Spend King: She Left Me, So I Bought Everything
Chapter 59: Severance & Ascension

Chapter 59: Severance & Ascension

Zara didn’t look at Lilith or Nishanth. Her entire world had narrowed to the terrified child and the corrupted limb that was the price of her freedom. The void-scars burned with icy fire, Mammon’s whispers a seductive counterpoint to the puppet’s demand.

Give me the hand, embrace the power within it, and crush this paper abomination. Save the child AND become more.

The temptation was a physical ache, a dark gravity pulling at her soul. But beneath it, beneath the corruption’s oily promise, was a bedrock of something harder: resolve. She would not let this child pay for their war. Not like this.

"Tools," Zara repeated, her voice unnervingly calm, detached. "A clean cut. Now." Her eyes, when they finally met the puppet’s sockets, held no fear, only a terrifying emptiness.

The void flared in them, then receded, leaving cold determination. She was compartmentalizing, walling off the horror, focusing solely on the mechanics of survival. Sever the limb. Save the child. Deal with the consequences after.

Lilith, trembling, her own violation warring with the immediate need, didn’t hesitate this time. Her fingers dipped into a hidden pouch at her belt – remnants of her days as a courier navigating hazardous realms.

She flicked something small and gleaming towards Zara. It wasn’t a scalpel. It was a single, oversized, chromed paperclip, unfolded and sharpened to a razor edge along one length, the other end coiled for grip. A brutal, improvised blade born of the Bureau’s own detritus. It clattered on the lined-paper ground near Zara’s feet.

Zara bent, the movement stiff. She picked up the paperclip blade. It felt alien, cold, and lethally sharp in her good hand. She turned her corrupted arm outward, bracing the elbow against her hip, presenting the wrist just above the worst latticework of void-black veins and paperclip scars. The dark energy beneath the skin writhed, sensing its imminent excision, a nest of angry vipers.

Nishanth watched, paralyzed by pain and dread. He saw no hesitation, no last-minute plea. Just Zara, the void-vessel, preparing to pay the debt in flesh and darkness. Mammon’s puppet vibrated with anticipation, its paper form seeming to drink in the tension.

"Tick-tock, voidling," the voice slithered, tightening its grip on the child. A small bead of blood welled where the paper edge bit. The girl’s whimper turned into a thin, high-pitched sound of pure fear.

Zara took a deep, shuddering breath. Her gaze locked onto a point just above the wrist joint. The whispers crescendoed – promises of power, vengeance, an end to weakness.

Take it! Use it! Become the void! She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. Not in prayer, but in focus. When they snapped open, the void was gone, replaced by the flinty, unyielding stare of a soldier about to breach a wall. She raised the paperclip blade.

And brought it down.

CRUNCH.

The sound was obscene. Not the clean slice of metal through flesh, but the wet, gritty crunch of cartilage and bone yielding to brute force. The sharpened paperclip wasn’t a surgical instrument; it was a cleaver.

Dark, viscous fluid – thicker than blood, smelling of ozone and decay – erupted from the wound in a pressurized spray. It sizzled where it hit the transformed ground, eating tiny pockmarks into the lined paper.

SIZZLE.

Zara didn’t scream. A guttural gasp tore from her throat, her body rigid with shock and agony. Her face drained of all color, eyes wide and unseeing for a terrifying moment. Her good hand, still gripping the blood-slick paperclip blade, trembled violently.

The severed hand tumbled to the ground. It didn’t just lie there. It twitched. Fingers spasmed. The void-black veins pulsed with frantic, dying light. Then, with a sound like a sighing vacuum, it dissolved. Not into gore, but into swirling, inky shadow, a miniature vortex of pure negation.

The puppet lunged. Its paper maw gaped wide, far wider than should be possible, a dark portal opening within its folded throat. It inhaled deeply. The swirling shadow-vortex that was Zara’s hand streamed into that maw, sucked down like smoke.

The puppet shuddered violently, its paper form rippling, darkening, gaining substance. The crude folds smoothed, becoming harder, more defined. The paper gained a sheen like obsidian glass. The empty eye sockets flickered, then ignited with twin points of cold, void-black flame. A low, resonant hum emanated from it, vibrating the air.

Physicality Achieved: 45%.

