Chapter 178 The Mob Way.

Chapter 178: 178 The Mob Way.

Relieved as I was that I wouldn’t have to actively deal with the Brain Trust and their mind-control conspiracies anymore, I still felt a little weird going shopping for a new car.

Not that I was complaining, exactly. I desperately needed an upgrade. I just didn’t expect to be buying a sedan from an underground supervillain surplus lot.

My Toyotas had been a reliable beast for years now, it was true. And I had taken pretty good care of it, magnetically buffing out the dents every time some B-list hero threw me across the hood.

But the girls actually had a very valid point. I wasn’t just some street-level villain who got beaten up for chump change anymore. I was a high-class syndicate boss who got beaten up for premium corporate payouts.

As the leader of a coterie of stunning supervillainesses under a unified umbrella organization, optics mattered. Kicking my ass was going to be a highly prestigious, marketable event for these heroes, and I needed to look the part.

Not that I was going to be slapping nefarious neon symbols onto the doors, or having the hood of the car designed to look like a flaming skull (though, fuck, that would be incredibly badass. I’d love to drive that kind of car on the weekends). But I did need something that actively demonstrated the sort of high-end adversary I was now.

In this industry, people treated you exactly as well as you looked. I knew that, and I usually tailored my armor accordingly, but the sorts of S-class heroes and multinational corporations I was going to be making deals with now expected a certain... sophistication.

They didn’t want to think they were chucking millions of dollars at some random thug in a rusty hatchback. I was meant to embody an organization that could credibly menace top-tier heroes. And more than one at a time.

So, I had to look the part.

Wardrobe wasn’t really an issue for me. I had a few custom-tailored suits I wore when meeting with heroes, agents, or lawyers. But the car... the car was the centerpiece of the getaway.

The simple fact was that you had to make a flawless first impression, and if you wanted people to hand over real money, you had to look like you were already wealthy enough not to need it. It was entirely about respect. I had to earn their respect in the exact instant I pulled up to the curb.

Sure, I did my job exceptionally well, but I wasn’t quite so famous yet that I could get away with looking like a slob.

For now, I had a product to sell, but that product wasn’t just ’me’ anymore. It was also the girls. And I would be damned if I was going to make them look bad by making them ride shotgun in a beater. They deserved to have the world bowing at their feet. And although I wasn’t exactly out for global domination, the absolute least I could do was not embarrass them in traffic.

Investments. That was the ticket.

But I was a bit deeply suspicious about Rhea’s specific choice in venue.

My first hint that this wasn’t your average luxury dealership came when Rhea, Psyren, and I strolled into the bustling Metro Mega Mall, completely ignored the retail stores, and headed straight for the maintenance elevators.

Once we were crammed inside the sterile metal box, Rhea pulled out a blank black keycard and casually swiped it against the blank paneling directly underneath the floor buttons.

A hidden LED indicator that definitely wasn’t there before blinked on, turning a deep, unauthorized red.

And we started going down. Way past the basement parking levels.

I gave Rhea a very close, assessing look. She just bounced lightly on her heels beside me, adopting an expression of wide-eyed, angelic innocence.

"Rhea?"

"Hm?" she hummed innocently, her wolf tail swishing behind her lab coat.

"When you said we were going to a discount car lot, did you mean..."

"No, no! No way, Miles," Rhea interrupted, waving her hands in rapid, dismissive motions. "This is totally legal. Really! This is just a surplus liquidation sale of extremely legal items, obtained through very legal means, for perfectly legal sale to interested parties."

"You’re saying the word ’legal’ an awful lot," I noted dryly.

"Miles. Miles!" Rhea gasped with mock shock, pressing a hand to her generous cleavage. "Surely you don’t think I’d involve you in anything illegal, do you? Come on. What’s a little trust between syndicate members? This is just a specialized tech surplus sale."

She leaned casually against the elevator wall. "You know exactly how it is in our line of work. Sometimes a brilliant supervillain gets unexpectedly captured by the Bureau before his nefarious doomsday device is quite ready. Or a tech-hero gets sucked into an alternate dimension. Who’s gonna pick up the tab for all his thematic aerodynamic boomerangs and custom boxing-glove arrows? The bank? No! The assets get liquidated. It’s totally legit. Just not... you know, publicly advertised."

I eyed my resident mad scientist. She wasn’t wrong, per se. The underground economy had to process the abandoned gear of incarcerated capes somehow. I just wasn’t sure how confident I felt walking into the black-market equivalent of a supervillain wholesale warehouse.

"C’mon, boss. Where’s your sense of adventure!" Psyren cheered, sliding smoothly up beside me. She looped her arm securely through mine, pressing her plush curves against my side and flashing me that crooked, punk-rock grin that sent her underground fans absolutely wild.

"Who’d dare fuck with you down here anyway? We could do literally anything we wanted, and I could just mind-wipe the entire room so they forget all about it. Not that we’d ever dare do something bad without your explicit say-so, of course."

She leaned in closer, her pink hair brushing my cheek. Her lips hovered an inch from my ear, her voice dropping into a teasing, husky whisper. "So come on. What’s a bit of light shopping between us? And who knows, I might even find some fun new clothes down here. Something... risqué."

Psyren wasn’t exactly helping matters by deliberately trying to fluster me, but there was little to be done for it now. We were already here. Might as well take a look around the showroom.

"Fine," I sighed, resigning myself to my fate and letting the pair of stunning women hang happily off my arms as the elevator finally dinged and the heavy doors slid open.

A couple of guys stood directly outside the doors, and the exact second I saw them, I realized I had a very good reason to be wary.

Both men were not only massive and tough-looking, but they were rock hard. Literally.

Their skin had the jagged, overlapping texture of tectonic plates. One had a reddish hue, like cracked masonry bricks, while the other sported the dense, unyielding gray texture of reinforced cement.

They could only be Arman Glint’s boys.

Better known as the ruthless mobster owner of the underground Death Rumble—where Psyren used to sing and fight—Arman was a man with many a diamond-encrusted finger in many an illegal pie.

I guess I shouldn’t have been entirely surprised to learn he was running a black-market liquidation show like this, but it wasn’t exactly encouraging. I rarely enjoyed my interactions with the Metropolis mob, and Arman always managed to extract exactly what he wanted whenever I encountered him.

Fortunately, I wasn’t here to deal with him directly today. But that didn’t mean I was going to lower my guard. There were going to be a lot of incredibly sketchy bastards walking around this showroom.

Though, if I knew Arman’s reputation, he also wouldn’t let anyone get away with starting a brawl on his sales floor. He wasn’t the kind of guy who tolerated people flouting his rules and jeopardizing his profit margins.

He also wasn’t the kind of classic supervillain to monologue threats at those who fucked with him, or tie them to a steel table with a slow-moving laser inching dramatically toward their crotch.

He would simply, quietly, and politely have the perpetrator dragged into a soundproof back room, and have one of his tectonic thugs bludgeon the poor bastard to death with a heavy canvas bag full of brass doorknobs.

Clean(ish), efficient, and above all, utterly professional. The mob way.

Still, it was always better to be safe than sorry.