Master of Lust-Chapter 339 - -

The control room of the offshore rig hummed with the sound of a thousand cooling fans spinning up to maximum RPM. The air was electric, thick with the invisible data streams that Rick was pulling from the ether and weaving into a weapon.

Rick sat in the command chair, his eyes glowing with a steady, rhythmic blue pulse. He wasn’t typing. He didn’t need to. His hands rested on the console, his mind interfaced directly with the rig’s mainframe, and through it, the global network.

He was a spider in the center of a digital web that spanned the planet.

[System Status: Overclocked.] [Bandwidth: Unlimited.] [Target: Corporate Oversight Financial Division.]

Rick wasn’t just hacking; he was looting. He bypassed firewalls like they were wet tissue paper. He slid past quantum encryptions that would take a supercomputer a thousand years to crack, simply by asking the code to open the door.

"Transfer," Rick commanded mentally.

In the Cayman Islands, a slush fund belonging to a black-ops division of the CIA vanished. In Zurich, a numbered account used to bribe warlords emptied instantly. In Hong Kong, a cryptocurrency wallet holding the GDP of a small nation was drained.

[Transaction Complete.] [Current Wealth: $2,175,000 >>> $452,175,000.]

Rick watched the numbers climb. Half a billion dollars. It was an obscene amount of money. Enough to buy an army. Enough to buy a country.

But money was just ammunition. He needed hardware.

He turned his attention to the rig itself. It was an automated facility, designed to operate without humans. That meant it had fabrication units. Repair drones. Industrial 3D printers capable of printing steel and carbon fiber.

Rick accessed the System Shop. He wasn’t buying guns anymore. He was buying blueprints.

[Shop > Blueprints > Advanced Warfare] [Item: ’The Horner’ Autonomous Hunter-Killer Drone Schematic] [Cost: $500,000] [Item: ’Aegis’ Personal Force-Field Generator (Prototype)] [Cost: $2,000,000] [Item: ’Nanite Repair Swarm’ (Consumable Formulation)] [Cost: $1,000,000]

"Buy all," Rick thought.

The data flooded his mind. He pushed it into the rig’s fabrication queue.

Deep in the bowels of the rig, massive robotic arms began to move. Lasers sparked. Molten metal poured. Rick was building his own private army, right here in the middle of the Mediterranean.

BANG! BANG!

The sound of a fist pounding on the heavy blast door behind him broke his concentration.

"Rick!" Sharon’s voice was muffled by three inches of steel, but the desperation cut through clearly. "Rick, please! Open the door! You can’t just shut me out! We need to talk!"

Rick didn’t turn around. He didn’t feel anger anymore. The Technomancy upgrade seemed to have dampened his emotional response, replacing hot rage with cold, efficient logic. Sharon was a compromised asset. She was a liability. Engaging with her was inefficient.

"System," Rick said aloud. "Mute external audio."

The pounding continued, but the sound vanished, replaced by the soothing hum of the servers.

Rick turned back to the screens. He brought up the Warner Ledger. The list of Users.

"Show me the board," Rick whispered.

The map of the world appeared on the main screen. Twelve red dots pulsed on the continents.

Subject 1 (The Warlord): Entrenched in a fortress in Sudan. Controlling a diamond mine and a militia of ten thousand.

Subject 4 (The Prophet): Moving through Rome. High-level political influence. Unseen.

Subject 9 (Valerius): Switzerland. Status: Critical Damage. Rebuilding.

Subject 11 (The Huntsman): Location Unknown. Last ping: Fiji.

And him. Subject 13 (The Chaos Agent).

Rick zoomed in on his own file. Johnson’s notes were extensive. They had been watching him since he was a child. Every fight he got into at school. Every girl he dated. Every job he lost. It was all documented.

Stress Testing.

They had engineered his life to be difficult. To keep him on edge. To prepare him for the moment the System activated.

"Why?" Rick asked the empty room. "Why me? Johnson said it was an ’accidental transfer’. That the previous host died."

He scrolled back to the date of the transfer. Six months ago. The day he found the System. The day he ’woke up’.

He cross-referenced the date with the Ledger’s obituary files.

[Subject 0: Deceased. Date: June 14th.] [Name: Arthur Smith.] [System: The Chaos System (Original Host).]

Rick froze. The cold logic of the Technomancer faltered. His heart slammed against his ribs, a very human, very painful reaction.

Arthur Smith.

His father.

The man lying in a coma in a hospital bed back home. The man Rick had despised for being a drunk, for being absent, for being weak.

"Deceased?" Rick whispered. "He’s not dead. I spoke to the doctors. He’s in a coma."

He pulled up the hospital records. He hacked the hospital mainframe in three seconds.

Patient: Arthur Smith. Status: Comatose. Brain Activity: Minimal. Notes: Patient exhibits zero neural response to stimuli. Body is functioning, mind is absent.

Rick stared at the screen. "Mind is absent."

He looked at his own hands. At the blue light pulsing under his skin.

"He didn’t give it to me," Rick realized, the horror dawning on him. "He didn’t die. The System... it left him. It jumped. It drained him dry and moved to the nearest viable genetic match. Me."

His father wasn’t a drunk. He was a vessel that had burned out. The ’drinking’ was probably the only way to cope with the voices, with the quests, with the constant demand for chaos. And when Arthur couldn’t handle it anymore, when he broke... the System found a fresh battery.

