That’s a parrot claw. Or maybe an owl. Definitely something with talons. Wide, splayed… toes? Do you call them toes? With big hooks on the end. When you get right down to it-
The claws ripped through the very expensive building front. It wasn’t the headquarters of the Four Seas Bank, but it was a pretty big sub-office. Keyword being “was.”
I am just not a bird guy.
An owl’s head lunged out of the hole. There was a terrible hissing noise. Then a shriek that let everything in earshot know that it was prey, nothing but prey, and they could run but never hide. A flaming sword held in another taloned hand slashed another hole in the wall. Was the demon about to break free?
Chains shot out of the holes in the building, black iron etched with golden Names and sigils of dreadful meaning. They burned when they touched the demon, and they wrapped it up tight. The demon wasn’t a quitter. It hacked down with its sword, setting fires. Smashing up the pavement around the office. Talons the size of carriages dug furrows a man could get lost in through the concrete.
Furious, desperate chanting rang out, as a dozen junior managers surrounded the demon, waving talismans and gems, suppressing its power. Step by seething, raging step, they drove it back in. Hundreds streamed out, covered in cement dust, or blood. The staff evacuated in surprisingly good order. They did regular fire drills, Truth guessed. It would be the responsible thing to do. Or maybe their floor wardens had just whipped them into obedience.
He managed to grab one at the end of the line. An office junior, barely fifty years old. Maybe thirty years at the bank. Time enough to learn some things, but not so old as to be too sharp. Or missed. Truth spotted the lapel pin. He must be some kind of liaison. Better and better.
“Praeger’s mercy! Are you alright? Here sit down before you fall down.”
“Thanks, thanks. Lightheaded. Do you have any water?”
“Sorry. What was that? I mean, what the Hell was that?”
“That?” The banker’s voice was somewhere between hysterical laughter and crippling depression. “That was our “innovative, forward looking, multi-dimensional bank security infrastructure improvement project.”
“It was a four story tall demon with a damn owl head, talons and a flaming sword!”
“That too.” The banker started coughing. Truth rubbed his back soothingly.
“I get that you are a bank, but why not just get a golem? I hear metal golems are nasty, and lots of banks use them to protect their vaults.”
“We don’t have a vault. Not that kind of bank.”
“Pardon?”
“Commercial loans and investment banking. Want to start a business? Need a loan to get your company off the ground? Or just to cover payroll? I can make that happen for you.”
“And the demon helps with that, how?”
“It doesn't. At all.” The banker buried his face in his hands, smearing the concrete dust around. “It’s filling in security gaps, apparently.”
Truth looked at the ruined building.
“Sure. That looks very secure.”
“It’s those stupid shitty roadblocks going up everywhere!”
Truth blinked.
“How do you get from roadblocks to demon?”
“It’s all the senior managers. Upper C-Tier people, from all the Starbrite offices all over Jeon. They get issued missions to “Support the country in this time of national emergency.” They sent around memos explaining all this.”
“Ah. Because they are C-3-U and up, they are all probably pretty decently leveled and have the credits to buy some nasty stuff from the store.”
“Level Six and up. Word is, the rewards are pretty decent for standing around for eight hours, looking down on the serfs. Must be fantastic, actually, because some of the top people haven’t been in the office in ages. Not answering messages, nothing.”
Truth had been wondering where the hell all those high level people were coming from. For that matter, it was pretty shocking how fast they responded to his attack on Happori Village. Turns out the answer was simple. A lot of them were already in the air, and a lot of the rest were fast reaction forces. But that also meant…
“So who’s running the shop while they are doing important standing around?”
“Not like they never leave the office in the first place. We can spare them for eight hours a week. It does add up, though. Things are definitely getting approved more slowly, decisions coming more slowly, new policies, high level deals, all happening more slowly or not at all. Supervision slipping in a big way.”
Truth started connecting some dots. “So there is less high level support in key locations. Like an office building that manages investment and commercial banking.”
The banker nodded. “It started after the hit on that bank in Gwaju, then ramped up after the atrocity in Buran. And a dozen other places, of course, but those are the ones that stuck in my mind. The footage of that burned out bank, or those torn apart accountants… Everyone knew the terrorists were targeting Starbrite, but they were too cowardly to go straight at us. So they picked off branch offices. Subsidiaries. A guy from our office got sniped. Can you believe that? He was an asshole, but damn. He didn’t deserve that.”
“He got sniped!?”
“Lone wolf shooter. Seventeen year old kid, raving about how Starbrite made his sister kill herself. Batshit crazy stuff.”
“Damn.”
The banker nodded. Then took a deep breath.
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“It’s good to talk to someone, you know? After something like this. Just being able to lay it all out on someone. You are a great listener. Thank you.”
“Really, it’s no problem. So, finish the story. Security, which, F-Tier or not, does know a thing or two about securing buildings, says you need a huge, angry demon?”
“Like I said. Security infrastructure improvement. Things like golems are good, but they are too damn expensive to put everywhere, and I’m told that maintenance costs on them are getting unbearable. At least for wide scale deployment. Even for us, which is saying something.”
“True, true. Things are tough all over.”
“You have no idea.”
Truth felt that he did, in fact, have an idea.
“So bigass demons are cheaper?”
“Apparently. The idea was that it would act as a defensive measure if the building was attacked, counter attack, all that. Working with security. But, and I’m just guessing this part, I bet you some wiseguy thought “We better have an override just in case. Something that lets us deploy him in the event that it doesn't respond to an attack, or we have to pre-emptively attack.”
“You think someone panicked and used the override?”
