Seventy-two hours is enough time to slaughter a dynasty.
I didn't reach this conclusion from reading history books. I confirmed it through physical reality.
It took Napoleon exactly sixty-one hours to completely decapitate the manufacturing network of Apex Industries in Europa. He didn't send back any reports. He didn't need to. I could see the bloodbath unfolding in real-time on the holographic KPI dashboard. The French Emperor had apparently spent two centuries in a stasis pod just waiting for someone to hand him a modern corporate hostile takeover and tell him to treat it like a war of annihilation.
Caesar was even more surgical. Within seventy-two hours, he had filed forty-seven independent lawsuits across six jurisdictions, deploying procedural traps so elegant they effectively paralyzed three of Apex's core shell companies and forced two Federation Exchange Commission (FEC) attorneys into early retirement. At 3:00 AM, he left a forty-page cross-referenced brief on my desk, mapping every political node Richard Sterling relied on to legitimize his acquisition bid—complete with perfectly legal amputation strategies.
As for Cleopatra, she filed no reports either. She only sent three encrypted messages:
The first High Council member is handled. The second required additional persuasion. Handled. The third will handle himself by morning. You will see why.
I did see why. By 6:00 AM, the third councilman's private communications—lethal leverage I hadn't asked how she obtained, nor cared to—materialized on the desk of the Federation Security Directorate's ethics division. By 9:00 AM, he had voluntarily recused himself from all matters regarding Apex.
By noon, Apex's stock plummeted by eleven percent. Sterling's legal foundation within the High Council had collapsed.
It was now 3:00 PM. Cleopatra walked into my office.
I didn't look up, my eyes fixed on the logistics routes on the secondary monitor. But I heard her steps.
Even trapped in a bio-shell utterly stripped of temperature perception, pain, and dopamine, she still carried two millennia of muscle memory—that gravitational pull of a monarch claiming every inch of space she entered. But today, beneath that sheer arrogance, there was a tight, agonizing hunger.
It was the asphyxiating desperation of a prisoner starved of her humanity for three days, now clawing frantically for a single breath of oxygen.
She stopped in front of the obsidian desk and slammed something heavy onto the glass surface.
A thick, black dossier secured with a biometric lock.
"Those three councilmen were just Sterling's visible assets," Cleopatra spoke. She fought to maintain the lethal melody in her voice, but the final syllables trembled with a rabid craving. "What I have brought you are his invisible assets. Forty-three names. Sterling's true political network—not the men he pays, but the men whose lives he owns. Complete financial records and private recordings."
I finally shifted my gaze from the screen to the heavy file.
It was the crystallization of seventy-two hours of sleepless social engineering. It was the ultimate weapon of an apex predator who had once navigated the deadliest imperial courts in history, now bleeding this synthetic body dry to forge a nuclear option in the modern corporate arena.
In the shadows by the door, I saw Caesar. He leaned against the frame, arms crossed, watching with glacial detachment. Cleopatra knew he was there, but she didn't care. Right now, her eyes were locked onto the only thing this body instinctively craved.
"The sensory synchronization reward." Cleopatra stared at me, her chest heaving with suppressed fanaticism. "I exceeded the KPI. This is my leverage. It's enough to commandeer the political nervous system of this city. I demand the immediate twenty-four-hour full sensory restoration."
She planted her hands on the desk, leaning in. "And I want operational control of the intelligence division. I want the seat beside you, Warden. I have earned the right to sit at the table."
Dead silence.
I didn't answer. I simply reached out and picked up the heavy black dossier.
I walked past her, toward the corner of the office where the industrial-grade physical destruction unit—"The Devourer"—sat waiting.
Behind me, Cleopatra's breathing hitched.
"That is the only physical backup..." Her voice broke. The flawless mask of the Queen shattered, revealing the raw, genuine panic of a desperate human underneath. "The biometric lock only recognizes your prints and mine! If that goes in—"
I let go.
SCREEECH—!
