Chapter 638: Vanderbilt’s Suffering

[Columbia Royal Hospital]

The seals on the trauma pod hissed with the sterile dry gasp of pressurized nitrogen.

Inside the presidential suite on the seventy-first floor of the Columbia Royal Hospital, the air tasted of many different things that weren’t nice to smell at all.

"Ugh..."

Sunlight filtered through triple-pane blast glass, but none of its warmth reached the central bed as the suite was less a convalescent room and more an aerospace laboratory stripped down for emergency metabolic salvage.

Julian Vanderbilt Senior lay propped against an articulated titanium mattress with his breath rattling like wet gravel in an empty pail.

The mechanical ventilator hooked to his throat pulsed in rhythm with the intravenous pumps.

The official communiqués issued by the Executive Board had spoken of "minor lacerations and a back-blast sustained during the explosion." and due to that, the media reported third-degree burns.

However...

The media was lying through its teeth to preserve Columbia’s sovereign credit ratings.

Beneath the sheets, the President of Columbia was a ruined shell.

Both of his arms were gone from just below the clavicles with the stumps cauterized into jagged puckered knots of black tissue and silver surgical staples.

His left leg ended three inches below the knee, sheared away when the gloves had unraveled their secondary threads, and his right thigh was pinned with six external carbon-fiber stabilization struts.

Half of his face, the square-jawed granite profile that had graced forty years of corporate bank notes, was a landscape of weeping raw dermis with his left ear reduced to a shriveled notch of scarred cartilage.

And below his navel, the pelvic girdle had shattered under the directional blast wave.

The rare gloves had not simply backfired... the runes Rowenna had woven into the sub-threads had inverted the polarity of the charge, focusing the entire forty-billion-credit detonation directly inward between his hips.

’Gone,’ Vanderbilt Senior thought, his single bloodshot eye staring unblinkingly at the white tiles of the ceiling. ’Crushed... All of it... vaporized into grease.’

"The fluid," Vanderbilt croaked, his vocal cords scraping against the plastic tube in his windpipe. "Where is the immersion bath?"

At the foot of the bed, a senior surgical nurse in starched gray scrubs checked the digital telemetry monitor.

Her hands trembled slightly as she adjusted the drip rates.

"The synthetic marrow suspension is being routed from the Central City reserves, Mr. President," she said, her voice strained, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the glass vials. "The shipping manifest cleared customs twenty minutes ago but, as the chief surgeon noted, because you do not possess an active Lord core or even a Mana core so cellular regeneration will be severely limited... The unawakened nervous system rejects accelerated stem-grafts."

Vanderbilt’s jaw clamped shut with the muscle bulging on the unburned side of his face.

He wanted to reach out and he wanted to wrap thick, manicured fingers around the woman’s throat and squeeze until her eyes bulged, just as he had throttled incompetent boardroom directors for forty years but he had no hands.

There were only phantom twitches in the empty air beside his shoulders, followed by a searing phantom ache that radiated from his missing collarbones.

"Get on with it," he rasped, his voice venomous with phlegm rattling behind his teeth. "I don’t give a damn about biological purity... Bolt titanium to the bone and wire the neural bridges to synthetic servos too. If the tissue won’t knit, graft military-grade cybernetics into the sockets... I have a budget hearing with the other Directors in eighteen days and I will not attend from a basket."

"Y-Yes, sir," the nurse whispered, ducking her head and stepping back toward the telemetry bank.

Vanderbilt let his head roll back against the sanitized foam.

’Kara White.’ The name carved through his skull like a dull scalpel. ’That single-armed bitch... That gutter-born rat...’

She had smiled when she agreed to give him the gloves. That bitch had stood there in her suit, looking like a saint while she handed him a live ticking landmine wrapped in silk and Aki, that useless, unawakened little royal brat.

If Aki had simply agreed to the private marriage contract with Junior, if she had allowed the Vanderbilt line to graft its industrial wealth to the royal bloodline, none of this would have happened.

...Columbia would have secured its seat at the right hand of the World Throne.

Instead, his fleets were bankrupt, his factory lines were stalled for lack of raw star-iron, and he was rotting in an ICU bed while the World King looked elsewhere for military suppliers.

