The air in Warehouse 4 was thick with the reek of diesel, salt, and stale sweat. It was supposed to be simple. Clean. A textbook extraction. Pranav had visualized the exchange a hundred times: his voice firm, his posture commanding, the rival dealers folding under the sheer, unexpected weight of his authority.
He stepped into the ring of light cast by the overhead utility lamp, the smell of copper and cheap cologne hitting him first. The three dealers were bigger, older, and far more bored than he had anticipated. One, a man with a tattoo snaking up his neck, didn't even bother to stand up from his crate. He just looked at Pranav—this kid in an ill-fitting suit—and smirked.
"You the new delivery boys?" the tattooed man asked, his voice low and guttural, dripping with contempt.
Pranav felt the confidence bleed out of him, replaced by a cold, sickening rush of doubt. He tried to speak the lines he'd rehearsed—about leverage, about respect, about the New Blood—but the words jammed in his throat.
Then the tattooed man shifted, his movement too quick, too practiced. A small, black handgun appeared in his hand.
"Get lost, kid," the dealer spat. "Or start digging."
Pranav's mind locked up. Protocol Delta 7. De-escalation strategy. Arpika talks. He opened his mouth, but only a dry, pathetic gasp came out.
The de-escalation never happened.
Sanvi didn't wait for the order, or the protocol, or the fear. She saw the flash of the weapon and reacted instantly, instinctively. It was pure, feral aggression, faster than thought, faster than a bullet. A wide, terrifying grin stretched across her face.
"Took you long enough!" she yelled, the sound shockingly loud in the enclosed space.
The first shot was hers. A wild, ear-splitting report from her compact pistol. It didn't hit the dealer, but it tore a chunk of concrete out of the wall above his head, showering the room in white dust.
Chaos.
It exploded around Pranav in a cacophony of panicked shouts and muzzle flashes. This wasn't the clean, surgical strike he'd planned. This was sloppy, amateurish butchery.
"Cover! Hold your fire! Conserve your—" Pranav barked, trying to regain control, but the fear finally broke through. His voice cracked, high and pathetic, halfway through the command. He ducked behind a stack of rotting wooden pallets, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
This is a disaster. This is not destiny. This is just stupidity.
While Pranav was paralyzed by the failure of his ideal plan, the others were moving.
The dealer Sanvi had targeted dropped his gun in surprise, clutching his arm where a stray fragment of concrete had sliced his skin. Sanvi was already on him, moving in a crouch, not like a soldier, but like an animal hunting.
"Don't you dare bleed on the product!" she snarled, slamming the dealer's head into a metal girder. Her movements were brutal, efficient, and utterly devoid of mercy. She was magnificent and terrifying, the physical manifestation of their collective, desperate recklessness.
Meanwhile, Arpika was executing a masterclass in controlled distraction. As the other two rival dealers started firing blindly towards the crew's position, she ignored the bullets. She approached the last remaining dealer who was still standing, his eyes wide with a mixture of rage and terror.
She moved with an unnerving smoothness, a calm oasis in the storm. She didn't shoot. She didn't threaten. She simply reached out a hand, touched his arm with delicate, deceptive charm, and leaned close amidst the deafening gunfire.
"You look like you're having a terrible night," she cooed, her voice barely audible over the mayhem. "Tell me, honey. Who sends three men with cheap iron to guard fifty thousand units of fentanyl? Is it the Boss or the Accountant? Who do I send the invoice to?"
The dealer, startled by the strange, beautiful woman who was more interested in logistics than survival, faltered. He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but the calculated charm had twisted his focus. Arpika hadn't asked a question; she had created a distraction. Just long enough.
As the dealer struggled to process the smooth manipulation, Arpika's heel snapped back, catching his knee with punishing precision. He went down hard, the information momentarily safe, the product temporarily exposed.
In the middle of the mess, a man who had taken a stray bullet was crawling toward the exit door, dragging a useless leg. He was bleeding profusely, staining the concrete a violent, dark red.
Sathwik appeared out of the shadows like a force of nature. He wasn't firing wildly, or shouting, or diving for cover. He was stalking. He moved with lethal calm, conserving every ounce of movement, his eyes fixed only on his target. He treated the environment—the chaos, the gunfire, the shouting—as if it were mere background noise.
He reached the wounded man. The dealer looked up, eyes pleading, clutching his injury. Sathwik didn't hesitate. He brought his boot down, not once, but twice, with brutal, efficient force. It was a finishing move, quiet and absolute, resolving the conflict with the least necessary effort.
"Unnecessary bodies!" Gautham shrieked, his voice high-pitched and panicked. He was scrambling frantically behind a pyramid of stacked crates, his expensive tactical vest serving absolutely no purpose. He hadn't fired a single shot. "That's three bodies now! Amateur move! Do you know the forensic signature of a blunt trauma kill on a wound track? It's completely indefensible! We needed to incapacitate, not create capital charges! We're making a mess! A mess!"
Pranav watched the scene unfold—Sathwik's cold brutality, Arpika's calculated grace, Sanvi's sheer, joyful violence, and Gautham's frantic, cowardly intelligence.
Five idiots playing gangster. The thought hit Pranav with painful clarity. They were sloppy, loud, and unforgivably messy. They were wasting ammo, firing through crates, missing easy shots. The whole thing was a dark, grotesque comedy of errors—a desperate, embarrassing show of their inexperience.
But somehow, through a combination of blind luck and the sheer volume of their raw, untrained aggression, they overwhelmed the three dealers. The last man, seeing two of his associates dead and the third pinned under Arpika's careful boot, dropped his weapon and threw his hands up.
"It's over! We're done!" he yelled.
Pranav climbed out from behind the pallet, his legs shaking, his ears ringing. His fine suit was now dusted with concrete and splattered with something wet and dark. He looked at the scene: bodies sprawled across the concrete, shell casings littered everywhere, blood pooling rapidly. It was an embarrassment. A loud, sloppy, screaming statement of their utter amateurism.
He should have felt triumph. He had his prize—a heavy-duty duffel bag Arpika had efficiently located and secured. But all he felt was the sickening realization that he had planned for a chess match and gotten a bar brawl.
"Go. Go!" Pranav yelled, grabbing Gautham by the collar and dragging him toward the door.
They scrambled out of the warehouse and piled back into the van. The engine roared to life, screeching tires protesting the abrupt, reckless acceleration. They left the docklands and the decaying warehouse behind them, speeding back toward the uncertain sanctuary of Santa Fortuna's neon alleys.
Pranav didn't look back. He didn't need to. He knew exactly what they had left in the wake of their first, disastrous venture: bodies, evidence everywhere, and a trail of chaos that no amateur crew could afford to leave. They had won the battle, but they had lost the ghost status. Someone would notice. Someone big.