Spend King: She Left Me, So I Bought Everything
Chapter 58: The Mortal’s Gambit & The Papercut Prophet

Chapter 58: The Mortal’s Gambit & The Papercut Prophet

Agony was a white-hot brand searing Nishanth’s side with every ragged breath. The dead coin in his hand felt like a tombstone. Across the transformed plaza, Zara was a statue of defiance and corruption, Stapler Prime’s targeting photoreceptor burning a hole in the air mere feet from her.

Tabitha’s roars had turned to furious, impotent thrashing beneath her paperclip prison. Lilith was a shadow against the lined-paper sky, her eyes wide with horror.

Mortal. Broke. Useless. The words hammered in his skull, echoes of Lilith’s pronouncement. But beneath the terror, beneath the crushing weight of his newfound fragility, a spark ignited. Not divinity.

Something older, messier, infinitely more human: spite. Mammon had broken him. Stapler Prime sought to erase him. They both saw him as obsolete, inefficient, clutter.

His gaze locked onto Stapler Prime’s central hinge – a complex junction of chromed plates near its ’waist,’ where the upper torso met the lower assembly. A vulnerability? Or just a hope born of desperation? It didn’t matter.

Nishanth pushed himself off the med-cot, the world tilting violently. Pain screamed through his ribs, a jagged counterpoint to the dry, mechanical clatter of the Bureau’s new master. He stumbled, catching himself on a folded-rubble filing cabinet, the sharp edge biting into his palm – another new, unwelcome sensation.

"You want efficiency?" Nishanth rasped, his voice raw but carrying across the unnaturally quiet battlefield. Stapler Prime’s photoreceptor flickered fractionally towards him, a dismissive acknowledgment of insignificant biomass.

Zara’s head twitched, a flicker of her own consciousness beneath Mammon’s smothering presence. "You think folding reality into a memo solves anything? Let me show you what real inefficiency looks like."

He forced his legs to move, each step an exercise in agony and willpower. He wasn’t charging; he was lurching, a broken puppet held together by sheer, bloody-minded obstinacy.

Stapler Prime’s arm remained trained on Zara, processing this minor distraction. Drones buzzed nearby, scanning, categorizing: Sentient Organism: Designation Nishanth (Former Divinity). Status: Critically Injured, Low Threat Potential.

Nishanth reached the base of the towering chrome entity. He looked up, dwarfed, insignificant. The cold weight of the inert copper coin was the only thing in his world. Last spark. Last gamble. Last everything. He drew back his arm, ignoring the shriek from his ribs, and with a guttural cry born of pain, fury, and utter human recklessness, he jammed the coin deep into the complex hinge mechanism of Stapler Prime.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The coin seemed absurdly small against the vast machinery. Stapler Prime emitted a low, processing hum.

Then, chaos.

"WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED CURRENCY INSERTION IN PRIMARY ARTICULATION NODE," the drone voice blared, suddenly laced with static.

"SECURITY PROTOCOL DELTA-7 VIOLATED.

SYSTEM CONFLICT: DIVINE SIGNATURE (INERT) DETECTED WITHIN NON-FINANCIAL SUBSYSTEM.

INITIATING PURGE... ERROR! ERROR!"

The coin, dead to Nishanth, was anything but to the hyper-rational, rule-bound entity that was Stapler Prime. It was a paradox. It was illegal tender in a mechanical joint. It was divine residue contaminating sterile bureaucracy. The system short-circuited spectacularly.

Stapler Prime vibrated, a violent, shuddering tremor that shook the ground. Its red photoreceptor strobed erratically.

Its stapler arm jerked spasmodically, firing a wild barrage of staples not at Zara, but backwards, shredding its own newly formed drone towers into metallic confetti. "PURGE CONTAMINATION! PURGE!"

From vents along its torso, a torrent of paper erupted – not blank, but thousands of perfectly printed PINK SLIPS. They fluttered down like toxic snow, each one stamped "TERMINATION NOTICE: Stapler Prime - Reason: Gross Inefficiency."

Its massive jaws, snapping open and shut in a panic, suddenly stapled themselves together with a final, deafening KER-CHUNK! Muffled, synthesized gargling sounds emerged. "MMMPH! SYSTEM OVERR-- MMPH! --IDE!"

The towering god-machine staggered, off-balance, systems cascading into catastrophic failure. It wasn’t destroyed, but it was blind, self-mutilating, and utterly, bureaucratically compromised.

Nishanth collapsed to his knees, gasping, the world swimming. He looked at his empty hand. The coin was gone. Truly, irrevocably spent. Not a flicker of power remained. Only the bone-deep ache, the taste of blood, and the terrifying, exhilarating emptiness of pure mortality. He’d gambled his last scrap of the divine... and won a moment of chaos.

[ NISHANTH’S COIN: SPENT - ABSOLUTE MORTALITY CONFIRMED ]

[ STAPLER PRIME: STATUS - CRITICAL SYSTEM MALFUNCTION (SELF-TERMINATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE, SELF-SABOTAGE, COMMUNICATION JAMMED) ]

[ IMMEDIATE THREAT: TEMPORARILY NEUTRALIZED - ENVIRONMENT REMAINS HOSTILE ]

The sudden, shocking incapacitation of Stapler Prime created a vacuum of power and noise. The drones, lacking central directive, buzzed in confused circles. Zara stumbled back, the pressure of Stapler Prime’s targeting lock vanishing, though the dark veins in her hand still pulsed fiercely. Tabitha roared, redoubling her efforts to tear free from the paperclip mesh.