The reinforced glass door slid open with a smooth chime.

Stepping into the room was a young man in a bespoke three-piece charcoal suit cut from imported void-silk.

His hair was slicked back with expensive pomade with his signet rings gleaming under the cold fluorescent panels.

...Julian Vanderbilt Junior.

Unlike his father, Junior had emerged from the Grand Assembly incident relatively intact.

As an Awakened noble with an active Lord core, his body had accepted the medical treatment.

The fractured vertebrae he had sustained after his humiliating confrontation in the corridor had been set by royal bone-shapers, leaving only a lingering stiffness in his lower spine.

"Father," Junior said, stepping toward the foot of the bed, his voice carrying the solemn gravity of an heir assuming command. "The board is secured... I have already initiated the legal injunctions against House Bloom for their trade interference and hopefully we will hold the northern contracts."

Vanderbilt Senior’s eye flickered toward his son.

A bitter warmth stirred in his chest... At least the boy was standing, so he trusted that at the very least the lineage had an heir who could walk into an executive suite without a wheelchair.

"The girl," Senior wheezed. "And the one-armed vagrant... Kara White."

Junior’s jaw hardened, his fists clenching at his sides.

"I will handle them. The family’s honor will be repaid ten times over... Once the Khemet containment perimeter falls, Kara White will face the full weight of Columbia’s private strike divisions! I swear it to you, Father! I will take revenge for what they did to this family!"

A rare proud breath passed through Vanderbilt Senior’s teeth.

"Good... That is my blood... Break them and strip the skin from—"

Junior paused mid-stride.

His sentence choked in his throat as his groomed face violently contorted, draining of every drop of color as his eyes bugged out of his skull.

"Ah, fuck," Junior whimpered, his voice pitching up into a shrill breathless squeak.

"Junior?" Senior rasped.

The young heir did not simply sit down as his knees completely buckled, and he collapsed sideways onto the polished linoleum floor with an undignified smack.

"MY BACK!" Junior shrieked, rolling onto his side, clutching his lumbar region with both hands, curling into a tight ball as fat tears burst from his eyes. "IT WENT OUT AGAIN! THE DISK POPPED! OH GOD, THE BONE-SHAPER DIDN’T SET THE SPINAL PIN... CALL THE SURGEON! CALL THE SURGEON, IT BURNS!"

The heart-rate monitors in the suite went wild, sirens chirping across the ward.

"Code blue! Assist in Room 701!" the nurse shouted into her intercom, dropping her clipboards as three orderlies rushed through the pneumatic doors with a heavy hydraulic gurney.

"Careful with his lower lumbar!"

"Administer two hundred milligrams of neural dampener!"

"Hold his shoulders, he’s thrashing!"

Vanderbilt Senior laid motionless on the bed and unlike what one would expect, he did not yell and he did not curse either.

"Ah..."

He simply stared at the ceiling as his only son, the recognized heir to the Republic of Columbia, the boy who was supposed to march an army into Khemet to avenge the family name, was hoisted onto a canvas stretcher like a slaughtered calf, sobbing loudly into the linoleum, clutching his rear end as he was wheeled frantically down the corridor.

The doors hissed shut and the room fell silent, save for the mocking hiss-click of the ventilator.

"I’m finished."

A hollow despair settled into the marrow of Vanderbilt’s surviving bones.

’It started,’ he thought, his single eye clouding with a cold, dead glaze. ’All of it... Every shred of bad luck, every failed contract, every ruined bone in my body... It all started the exact second I laid eyes on that black-haired woman in the meeting.’

His gaze drifted toward the small laminate nightstand near the window.

Sitting beside a box of disposable sterile gloves was a newly opened cardboard package.

Resting on the polished surface was an eight-inch hand-painted collector’s figurine.

It was the Kara White commemorative sculpt from the Heroes of the Dust series, likely purchased by one of the day nurses on her lunch break.

The miniature Lord was standing upon a vitrified black ledge with one empty sleeve pinned neatly across her chest and her dark eyes looking down with a faint mocking smile while the tiny gold Dawn Blade rested casually at her side.

Vanderbilt stared at the little plastic woman and his breath grew rapid and shallow.

