Master of Lust-Chapter 327 - -

Chapter - 327

The warehouse freezer was a cathedral of ice and anxiety. It was minus fifteen degrees, a temperature that made breath plume in thick white clouds and turned fingers clumsy and numb.

Rick stood in the center of the room, wearing a heavy parka over his suit trousers (because he refused to wear snow pants), safety goggles, and holding a gas-powered Stihl chainsaw.

In front of him was a massive, six-hundred-pound block of crystal-clear ice.

"Okay," Rick yelled over the idle rumble of the chainsaw. "Let’s review the payload delivery system."

Sharon sat on a stack of frozen beef crates, shivering despite her thermal gear. She was checking the seals on the metallic canisters of Sleepy Hollow gas.

"The gas is heavier than air," Sharon shouted back. "Once the ice melts to the core, the canisters expose. The pellets sublime instantly. It’ll create a low-hanging fog that will knock out anyone sitting down in about thirty seconds. Standing targets take maybe a minute."

"Perfect," Rick said. "Silas is old. He’ll be sitting. The guards will be standing. We take out the head, the body dies."

"Rick," Nadia called from the doorway, wrapped in three blankets. She was holding the tablet linked to the tracker on the real laptop. "We have a problem with the extraction. The Chateau has air defense. SAM turrets on the peaks. If we try to fly a drone out with the laptop, they’ll shoot it down. If we try to drive out, we hit the roadblocks."

Rick revved the chainsaw. VROOOOM.

"We aren’t driving out," Rick shouted. "And we aren’t flying out. We’re skiing."

Sharon stared at him. "Skiing? Rick, I grew up in Detroit. The only skiing I know involves a car bumper and an icy parking lot."

"I’ll buy you a skill book," Rick said dismissively. "It’s the Alps. It’s downhill. Gravity does the work. But for the loot—the laptop, the cash, whatever else we steal from Silas’s vault—we need something that doesn’t trigger radar."

He killed the chainsaw engine. The silence was sudden and ringing.

Rick opened the System Shop.

[Shop > Espionage > Extraction]

He needed something low-tech but high-yield. Something that could bypass high-tech sensors by being too stupid to detect.

[Item: The ’Fulton’ Sky-Hook Balloon (Stealth Variant)]

[Description: A heavy-lift helium balloon coated in radar-absorbent material. Silent. Launches a payload to 5,000 feet for aerial recovery by a passing aircraft (or System Retrieval Drone).]

[Cost: $75,000]

"Bought," Rick muttered. "Two of them. Just in case."

He looked at the block of ice. "Okay. Time to make a swan."

He didn’t know how to sculpt ice. But he had $3.4 million left.

[System Shop > Skills > Arts]

[Skill Book: ’Master Sculptor’ (Ice/Stone/Wood)]

[Cost: $10,000]

Purchase.

The headache hit him like a hammer—a sudden influx of geometry, structural integrity data, and the precise angle needed to carve a feather. He blinked, the pain fading into a cool clarity. He looked at the block of ice and didn’t see a block anymore; he saw the swan trapped inside, waiting to be released.

He pulled the starter cord. The chainsaw roared to life.

For the next hour, Rick was a blur of violence and art. Ice chips flew like shrapnel, coating his goggles and freezing in his hair. He carved with the manic intensity of a man who knew this frozen bird was the only thing standing between him and a violent death.

He sliced the block, revealing the curve of a neck. He switched to a chisel and hammer, tapping out the delicate feathers of the wings. He used a blowtorch to smooth the edges, the ice gleaming like diamond under the warehouse lights.

Finally, he cut the core. A hollow cavity in the center of the bird’s chest.

"Give me the canisters," Rick ordered.

Sharon handed him the metal tubes of sleeping gas. Rick embedded them into the slushy core of the swan, packing them tight with snow and water, then sealing the cavity with a fresh slab of ice. He used the blowtorch to fuse the seam until it was invisible.

He stepped back.

It was magnificent. A six-foot-tall swan, wings spread in aggressive display, its neck arched in a silent scream. It looked angry. It looked beautiful. It looked like a bomb.

"That," Nadia said, stepping into the freezer, "is the most terrifying piece of catering equipment I have ever seen."

"It’s a Trojan Swan," Rick corrected, wiping ice slush from his face. "Now, let’s talk about the Vault."

He walked over to the prep table where he had laid out the blueprints Nadia had scraped from the Poltergeist virus data before it went dormant.

"The Chateau is built on top of an old Cold War bunker," Rick said, tracing the lines. "The Conclave happens here, in the Grand Ballroom on the ground floor. That’s where the Swan goes. But the Vault... the Vault is here."

He tapped a spot three levels underground.

"The ’Oubliette’," Nadia read the label. "That sounds cheerful."

"It’s air-gapped," Rick said. "No wireless signals in or out. That’s why Silas is bringing the physical laptop there. To upload the data to his offline mainframe."

"The door?" Sharon asked.

"Bio-metric. Retinal, voice, and palm print. Silas Warner only. Or..." Rick tapped the silver briefcase containing the bio-mask. "...Henri Vancroft."

"Why would the chef have access to the vault?" Sharon asked, skeptical.

"He doesn’t," Rick grinned. "But Henri Vancroft has access to the Wine Cellar. And look at the blueprints."

Sharon leaned in. The Wine Cellar was on Sub-Level 2. The Vault was on Sub-Level 3.

"They share a ventilation shaft," Rick said. "A service vent for climate control. It’s too small for a person."

"So we’re stuck," Sharon said.

"No," Rick said. "We’re not. I’m not going into the vent."

He reached into his Inventory.

[Item: ’The Rat King’ - Remote Drone Swarm]

[Description: Five micro-drones shaped like rodents. Can climb, squeeze, and chew through cables. Equipped with cameras and microphones.]

[Cost: $50,000]

He pulled out a small, metallic rat. It had red LED eyes and a carbon-fiber tail.

"Say hello to Mickey," Rick said. "While I’m serving Silas his poisoned soup, Mickey here is going to crawl down the vent, chew through the locking mechanism’s power coupling, and short the door."

"Shorting the door will trigger the alarm," Nadia pointed out.

"Exactly," Rick said. "It triggers a lockdown. The guards rush to the vault. Silas rushes to the vault to check his precious laptop. And that’s when the swan melts."

"So we create a panic," Sharon realized. "We herd them into the vault room, gas them, and then we’re the only ones left standing wearing gas masks."

"Bingo," Rick said. "We grab the laptop, we attach the balloons, we send the loot into the stratosphere, and we ski down the mountain while the entire Warner empire takes a nap."

"It’s insane," Sharon said, shaking her head. "It has too many moving parts. The ice melt rate, the ventilation, the drone timing... if one thing goes wrong..."

"Then we improvise," Rick said, putting the robot rat back in his pocket. "That’s what I do. I’m a Chaos Agent. Plans are just suggestions."

He looked at the clock on the wall.

"Load up," Rick ordered. "The trucks leave in two hours. We have a dinner party to crash."

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