The grip on Seraphina’s niece vanished. The child collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, gasping, clutching her bleeding arm, her eyes fixed on the monstrous transformation happening before her. The staple holding her shadow dissolved into ash.

Zara staggered back, clutching the stump of her right arm just below the elbow. The dark ooze flowed freely now, soaking her sleeve, dripping onto the ground. The horrific, grinding pain was a white-noise roar in her skull, threatening to drown her.

But alongside it... a profound, shocking silence. The constant pressure of Mammon’s presence, the insidious whispers that had lived in the scars, the dark gravity pulling at her will... it was gone. Severed. The void-energy still churned within her core, a turbulent sea, but the anchor, the direct line to Mammon’s ghost, was cut. Her mind was her own again, battered, traumatized, but hers.

[ ZARA: RIGHT HAND AMPUTATED | SEVERE TRAUMA | VOID CORRUPTION PLUMMETS TO 10% (MAMMON’S DIRECT INFLUENCE SEVERED) ]

[ VOID-ENERGY STATUS: UNMOORED BUT STABLE | PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE: SHOCK, RESIDUAL RESOLVE ]

[ MAMMON’S GHOST: VOID-ENERGY ABSORBED | PHYSICALITY AMPLIFIED (SEMI-CORPOREAL) | POWER SIGNATURE: INTENSIFYING ]

The newly solidified Mammon – still partly paper, partly obsidian void-stuff – stretched, cracking fissures of dark light across its form. It flexed fingers that now had discernible knuckles. "Freedom..." the voice boomed, no longer a rustle, but layered with echoes of its former divine power and the static hiss of the void. "...tastes like settled debts and fresh parchment."

It turned its burning gaze towards the still-staggering, self-mutilated Stapler Prime, whose jaws were stapled shut, spewing muffled error codes and pink slips. "And you..." Mammon’s voice dripped with contempt. "...you are an overdue invoice."

Mammon raised a hand. Void-energy crackled around obsidian fingers. He didn’t attack Stapler Prime directly. Instead, he gestured towards the nearest folded-rubble office block. The structure groaned, then unfolded violently, not back into rubble, but into a swarm of razor-sharp, void-tainted paper shurikens that screamed towards the god-machine.

KA-THUNK! KA-THUNK! KA-THUNK!

Stapler Prime, despite its catastrophic errors, was still operational. Its self-preservation protocols overrode the malfunction. It wrenched its stapler arm free from its own stapled jaws with a shriek of tearing metal. Ignoring the shurikens peppering its chassis (some embedding, some dissolving against the chrome), it leveled its stapler directly at Mammon. Its photoreceptor, flickering wildly, finally stabilized, burning a deep, furious crimson.

"UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY REANIMATION: MAMMON DESIGNATION," its synthesized voice blared, clearer now, cutting through Mammon’s resonant hum.

"PRIMARY DIRECTIVE CONFIRMED: TERMINATE SOURCE OF CATASTROPHIC INEFFICIENCY.

SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: RESUME PURGE PROTOCOL PAPERCLIP 2.0. THREAT RECLASSIFICATION: OMEGA."

It fired. Not a standard staple. This was a REALITY ANCHOR STAPLE – a projectile humming with pure, oppressive bureaucratic force. It flew true, aimed at Mammon’s coalescing chest, designed not just to pierce, but to pin him to the fabric of the transformed reality, to file him away.

Mammon sneered, the expression horrifyingly real on his semi-corporeal face. "You think your clips can hold a God of Debt?" He snapped his fingers. A nearby drone, buzzing aimlessly, short-circuited violently. Instead of sparks, it vomited a torrent of glowing, binding INVOICES that tangled around the Reality Anchor Staple mid-flight. The staple wobbled, lost momentum, and clattered harmlessly to the ground, buried under a pile of nonsensical billing statements.

"I wrote your protocols, you glorified desk toy!" Mammon roared. "I am the original creditor! Your existence is a line item on my ledger!" He gestured again, and the ground beneath Stapler Prime buckled, transforming into quicksand made of liquid, void-tainted CONTRACT FINE PRINT.