Rick stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the floor.

The anger returned. Not the cold, efficient anger of the machine, but the hot, messy rage of a son who had been lied to by the universe. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

"Corporate Oversight knew," Rick snarled. "They watched him burn out. And they were waiting to catch the spark."

He looked at the door. Sharon knew. She had to know. Her file said she was assigned to Subject 13. She knew the history. She knew his father was Subject 0.

Rick walked to the console. He tapped a command.

The fabrication units below stopped printing drones. They started printing something else. A suit. Not cloth. Armor.

"I’m done hiding," Rick said.

He accessed the Black Market Beacon—the item he used to lure Valerius. He modified the frequency. He boosted the signal using the rig’s massive satellite dish.

"System," Rick commanded. "Broadcast a message. Global frequency. Encrypted channel: Project Succession."

[Message Ready. Recording...]

Rick leaned into the microphone.

"To the Eleven," Rick said, his voice amplified, distorted, and echoing across the secure channels used by the most dangerous people on Earth. "My name is Rick Smith. I am the Chaos Agent. You have been playing a game in the shadows. You have been hiding. You have been hoarding your power."

"I just stole half a billion dollars from the Moderators. I just burned down the Warner Empire. And I am currently building an army on an oil rig in the Mediterranean."

"The Game is too slow. I’m speeding it up. I have the Ledger. I know where you live. I know who you love. I know your weaknesses."

"Come and get me. Or I’m coming for you."

[Broadcast Sent.]

Rick sat back. He had just painted a target on his back the size of a continent. Every User, every government, every shadow agency was going to descend on this rig.

Good.

He turned to the blast door. He waved his hand.

Clank-Hiss.

The heavy steel door slid open.

Part 2: The Severance Package

Sharon fell into the room as the door opened. She had been leaning against it, exhausted, her knuckles bruised from pounding.

She looked up, eyes red-rimmed. She saw Rick.

He looked... terrifying. The blue light in his eyes was brighter now. He stood with a posture that wasn’t human—too still, too perfect. The air around him hummed with static electricity.

"Rick," she breathed, scrambling to her feet. "Rick, please. Let me explain. The file... it’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. I started as a handler, yes. But I—"

"Stop," Rick said. He raised a hand.

Sharon flinched, her body locking up as if he had used Voice of Command. But he hadn’t. She was just afraid of him.

"I don’t care about your feelings, Sharon," Rick said. His voice was flat. "I don’t care if you fell in love with the mark. It’s a cliché. It’s boring."

He walked past her, heading for the hallway.

"Where are you going?" she asked, running to catch up.

"To the hospital," Rick said. "My father isn’t in a coma. He’s an empty shell because this parasite," he tapped his head, "ate his mind. I’m going to see if I can put it back."

"You can’t just fix a brain dead patient!"

"I have the Precursor Core," Rick said. "I have Technomancy. The brain is just hardware. I can reboot it."

He stopped at the elevator leading to the helipad.

"Rick, you can’t leave me here!" Sharon pleaded. "Johnson is in the closet! The guards are mind-controlled! If you leave, Oversight will send a cleanup crew. They’ll kill me!"

Rick looked at her. He looked at the woman he had slept with, the woman he had fought beside, the woman who had lied to him every single day.

He felt a flicker of the old Rick. The guy who made pancakes.

He reached into his Inventory.

He pulled out a small, metallic drive.

"This," Rick said, tossing it to her, "is the encryption key to the Cayman accounts I just drained. There is ten million dollars in a blind trust in your name."

Sharon caught it, stunned. "I don’t want your money!"

"It’s severance pay," Rick said coldly. "Take it. Run. Go to Fiji. Buy that beach."

"Rick..."

"And this," Rick said, pulling out a heavy, grey remote control. "Is the control unit for the rig’s defenses."

He handed it to her.

"I’ve printed six automated sentry turrets. They are deployed at the airlocks and the helipad. They are programmed to target anyone wearing a Corporate Oversight uniform. Except you."

Sharon looked at the remote. "You’re giving me the castle?"

"I’m giving you a head start," Rick corrected. "Oversight is coming. Johnson will wake up eventually. You have maybe six hours before a strike team hits this rig. Use the turrets. Use the money. Disappear, Sharon. If I see you again... I won’t be this generous."

He stepped into the elevator.

"Rick!" she screamed, tears streaming down her face. "Don’t do this! You’re losing yourself! The System is changing you!"

"The System isn’t changing me," Rick said as the doors began to close. "It’s revealing me."

The doors shut.

Rick rode the elevator to the roof. The wind was whipping across the helipad.

The stolen VTOL was gone. He had sent it away on autopilot to crash into the sea as a decoy.

Instead, sitting on the helipad, gleaming in the moonlight, was his new ride.

It was a prototype. One of the blueprints he had rushed through the fabrication unit. It looked like a sleek, black coffin with jet engines. A single-seat, hypersonic extraction craft.

The ’Night-Shrike’.

Rick climbed into the cockpit. The canopy hissed shut. The HUD flared to life, connecting instantly with his mind.

[Pilot: Rick Smith.] [Destination: City General Hospital.] [ETA: 45 Minutes.]

"Let’s go see Dad," Rick whispered.

The engines roared. The Shrike shot into the sky, a streak of black fire against the stars.