In the relative quiet, a new sound emerged: a wet, ragged, deeply wrong coughing fit.

Lilith had been trying to edge towards Zara, her expression torn between fear and fierce protectiveness. Now, she doubled over, hands clawing at her throat. It wasn’t a normal cough; it sounded like something was tearing its way up from her lungs, dry and rustling. Her eyes bulged with panic and revulsion.

"Lilith?" Nishanth croaked, pushing himself up onto his elbows, fresh agony blooming in his side. "What’s--"

She couldn’t answer. With a final, violent retch, she expelled not phlegm, but a stream of pristine white origami paper. Dozens, hundreds of perfectly folded paper cranes tumbled from her lips, fluttering to the transformed ground in a macabre snowfall. They landed, rustled... and then began to move with unnatural purpose.

Faster than thought, the cranes swarmed together, folding into each other, layering, interlocking with terrifying speed and precision. Within seconds, the paper avalanche coalesced into a life-sized, disturbingly detailed puppet.

Its form was crude paper, yet it radiated an aura of chilling familiarity: the sharp, predatory lines of Mammon’s face, the arrogant set of shoulders, the cruel curve of a paper-mache smile.

The puppet’s head turned, empty eye sockets seeming to fix on the scene. It raised a hand constructed of interlocking cranes, and its voice emerged – not from the paper mouth, but woven from the rustling of a thousand wings and the lingering static of Mammon’s void-whispers. It was a grotesque parody of his former grandeur, thin and papery, yet dripping with malice.

"Miss me?" it hissed, the sound skittering across the lined-paper ground.

Before anyone could react, the puppet moved with impossible speed. It wasn’t walking; it flowed across the ground like a predatory scrap of parchment. Its target wasn’t Nishanth, Zara, or the struggling Stapler Prime.

It shot towards a huddled form near a folded-rubble outcrop – Seraphina’s niece, the child who had somehow survived the initial collapse. The girl had been trying to make herself invisible, tears streaking her dusty face. The paper hand lashed out, not to strike, but to grasp. Sharp paper edges dug into the girl’s arm as the puppet yanked her forward, holding her like a shield.

The puppet turned its empty gaze towards Zara, its paper smile widening into a rictus. "Trade," it rustled, the word final and cold. "The child’s fragile, mortal spark..." It tightened its grip, making the girl whimper. "...for the hand that binds my echo. Your void-scarred hand, voidling. Sever it. Offer it. And the little one walks free."

Zara stood frozen, the conflict warring on her face almost visible. The corruption in her hand flared, a dark counterpoint to Mammon’s paper offer. Mammon’s whispers surged, promising power, vengeance, an end to the pain if she embraced him. But the sight of the terrified child, the sheer monstrousness of the demand...

Lilith stared in utter horror at the puppet, then at her own hands, as if they were alien things. She’d been the vessel, the unwitting conduit. The violation was absolute.

Nishanth tried to shout, to intervene, but pain and mortal weakness held him pinned, a spectator to the unfolding nightmare.

Zara took a single, shuddering step forward. Her eyes, when she raised them to meet the puppet’s empty sockets, weren’t filled with Mammon’s darkness, nor with fear for herself. They were filled with a terrifying, resigned clarity. Her corrupted hand flexed, the void veins pulsing like a dying star.

"Deal."

The word hung in the air, heavier than Stapler Prime’s chrome. It wasn’t a shout, nor a whisper. It was a verdict.

[ MAMMON’S GHOST: MANIFEST VIA LILITH’S LUNGS (ORIGAMI AVATAR) - POWER LEVEL: UNKNOWN, LEVERAGING HOSTAGE ]

[ ZARA’S FATE: AMPUTATION DEMANDED - MOTIVATION: PROTECTION OR CORRUPTION’S FINAL PUSH? ]

[SERAPHINA’S NIECE: HOSTAGE - FATE BALANCING ON A PAPER EDGE ]

[LILITH: TRAUMATIZED CONDUIT - GUILT AND HORROR ]

The word "Deal" hung in the air, colder than the void-scars on Zara’s arm. It wasn’t defiance, nor surrender. It was transaction. The final cost laid bare.

The paper Mammon puppet’s grin stretched wider, a cruel fold in reality itself. Seraphina’s niece whimpered, sharp paper edges digging into her small arm, her eyes wide pools of terror fixed on Zara. Nishanth tried to push himself up, a roar of denial choked by a spasm of pain from his ribs – a brutal reminder of his mortality, his utter impotence. Lilith stared at the puppet she’d vomited forth, her face a mask of revulsion and dawning horror at her own unwitting complicity. She had been the door.

"Zara, don’t!" Lilith choked out, her voice raw. "It’s a trick! He’ll just–"

"Silence, conduit," the puppet rustled, its empty gaze flicking towards Lilith for a microsecond. Lilith gasped, clutching her throat as if phantom paper filled it again. The threat was implicit. One more word, and the child suffers.

To be continued.....