meeting the Director. Cross said the guy’s a Rank-7 Martial Deity. That’s… man, I think my left leg’s turning into porridge.”

“Take a breath, Mase,” Garrett said, his back resting against the handrail.

He could feel his own pulse gradually settling down after the brawl downstairs.

“He’s got two arms and two legs like everyone else.”

“Yeah, except his legs can probably kick through a tank turret,” Mason mumbled under his breath.

The elevator doors chimed and slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss. Instead of the neon glass and chrome typical of the lower district lounges, the top-floor lobby was dead quiet. Deep dark red carpet ate the sound of their boots. At the end of the hall, behind a massive slab of dark walnut wood that looked like it had been salvaged from a pre-Calamity bank vault, sat a man in a plain grey linen shirt.

Director Harlan Cross looked thirty-five, maybe forty, with short-cropped silvering hair and shoulders that didn’t fit neatly into his chair. His face wasn’t scarred or dramatic, but his eyes had a strange, heavy stillness to them—the kind of look men got after spending twenty years watching mutated beasts tear through reinforced concrete.

Marcus stepped forward first, clapping his cap against his thigh.

“Director. I brought the kids up.”

“Sit,” Harlan Cross said.

His voice was low, devoid of the theatrical booming tone most district officials used when addressing new recruits. Garrett took the leather armchair directly across from the walnut desk. Mason dropped into the seat beside him with a heavy, awkward slump, looking like he was afraid he’d break the leather. On the desk, a curved holographic glass panel was playing a three-angle loop of the Millennium Lounge main hall.

The footage showed Garrett stepping around Julian’s clumsy knife slash, the quick, crushing knee to the liver, and the seamless sweep that took down the two Wyrmslayer Rank-3s before Raynor even cleared the table. Cross tapped the glass, pausing the video right at the moment Garrett’s palm caught the second recruit under the jaw.

“No wasted kinetic force,” Cross said, his eyes shifting from the screen to Garrett’s face.

“Most seventeen-year-olds get their blood up in a bar fight and try to throw haymakers like they’re breaking concrete on a dare. You didn’t even shift your center of gravity. You fought like you were trying to clear garbage off your porch before it rained.” Garrett kept his hands folded in his lap.

“They were sloppy, sir.”

“They were Wyrmslayer recruits,” Cross corrected dryly, a faint, fleeting humor touching the edge of his mouth.

“Which means their syndicate leader is going to lodge a formal complaint with the municipal board by breakfast. Not that I give a damn. We don’t bow to Wyrmslayer in District 4.” He reached out and slid a thin, obsidian-black tablet across the wood toward Garrett, then pushed a second one toward Mason.

“The Lodge rewards initiative,” Cross continued, leaning back into his chair.

“You cleared four of their Rank-3s, one Rank-2, and put Julian Drake on a stretcher. Guild protocol dictates a merit distribution for unscheduled defensive engagements.” Mason tapped his screen, his jaw dropping so fast a quiet squeak escaped his throat.

“Seven… seven hundred Merit Points? And a five-million equipment credit?”

“Your raw physical strike on the test-pad was four hundred and three kilos, Gable,” Cross said, glancing at Mason.

“You’ve got baseline brute force, but your footwork is garbage. Use those credits on a decent broadsword manual and some heavy leg-weights before you hit the Outland tracks.” Mason nodded like a bobblehead doll, his thumbs flying across his pad as if he was afraid the credits would vanish if he didn’t look at them.

Garrett tapped his own interface. Recruit Account: Garrett Cole. Merit Points Granted: 3,300. Equipment Credit Line: $20,000,000. The number sat there in bright blue digital ink against the black screen. Twenty million credits. In his previous life, Garrett had worked three full years in the outer border trenches just to clear his first two million.

“Three thousand three hundred merit points,” Cross noted, watching Garrett’s reaction closely.

“Plus twenty million in hardware procurement. That’s a Tier-1 senior incentive package, Cole. I’m authorizing it directly from the director’s discretionary pool.” Garrett looked up from the pad, his expression entirely neutral.

“What’s the catch, Director?”

“No catch,” Cross said, picking up a pen and rolling it between his knuckles.

“I’m leaving the Citadel in thirty minutes for a five-day hunting run near the northern ridges. If you want my personal clearance on specialized gear—gene cocktails, non-standard weapons, or restricted technique chips—you’ve got twenty-five minutes to complete your orders on that terminal. After I walk out that door, you’ll have to wait through the standard administrative approval queues, and Julian’s father has friends in the supply office.” Mason was already hyperventilating next to him, muttering under his breath as he scrolled through pages of customized broadswords and armored boots.

“Man, look at this car… wait, no, I can’t buy a car, Gar said no cars…” Garrett ignored his friend’s rambling.

His fingers hovered over the dark glass terminal, his mind-core buzzing with quiet, cold precision. He didn’t need shiny sports sedans or standard-issue guild armor. He had twenty-five minutes to set up the foundation for the rest of his life.