Six months after the e-commerce platform went live, Neo Trading Group was printing money—but in the shadows of New Havenport, a wounded predator had finally caught the scent.
Inside the top-floor executive suite of his oil and gas conglomerate, Gordi stared at a massive wall map of Southern Casperia. A red pin was shoved directly into the quiet farming town of Frankstad.
"You're telling me," Gordi growled, chewing on an unlit cigar as he glared at his head of corporate security, Miller, "that the bastard who shorted my company for twenty-one percent and bankrupted my short position on XOR Group is operating out of a backwater apple-farming town?"
"The short trade itself was a ghost, boss—routed through four layers of dummy accounts," Miller replied. "We couldn't trace that. But we followed the capital injection into XOR Group. Every single wire originated from Neo Trading Group, headquartered in City Central Tower in Frankstad. It's the exact same firm running that new viral silver bullion website."
Gordi's face twisted with rage. Because XOR's luxury electric vehicles had just announced a 300-mile range at a fraction of petrol costs, clean-energy headlines had flooded the national press. Panic buying of EVs had already triggered a dip in regional petrol consumption futures, and Casperian lawmakers were suddenly drafting carbon-tax proposals on fuel imports months ahead of any scheduled debate. Gordi's billion-dollar crude distribution monopoly was bleeding valuation because the market was terrified of a premature shift away from gasoline.
"Who owns Neo Trading?" Gordi snapped.
"On paper, a local broker named Mark Vance and two software engineers named Amit and Stuart," Miller said. "But our informants say the real boss never shows his face. He operates from a locked corner office."
"I don't care who he is," Gordi said coldly. "Take a strike team down to Frankstad tonight. Torch their server rooms, grab their hard drives, and make sure they can never challenge my refineries again."
That afternoon in Frankstad, RO2's hologram popped up in front of Ethan's desk with a flashing amber alert.
RO2: "Boss! Code Red! My passive perimeter scan just flagged two black SUVs pulling into a motel on the edge of town. Six armed corporate fixers carrying military-grade thermite charges and suppressed submachine guns. They're planning to hit City Central Tower at 2:00 AM, burn Neo Trading to the ground, and interrogate whoever they find."
Ethan calmly set down his coffee mug. "Gordi finally tracked the XOR wires. Because of our EV announcement, petrol futures are dropping, and he thinks burning our servers will stop the bleed."
RO2: "So what's the play? Do we call the cops?"
"No," Ethan said. "Local police can't handle corporate death squads, and a shootout brings federal eyes onto my company. We use Option A."
Working quietly through the evening, Ethan did not buy weapons or plan executions. Instead, he logged into the system's restricted utility catalogue and spent 50 EXP to requisition two automated system gadgets: a neuro-amnesia aerosol disperser and a remote decoy feedback loop.
He rigged the disperser to the fourth-floor HVAC vents of the Frankstad office, programmed to trigger the moment uninvited thermal signatures crossed the perimeter at midnight.
By 7:00 PM, Ethan had Amit and Stuart migrate all live e-commerce databases to Aegis's cloud servers in New Havenport, instructing the staff to take a three-day holiday while maintenance was performed. The office was left entirely empty, save for dummy server mainframes.
At 2:10 AM, Miller and his five mercenaries broke through the service entrance of City Central Tower.
They crept up to the fourth floor, carrying their thermite charges. As Miller kicked open the door to the corner executive office, a hidden ceiling vent hissed softly.
Hiiiiissss.
A thick, odorless cloud of military-grade neuro-amnesia gas flooded the hallway.
Before the mercenaries could even raise their weapons, a single breath of the aerosolized compound short-circuited their cognitive pathways. Their eyes rolled back, their muscles went slack, and all six men dropped hard onto the carpet, fast asleep.
The system gas didn't kill them—it hijacked their short-term memory, rewriting the past two hours of their consciousness with a vivid, chemically induced hallucination.
An hour later, the automated feedback loop triggered a controlled, localized spark in the dummy server racks, igniting a smoky, contained grease fire.
At 4:00 AM, Miller and his team bolted upright on the floor, gasping for air as thick grey smoke filled the hallway. Their memories of the last two hours were completely erased, replaced by a terrifying false memory: they had planted their thermite, the charges had misfired prematurely, and the room had instantly erupted into an uncontrollable inferno.
"Abort! Abort!" Miller choked out, coughing violently as he dragged his disoriented men toward the stairs. "The charges blew early! The whole place is going up!"
They fled down the stairwell, scrambled into their SUVs, and sped out of Frankstad before the fire department even arrived.
From his bedroom at the family farm, Ethan watched the distant sirens flashing through his window, a quiet smile on his face.
RO2: "Absolute mastery, Boss! Zero corpses to hide, Jacob and Marcus never had to ask awkward questions, and Gordi's top fixers are currently driving back to New Havenport convinced that they accidentally burned down Neo Trading!"
"Gordi thinks we're wiped out," Ethan said, turning away from the window. "And with our live database safely running in the cloud from New Havenport, our silver cash cow keeps printing money without a single ripple."
RO2: "So, what's next? You're eleven years old. If we aren't leaving town yet, how do we handle the fallout from the 'fire'?"
"We let Neo Trading stay dead in the minds of our enemies," Ethan replied calmly, his mind already mapping out the corporate pivot. "And we rise under a new banner in Willow Creek."