III：Yield Noose

The air in the Federal Reserve's underground vault hummed with predatory static. Leo Wu crouched behind a stack of Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filings, his claws leaving scorch marks on paperwork that smelled like burnt almonds and regret. Across the dim chamber, six vampire quants from Merrill Lynch adjusted their augmented reality visors, their mechanical hearts clicking in sync with the 10-year Treasury yield ticking overhead.

"Bearish convergence confirmed," their leader sneered, his voice warped through a vocoder that mimicked Alan Greenspan's monotone drawl. "Initiate yield curve inversion protocol."

Leo's Wolf King's Pupils flared. The quants' biometrics materialized as floating covenants—sweat pH levels mapped to credit default swap spreads, dilated pupils charted like volatile LIBOR rates. Above them, the holographic Treasury yield curve sharpened into a silver noose, its inverted arc glinting with CRISPR-laced nanoparticles.

Genetic Alert: Treasury Contaminant Detected (Strain T-Note-08)

One quant's tablet flickered with decrypted entries from his father's 1998 trading logs: September 15: Elaine's gene rejection accelerated by 73% post-FOMC vote. Recommend collateralization. The files bled the Pale Hand's insignia—a skeletal claw throttling the Fed's eagle.

"Margin call, mutt." The quant tapped the screen. "Your father's trades financed our first gene-editing round. His tears made excellent collateral."

Leo's claws tore through a pallet of Bear Stearns stock certificates. "You coffin-dwellers still think this is about settling scores?"

The quants unholstered nanowire garrotes humming with anti-lycanthrope frequencies. "It's about risk-adjusted returns. Even your mother's death throes had a positive Sharpe ratio."

Phase One: The Debt Snare

Merrill's ambush had begun at dawn. Leo's blockchain implants pinged with aberrant CDO bids—phantom offers on mortgage-backed securities traced to Pale Hand shell companies. By noon, the yield curve inversion manifested physically: 2-year Treasury notes crystallized into barbed wire, 10-year bonds coiled like steel serpents in the vault.

"Alpha decay in your short positions," Victor's glitching AI warned through a cracked BlackBerry. "Their quant models are weaponizing convexity against your DNA."

Leo stalked through Wall Street's steam tunnels, the clang of his claws on cast-iron pipes echoing Fedwire transaction codes. His father's Montblanc pen—stolen from the man's Hong Kong coffin—burned in his breast pocket. The engraved Wu Securities logo concealed a quantum drive with thirty years of damning Fed-vampire collusion.

The quants' footsteps clicked aboveground. "Increase duration risk exposure. Correlate his lunar cycle to convexity adjustments."

Phase Two: The Unbonding

The vault's emergency lights bathed everything in jaundiced yellow—the hue of toxic mortgage bonds. Leo's vision split: human eyes tracked quants calibrating AR visors, while wolf pupils parsed the yield curve's biological weak points.

Target 4: Chromosome 17p13.1 (Smith-Magenis Deletion)

He lunged. Nanowire garrotes lashed out, slicing AIG credit default swaps into confetti. A quant screamed as Leo's fangs found his jugular, blood tasting like over-leveraged repo agreements.

"Gamma spike! Deploy volatility surface!"

"Surface this." Leo slammed the man's skull into a Bloomberg terminal. The screen shattered into fractal gene sequences—Pale Hand Modification Log: 1998-Q3.

Memory Shard: Father's Dying Transmission "The repo market… they're blending vampire RNA into overnight lending…"

The remaining quants formed a Black-Scholes shield matrix, tablets projecting duration risk as spectral chains. Leo's claws met 5-year TIPS notes materialized as electrified manacles, their coupon payments shrieking like scalded cats.

Phase Three: Compound Fracture

The lead quant stumbled against a pallet of frozen MBS tranches. "You can't rehypothecate genetic destiny! The yield curve is sacrosanct!"

Leo pinned him with a São Paulo neck crank, forearm crushing his trachea. "Funny. My old man said the same thing about his marriage vows."

The quant's chest cavity split open, revealing a chrome heart pulsing with LIBOR rates. Leo hooked CME gold futures contracts—400-ounce bars still steaming from the Comex vault.

Leverage Applied: 100:1 (Margin Call Imminent)

With a roar that rattled the NYSE's foundations, Leo swung the futures like a medieval flail. The gold bars obliterated the vampire's ribcage, crushing the mechanical heart into silicon shrapnel and usurious intent.

LIBOR flatlined. The yield curve noose disintegrated into gene-editing enzymes.

Ephemera: The Blood Ledger

In the quants' abandoned briefcase, Leo found a Betamax tape labeled FOMC Meeting 1994. Grainy footage showed his father shaking hands with Greenspan over vials of wolf blood.

File: Operation Silver Standard (1994-2008) Objective: Use interest rate swaps to distribute vampire CRISPR via…

Victor's AI sputtered: "They've been doping the system since the dot-com crash! Your mother's death wasn't malpractice—it was monetary policy!"

Polished English Version

The vault reeked of scorched regulations and lycanthropic rage. Leo crouched beneath a disemboweled trading terminal, claws dripping mercury-blood onto Merrill Lynch's shredded balance sheets. The last surviving vampire quant rasped through a punctured lung:

"You've… contaminated… the duration model…"

Leo crushed the Betamax tape. "Tell your actuaries to recalculate."

Wallet Alert: 100,000 BTC Seized (Merrill Margin Accounts Liquidated)

Victor's hologram flickered. "The mining rigs decoded another memory fragment. Your father's logs mention a 'Silver Pact' signed at—"

A tremor rocked the chamber. The 10-year Treasury noose reknit above Leo, now threaded with his mother's DNA.

"Compound this," he growled, and lunged into the storm.