III：Wolf Eyes Burn the Ledger
The air in JPMorgan's trading pit smelled like burnt silicon and blood money. Leo Wu leaned against a Bloomberg terminal, his claws leaving scorch marks on the keyboard. Across the floor, vampire quants in Brioni suits adjusted their augmented reality visors, their mechanical hearts ticking in sync with the LIBOR spread. Their sweat carried coded histories—Bear Stearns' collapse, Lehman's silent scream, and beneath it all, the acrid stench of Pale Hand's insignia: a skeletal claw clutching the Fed's eagle.
Wolf King's Pupils Alert: Olfactory Decryption Activated
Leo's nostrils flared. The lead quant's perspiration reeked of Bearish MS—phony resistance levels mapped to his mother's genetic decay rates. Another trader's sweat dripped with Bull Trap pheromones, the same synthetic optimism that had lured his father into signing her death warrant.
"Margin call incoming, mutt," the quant sneered, tapping a tablet displaying Leo's DNA strand overlaid with CDO tranches. "Your short positions are collapsing faster than your mitochondria."
Memory Fragment: Father's 1998 Trading Log "Fed Directive 741 approved. X-12 strain rejection at 73%. Proceed to collateralization."
Leo's claws tore through a stack of Lehman bankruptcy filings. "You coffin-dwellers still think this is about spreads?"
The quants unholstered nanowire garrotes humming with anti-wolf frequencies. "It's always about liquidity. Even your mother's screams had a positive carry."
Phase One: The Scent of Deception
The ambush began at dawn. Morgan's trading algorithms had flagged abnormal CDO activity—phantom bids traced to Pale Hand shell companies. By noon, the pit's holographic tickers morphed into double helixes, their base pairs encoding subprime defaults.
"Alpha decay in your mitochondrial shorts," Victor's glitching AI warned through a cracked BlackBerry. "They're weaponizing Gaussian copula models against your genome."
Leo stalked through steam tunnels beneath Wall Street, the clang of his claws on iron pipes echoing Fedwire transaction codes. His mother's locket—stolen from her cryo-vault at the Fed—burned with decrypted data: Silver Pact 1987: Species Replacement Timeline.
Phase Two: The Ledger of Bones
The pit's emergency lights bathed everything in jaundiced yellow. Leo's Wolf King's Pupils dilated, parsing sweat trails into trading strategies:
Quant Team Alpha: Reeked of over-leveraged CDOs, cortisol spikes mapping to credit default swaps.VP of Synthetic Products: Cologne masked Pale Hand's clawprint branded into his amygdala.The Intern: Pulse spiked with every LIBOR flicker. Bait.
"Three shadow ledgers," Victor hissed. "One for the SEC, one for the Fed, one for… genetic repossession."
Leo lunged. Nanowires lashed out, slicing synthetic CDOs into confetti. A quant screamed as Leo's fangs found his carotid—blood tasting like repo agreements laced with CRISPR-MBS codes.
Genetic Impact:
Chromosome 17p13.1 (Smith-Magenis corruption halted)LIBOR-OIS spread contraction (-1.8 basis points)Phase Three: Datafire
The VP stumbled against a pallet of frozen MBS tranches. "You can't margin call evolution!"
Leo pinned him with a São Paulo neck crank. "Funny. My father said the same thing about his marriage."
The quant's chest cavity split open, revealing a chrome heart pulsating with LIBOR rates. Leo's claws hooked CME copper futures—25,000-pound bars still steaming from Comex vaults.
Leverage Applied: 100:1 (Margin Call Imminent)
With a roar that rattled Nasdaq's servers, Leo swung the futures like a medieval flail. The copper bars obliterated the mechanical heart, silicon shrapnel embedding into trading terminals.
LIBOR flatlined. Holographic ledgers combusted midair, their ashes forming his mother's face.
Ephemera: The Silver Tide
In the VP's pocket, Leo found a Betamax tape labeled FOMC Meeting 2000. Grainy footage showed Alan Greenspan shaking hands with a Pale Hand elder over vials labeled Wu Clan Mitochondria.
Victor's AI sputtered: "They've been short-selling your bloodline since Black Monday. Iceland's cloning facility—coordinates mined from their blockchain."
Polished English Version
The trading floor reeked of scorched algorithms and lycanthropic rage. Leo stood amidst smoldering terminals, his reflection warped in the VP's Rolex—its face now a countdown to X-12 Liquidation: 12H Remain.
Wallet Alert: 500,000 BTC Seized (JPMorgan Genetic Repo Accounts Liquidated)
Victor's hologram flickered. "The rigs decoded Iceland's coordinates. They're rebuilding her… piece by piece."
A tremor shook the building. The NASDAQ ticker rearranged into Viking runes:
ᚷᛖᚾᛖ ᚲᛟᛞᛖ: ᚲᚱᛖᛞᛁᛏ ᚢᚾᛞᛖᚱᚹᛟᚱᛚᛞ
Leo crushed the Betamax tape. "Tell the vampires I collect debts in compound suffering."
As he exited, the VP's corpse melted into liquid mercury—flowing into Wall Street's drains toward an underground vault marked Iceland Facility: Final Margin Call. Somewhere in the quantum static, a familiar laugh echoed—higher-pitched than Irene's, warmer than the dead ought to be.
Genetic Sync: Maternal Memory Resurgence Detected (23%)
He threw a copper futures bar through the window. As glass rained onto Wall Street, the shards formed his mother's face in freefall.
"Interest accrues," he growled, and vanished into the neon smog.