"Fuck... Fuck... Fuck!"

His hip twitched as he tried to draw his right leg up beneath the sheet, straining with every remaining fiber of his unawakened core to swing his foot out and kick the tiny, smiling toy off the table, to smash it against the tile, to grind it into powder... He wanted to do a lot of things with it but nothing moved.

His leg was an immovable, leaden stump pinned to the mattress by six steel rods.

The figurine simply stood there, bathed in the midday sun, smiling serenely down at him and Vanderbilt Senior closed his eye with a dry silent sob rattling in his throat as he cursed her into the dark.

...

Six hundred miles to the northwest, in the quiet tree-lined suburbs of Valoria City.

The mid-afternoon bell of the central shopping pavilion chimed with three clear brassy notes that drifted over the manicured hedges and clean asphalt.

Inside the high-end boutique of the Apex Manufactory’s regional outlet, the air was cool and smelled of expensive cardamom tea.

The young receptionist behind the glass counter, a girl with neatly pinned auburn hair and the crisp starched blazer of the retail company, looked down at the three identical massive master-cartons resting on the velvet checkout runner.

"Confirming your order, ladies," the receptionist said, her polished fingernail tapping the touch-screen terminal. "Three complete royal-tier collector’s sets... Heroes of the Dust, The Blessed Land Chronicles and First Edition. That includes all eleven primary sculpts, the interlocking display bases, and the authenticated certificate of authenticity stamped with Lord Vespera’s seal if you’re lucky!"

Standing on the customer side of the marble runner were three girls.

In the center was Lia Graves.

At eleven years old, she barely reached the clerk’s shoulder, wearing a simple comfortable denim jacket over a beige sweater with her dark hair pulled back into a practical no-nonsense ponytail.

Her sharp dark eyes, carrying that same stubborn observant intensity as her older brother’s, nodded once with firm solemnity.

To her left, Penelope Whitmore leaned against the counter, her soft purple hair falling over her cheek with her hands tucked neatly into the pockets of her pleated skirt.

And to her right stood Kaede.

The younger sister of Minamoto was practically vibrating on the balls of her feet with her hands resting impatiently on the edge of the glass counter.

"That will be sixty thousand Spirit Credits in total," the receptionist said, tilting the terminal forward. "Credit card or direct transfer?"

Before Lia or Penelope could reach for their bags for anything, Kaede’s hand was already moving.

A sleek black-and-gold corporate debit card, embossed with the triple-cherry-blossom crest of the Shogunate Isles, slid smoothly across the marble runner with an oily expensive glide.

"Slide and ching, baby," Kaede declared with a smug self-satisfied grin while crossing her arms over her chest.

Penelope slowly turned her head, looking at the girl with deadpan exhaustion.

"Kaede," Penelope muttered, adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag. "You have been watching too many western action serials on the hotel network... Nobody says ’slide and ching’ in a certified retail outlet."

Kaede didn’t even blink.

She snapped her right hand into the shape of a pistol, cocking her thumb back and pointing her index finger straight at Penelope’s forehead.

"Pew, pew," Kaede deadpanned, narrowing one eye like a veteran gunslinger. "Of course I say it... Action movies are pure cinema. The explosions are huge, the cars have eight exhaust pipes, and the heroes always pay for lunch with heavy gold coins, It builds character."

The receptionist maintained a professional smile, sliding the black card through the terminal’s magnetic groove.

"Pin, please," the clerk said smoothly.

Kaede leaned forward, tapped four numbers with her thumb, and the terminal let out a pleasant, high-pitched ping.

[TRANSACTION APPROVED: 60,000 SC.]

"Thank you for shopping with the Apex Syndicate," the receptionist said, using a small brass hook to slide the three heavy gold-ribboned cartons across the counter. "May the light guide your collections."

Kaede deftly snatched her card back, flicking it into her sleeve like a hidden throwing knife, and scooped up her carton by its reinforced canvas handle.

"Let’s roll, squad," Kaede muttered under her breath, turning toward the double glass doors.

Out on the sunlit sidewalk, the three girls paused beneath the shade of an ornamental maple tree with the breeze rustling the red leaves overhead.