The banker reached into his jacket and pulled out a flask. “I’ve been trying to cut back, you know? Bad look in the office. Screams weakness. But I like knowing it’s there. Just in case I need it. Want a nip?”
“No thanks, I need to keep my head clear. You go right ahead. I won’t judge.”
“Thanks.” The banker took a long sip, then a second. “I think it’s dumber than someone panicking.”
Truth waited while the man gathered himself. Took a third pull on the flask. “The last few years have been bad. I know they have been bad for everyone, but… I have been at Starbrite my whole life. Both my parents were C-Tier, I knew I would be C-Tier, my aunts and uncles chipped in with Friends and Family points on top of what my parents saved, and to top it all off, I busted my ass every second of every day in school. Did every extra curricular that would look good. Cultivated every night, no exceptions.”
Truth nodded along. He knew how that was.
“I only made the right kinds of friends. Dated the right girls. Joined the right clubs. Even my army posting, they pulled some strings and I served my National Service being a gopher in the Logistics Corps headquarters here in Harban. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it meant that I had the best barracks and met some of the most important officers in the Army- the ones buying all the stuff.”
Truth nodded again. He could see the banker was moving from shock to anger.
“I did everything right, EVERYTHING RIGHT, for twenty-two fucking years, graduate fifth in my class from my MBA program, recruited directly into a C-8-U position in the Commercial Lending department and guess what?”
“What?”
“Every other dog fucking bastard in the department is just like me! All of them! Each and every one of them has a story just like mine! They are all the top ten percent of their class, from a long line of high C-Tier employees, or a B-Tier wanting their kid to “work their way up from the bottom.” They all went to the right schools, made the right friends, networked, networked, networked.”
The “young” banker waved his hand angrily in the direction of the ruined building. “And you know what? None of it really mattered because when your boss has a working life of a hundred and twenty years, and nobody ever gets fired, normal promotions are not a thing that exist!”
“But surely people do get promoted. Do you just wait for attrition? Or… lateral transfers or whatever?”
The banker started angry laughing. Took a pull on the flask, then carried on. “No. No you do not. Not unless you are content to be a lowest tier drone for the entirety of your career, which after twenty-two years of working your ass off and being told what a genius you are, is not a thing that happens.”
“I can see that.”
“No, you can't. You really cannot imagine it, because this is not some normal thing humans deal with. That whole building right there?” He waved. A chunk of concrete fell off the torn out wall.
“Every person in that building comes from a very good family. Not an “elite” family, though you might mistake them for that. Just very good families. They are all competing for the affection and support of their superiors, making alliances with others, scheming to put down rivals, suppressing juniors, or cultivating them if they could be an asset down the road. For the very, very ambitious, arranging a transfer or a fall for a senior, to open up one of those vanishingly rare promotion opportunities.”
“How did you get any work done?”
“None of us sleep much.” The banker wasn’t kidding. “So you have this complete snake’s nest of manipulation, betrayal and control, supervised by ancient bastards who have spent a century playing this game. They are the ones making sure everything is still running. Keeping the game in bounds. But then, slowly, they start getting pulled onto other duties. Or the business channels just dry up. Less loans are getting sold, more defaults are coming up on the books. We have zombie companies- you know what those are?”
“No.”
“Companies that are functionally dead, but we keep alive just so we don't have to write off the debt. Because if we did have to write off all that debt, all of a sudden our balance sheet is solid red, with billions of wen in losses. And no one, not even the ancient bastards running things, could survive that.”
“Praeger! And nobody knows?”
“Everyone and their dog knows. Everyone. Because this is happening at every bank. We are all standing around going “Everything is fine! Keep investing and borrowing! All is well!” Because, again, if we don’t, if we actually have to take account of all those losses-”
He pointed at the building. Truth nodded.
“So…”
“So someone figured that everything was doomed. They looked at the world, their balance sheets, their promotion opportunities, realized that their husband was the departmental bike and everyone was getting a ride, and decided that desperate measures were called for. So they ‘did what it took-’”
And didn’t those words just drip with irony.
“To get control of the back door control system which I assume exists for the demon. Then, they outsourced adding themselves permanently to that system to some “very reliable expert,” who was not, in fact, very reliable. Then something happened. I don’t know what, I was on the tenth floor trying to figure out how to turn five hundred million wen in delinquent accounts into a positive revenue statement, and also how to knife Jessie and snag her position in Auditing, hopefully some time shortly after our six month anniversary. And then the building blew up and we all evacuated.”
Truth was looking at the banker a bit oddly. None of this was triggering his System? At all? He had been in C-Tier for decades, and he was apparently fine with spilling all this to a stranger? Something was very off here.
“Damn. Plus side you now have some… expedited promotion pathways?”
“Hah! True. Damn. Look, you know people in Starbrite are loyal. The company gives us everything. Everything. So even if we get pissy and bitch and moan and scheme, it’s all ok, because we are, ultimately, working to make Starbrite even more successful. We care about the company because the company cares about us.”
“Sure.” Truth tried to keep the irony out of his own voice.
“But now? With everything? It’s like the company is saying none of it matters. Just… keep the wheels turning for as long as you can. Don’t prepare for what’s coming next. Don’t even worry about it. Just keep your head down and do your job, same as always. Even if security has to chain a giant demon under the lobby, and your bosses’ bosses’ boss is needed for urban pacification duty!”
“Ah. I can see how that might strain a man.”
“It’s just… what comes next, you know? Because maybe this all blows over, but what if it doesn't? What do I do when the balances come due? Did I waste my whole life? Do I ever get to just relax and be happy?”
Truth patted the banker on the back and stood. “Prepare as best you can. And invest in canned foods.” And with that, Truth vanished back into the crowds.