The alloy blades shrieked to life, a horrific grinding violence designed to reduce top-secret documents to irreversible dust in four seconds.
Four seconds. Three days of blood, sweat, and forty-three trump cards capable of turning Crown City upside down were reduced to three hundred grams of worthless confetti.
The machine powered down. The room fell into a deathly stillness, save for the faint hum of the climate control.
I turned around.
Cleopatra stood paralyzed. Her cheek twitched unnaturally—the bio-shell attempting to simulate the neural reflex of catastrophic shock, rendered grotesque by the emotional dampeners. The leverage she was so proud of, the shred of dignity she had tried to buy with two thousand years of manipulation, had just been tossed into the garbage right in front of her.
"You bared your fangs at me, Cleopatra," I said, my voice maintaining that absolute, negative-twenty-three-degree chill. "The list was beautiful. But you seem to have misunderstood a fundamental law of physics."
I stepped up to her, looking down into those despairing eyes.
"Leverage is reserved for the players sitting at the table. And you, are not a player." I paused, letting the brutal reality obliterate her remaining defenses. "You are my asset. You do not get to use the value you create to name your price, because your very existence already belongs to me."
By the door, Caesar's breathing didn't falter for a microsecond. But the way he looked at Cleopatra was the way one looks at a corpse at an execution. He was carving this boundary into his own mind.
Cleopatra's shoulders dropped.
By about three millimeters. It was the most honest movement she had made since entering the room.
Then, without elegant curtsies, without theatrical flair. The Queen of the Nile, the woman who had once driven two of Rome's most powerful men to madness, dropped rigidly to her knees on the freezing marble floor.
It was a pure, structural decision of survival. A starving beast surrendering its pride for a scrap of sustenance.
"I understand..." she whispered to the floor, her voice hoarse. "Tell me what you need."
"Stand up. Take the brief Caesar left on the secondary desk. Napoleon needs intelligence support for his purge in the Eastern Archipelagos. That is your assignment for the next forty-eight hours."
She stood up and drifted out of the room like a ghost, not sparing Caesar a single glance.
Once the door sealed, Caesar looked at me.
"Those forty-three names," his voice remained steady. "You didn't even look at them. Even if you already mapped his network, you couldn't have known them all."
"I didn't need to know them all." I sat back down at the obsidian desk. "I only needed to know her methodology for building a dossier, the absolute limits of her infiltration network, and—most importantly—whether she has any bottom lines when achieving an objective."
I picked up a freshly poured glass of bourbon. "She has almost none. That makes her extremely useful."
Caesar stared at me for a long time. It was the gaze of an apex predator recalibrating its assessment of a much larger, much darker leviathan.
"You've done this before." He said softly. Not a question. A confirmation. "Not just to her. To all of us. You've run this system before."
I met his gaze without flinching.
"Go finish your legal brief, Caesar."
He turned and left.
Night fell over Crown City, the neon lights creeping up from the streets below like some carnivorous fungus. Sterling's empire was bleeding, and bleeding, in my experience, is usually an irreversible process.
I looked at the secondary monitor. Beneath the crushed asset data, a system process blinked—a line of code no employee could ever access:
Progress: 0.003%
I stared at that number. Seventy-two hours of absolute domination. Three multinational supply chains destroyed. The city's highest political network strangled. And my progress bar required three decimal places to measure.
I knew what that number would be in six months. I knew what waited for me at the end of the cycle. This wasn't the first time I had worn this ruthless armor, but it was absolutely going to be the last.
Behind me, on the giant screen, the static noise began to swirl into a rhythmic vortex.
The full moon had risen.
The Jury—the millions of souls slaughtered by these twelve monarchs—were screaming and voting behind the glass.
And right then, deep within the encrypted security channels, an unidentified anomaly flickered across the feed.
Exactly 0.4 seconds.
It wasn't the voices of the dead. It wasn't feedback from a stasis pod. It was a gaze... from something that did not belong here.
I raised my bourbon and swallowed the liquid ice.
The dead were voting.
I smiled.
I had to.