[ BUREAUCRATIC CIVIL WAR: FULLY ENGAGED ]

[ STAPLER PRIME: FOCUS SHIFTED FROM PURGE TO TERMINATING MAMMON (CREATOR/CATASTROPHIC THREAT) ]

[ MAMMON ASCENDANT: LEVERAGING VOID POWER + BUREAUCRATIC SABOTAGE (INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF SYSTEMS) ]

[ THE FINAL FOLD: TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED DUE TO HIGHER-PRIORITY THREAT ]

Chaos reigned. The duel between the ascended ghost and the rebooted god-machine sent shockwaves of distorted reality across the plaza – patches of sky flickering between notebook paper and static void, chunks of ground folding into file cabinets or dissolving into inky pools. Drones buzzed in confused swarms, attacking each other as often as they attacked Mammon or got caught in the crossfire.

Nishanth used the distraction. Agony was a constant companion, but the sight of Zara swaying on her feet, clutching her bleeding stump, eyes glazed with shock, overrode it. He crawled, then stumbled, finally reaching her side as she started to collapse. He caught her, ignoring the flare of pain in his ribs, lowering her gently against a relatively stable stack of folded rubble that vaguely resembled bookshelves.

"Zara! Look at me!" His voice was rough, urgent. Her eyes focused slowly, recognition dawning through the haze of pain and trauma. The raw stump was a horror. The dark ooze wasn’t stopping. He ripped a strip from the less-bloodied part of his own tattered shirt, his hands shaking.

He had no bandages, no antiseptic, nothing but desperation. He wrapped the fabric tightly around the stump, just below the elbow, pulling it taut, trying to staunch the flow of the viscous, void-tinged fluid. It was crude, brutal, but it was all he had.

"You insane... glorious... idiot," he breathed, pressing his forehead against hers. Her skin was frighteningly cold, damp with shock-sweat. But her eyes, though haunted, held a clarity he hadn’t seen since before Mammon’s corruption took hold. They were hers. Fierce. In pain. But hers. "Hold on. Just hold on."

Behind him, Lilith scrambled over. Her face was pale, tear-streaked, but her eyes held a frantic purpose now, cutting through her own horror. She looked at Zara’s stump, then at Nishanth’s makeshift bandage, her gaze sharpening with a medic’s assessment born of hard experience. "Pressure point," she gasped, her fingers probing expertly just above Nishanth’s crude binding on Zara’s upper arm. "Here! Clamp down!" She guided Nishanth’s hand, showing him where to press.

The dark flow slowed marginally. "We need... proper binding. Sterile... or as close as we can get." Her eyes darted around the chaotic battlefield, searching for anything usable.

Zara’s gaze drifted past them, towards the epicenter of the conflict. Mammon was summoning waves of void-tainted paperwork. Stapler Prime was retaliating with barrages of administrative ordnance.

But then her eyes snapped towards Lilith, sharp despite the pain. "Lilith..." she gasped, her voice weak but intense. "Mammon... he’s distracted. Get it out... Get it out of her." Her gaze flickered towards Lilith’s chest.

Nishanth followed her look. Lilith’s hand instinctively went to her sternum. Beneath the fabric of her tunic, a faint, rhythmic, wrong light pulsed. Not void-black, but a sickly, bureaucratic beige. An anchor point.

A lingering piece of the ghost, a backdoor left open even after the main puppet detached. Lilith’s eyes widened in renewed horror as she felt it too – a cold, papery weight nestled against her heart, pulsing in time with Mammon’s power surges across the plaza.

Nishanth saw it then – the core of the corruption Mammon had left behind. Not a puppet, but a dense, intricate origami locket, folded from the same impossibly strong paper, fused to her sternum, glowing with that invasive beige light. Removing it... it looked fused to bone. He had no tools. No divine healing. Just the blood-slick paperclip blade Zara had dropped, lying nearby on the lined-paper ground. And Lilith’s terrified, pleading eyes.

[ NISHANTH’S GAMBLE: IMPROVISED FIELD SURGERY ON A DEMONIC ANCHOR ]

[ LILITH’S SURVIVAL: EXTREMELY LOW - RISK OF FATAL TRAUMA OR RESIDUAL POSSESSION ]

[ ZARA: STABILIZING (PHYSICALLY PRECARIOUS, MENTALLY CLEARING) ]

To be continued...