The steel cables of the Manhattan Bridge hummed like a death knell in the rain. Leo squatted on the top of the bridge tower, and the wolf king's eyes penetrated the rain and locked onto the quantum trading center three blocks away - the blood clan was using Lehman Brothers' old server cluster to edit genetic futures contracts. He licked the rust on his fangs. The coordinates given by the Chicago Iron Claw Party were indeed accurate, but there was something else floating in the air: the metallic sweetness of DOA's special nanoworms.
"It's time to cover your position, Wall Street lone wolf."
The bullet arrived before the sound. The moment Leo tilted his head, the tungsten alloy bullet grazed his carotid artery, blasting a bullet hole with the Bitcoin symbol on the glass curtain wall of the Quantum Trading Center. When the second bullet hit his forearm, the nanoworms had already drilled into the wolf skin and etched runes along the tendons.
The pain was like an ice pick piercing his brain. Leo's retina flashed a double picture: the flames of the English Mint in 890 AD, and the trembling fingers of the elder of the Canadian Icefield Group when he handed him the key to the armory three days ago.
"Is my mother's face comfortable to use?" He roared at the drones in the rainstorm, and threw out the ASIC chip hidden between his fangs. When the chip smashed a drone, a projection of Satoshi Nakamoto's early emails exploded in the air.
Erin Wu stepped out of the shadows of 40 Wall Street, her tailor-made suit cut exactly like the one Leo wore to his mother's funeral. The nano-swarm condensed into a revolver at her fingertips, with "X-13β Factory Number" engraved on the barrel.
"Your short contract is out of date." She pulled the trigger, and the bullet split into twelve micro-missiles in the air. "The leverage is now 500 times."
Leo smashed a quantum trading screen and leaped into the air. The barrage of nanoworm bullets melted the glass curtain wall into liquid silver. As he fell, he caught a glimpse of the numbers on the screen fragments - the Dow Jones Index was being tampered with to show the spread rate of genetic pollution.
"Didn't Victor tell you?" Irene's voice was mixed with electronic noise, "The code for the Iron Claw Party's arsenal requires the genes of a living wolf king..."
The wolf claws tore through the rain curtain, and when Leo's nails were three centimeters away from her throat, the nanoworms suddenly detonated in his bone marrow. The memory of 890 AD was like a virus attack:
In the cellar of the Winchester Mint in England, Leo's Viking alter ego is smelting silver coins with wolf claws. Runes emerge from each coin after being soaked in wolf blood, and the minter is nailed to the wall and screams: "This is a tax for Charles III!"
"Taxes?" Viking Leo pressed the hot silver coins into the other's eyes. "Now it is the fuel of the gods."
Reality overlapped with memory. Erin's nanoworms were disassembling his genetic strands into tradable securities, but Leo smelled a breakthrough—her perfume was laced with the rust-preventive from the Federal Reserve vault.
"Charles III's silver coins," he suddenly chuckled in Old Norse, "are they stored several floors below the Federal Reserve?"
Irene's pupils shrank suddenly. This clone, who had memorized all of Leo's information during training, hesitated for the first time out of the program.
When the third nano bullet hit his shoulder blade, Leo deliberately slowed down his muscle reaction. He let the swarm penetrate deep into his bones and spell out the complete betrayal rune in his bone marrow. When Irene stepped into the killing radius he predicted, the Eye of the Wolf King started reverse compilation.
The wolf bones transformed by the nanoworms suddenly grew quantum tunneling spikes, the tips of which shone with the same luster as ancient English silver coins. Irene's nano shield was torn apart like parchment, and the moment Leo's fangs pressed against her carotid artery, the rainstorm suddenly stopped.
"Mother never used Chanel No. 5." He sniffed the artificial pheromones on the other's skin. "Your cloning department should update the database."
Irene's mechanical prosthetic eye suddenly projected a holographic image: in the Federal Reserve laboratory in 1948, Leo's father was injecting wolf spinal fluid into the first version of the US dollar banknote master. At the edge of the screen, a woman in a straitjacket looked up - it was the original Irene Wu with a bloody face.
Leo's wolf claws froze. The clone numbered X-13β took the opportunity to stab the nanoworm syringe into the side of his neck: "The name your father gave me... is Nemesis."
During his escape, Leo ran into an abandoned hedge fund office. The nanoworms reorganized more runes in his blood vessels, but the pain made Viking's memory clearer - the gene bank of the English royal family was buried under the silver coin furnace, which was exactly the same as the structure under the silver manor at this moment.
The Bitcoin mining machine suddenly started up automatically, and the face of the Blood Tribe Governor appeared on the screen: "Do you like our nano interest rate? Every bug is executing a credit default swap..."
Leo cut off the power supply of the host computer, but found an English silver coin from 890 AD in the capacitor. When his blood dripped onto the silver coin, the Bloomberg terminals in the office collectively played the video of Black Monday in 1987 - the plummeting stock index curve coincided with the keel outline of the Viking longship.
Irene's hunting signal was approaching, but what alerted Leo more was the change in the bracelet. The runes carved by the nanoworms were reorganizing, changing from "betrayal" to "ᚢᛁᚴᛁᛏ (awakening)".
The neon lights outside the window suddenly twisted into Viking battle flags. Leo heard the distant howl of wolves, not from modern wolves, but from the depths of the silver coin, a hunting call spanning thousands of years.
The moment the door of the abandoned office was melted by the nanoworms, he bit the silver coin into pieces and swallowed it. The quantum tunneling spike grew longer again, and this time the tip shone with the light of ancient English silver - just enough to pierce Irene's mechanical eye.
"Tell your master," he said, stuffing the remains of the nanoworm into her broken eye socket, "to use a more human lobbyist next time."
The Hudson River before dawn was shimmering like dead fish. Leo cleaned the nanoworm residue from the wound and found that each worm's body was printed with a miniature Lehman Brothers logo. When he crushed the last one with his wolf claws, the worm corpse suddenly played an encrypted recording:
"…X-13β has contacted the target, requesting to activate the Fenrir Protocol…"
The voice in the recording belongs to Irene, but there is the sound of waves in the background - exactly the same as the North Sea storm in the Vikings' memory. The Bitcoin wallet suddenly received a transfer from "Satoshi Nakamoto" for exactly 890 BTC, and the postscript column was written in Old English:
"ᛏᚢ ᛋᚴᚨᛚ ᚱᛖᛁᛋᚨ (It's time for you to set sail)"
The runes on the bracelet began to bleed, forming a map of Manhattan's sewers on the ground. Next to a node marked "Silver Manor", there was a scribbled totem of a Viking longship and the seal of the Federal Reserve.
A familiar wolf howl came from the other side of the river, but Leo could not smell the same kind of breath - that was a biological signal simulated by blockchain. When he threw an English silver coin towards the source of the sound, the lights of the entire city suddenly went out, and a huge rune projection emerged from the ruins of the Quantum Trading Center:
**ᛒᛅᛏᛦ ᛅᚢᚴᛅ ᛘᛁᚾ (Bloodline is Debt)**
There was a sound of mechanical gears meshing in the darkness. Leo knew that the bankers of this game were not only the vampires and DOA, but also ancient debts that had been collected since 890 AD. The silver coins were burning in his palms, and he suddenly wanted to meet the "Satoshi Nakamoto" - whether it was a man, a wolf, or a sea monster incarnated by some financial system.