My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0039 — The Crimson Appraisal

The air at the summit of the Glass Pyramid was not breathable for living things. It was scrubbed, ionized, and chilled to a precise zero degrees Celsius—the optimal temperature for preserving biological samples and high-frequency trading servers.

Isabelle sat in a chair that resembled a dentist’s operating table, suspended in the center of a spherical room made entirely of transparent screens. She did not look out at the city below. The sprawling, neon-vomiting mess of the Lower Districts was irrelevant. It was a bad investment. A sunk cost.

Instead, she watched the numbers.

"Hemoglobin Futures are down," she murmured, her voice vibrating against the sterile silence. "The war in the Northern Rift has stabilized. Supply is up. Demand is flat."

She flicked a gloved finger. A holographic ticker tape dissolved into red mist.

Isabelle was not a warrior. The Crimson Court had plenty of those—brutes who still believed that power came from ripping throats with teeth. How quaint. How medieval. Isabelle was an actuary. She understood that true power wasn't about how much blood you could spill, but how much you could leverage.

She inhaled. A thin tube connected to her collarbone hissed, delivering a micro-dose of purified, oxygen-enriched plasma directly into her vein. It was lunch. No mess. No biting. Just efficiency.

She had optimized her biology with the same ruthlessness she applied to her portfolio. Her heart had been replaced by a quiet, rhythmic pump that didn't flutter with adrenaline. Her eyes were augmented with thermal overlays and rapid-scanning software that could read a thousand lines of code in a blink. She had liquidated her own humanity to maximize her processing speed.

"Report on the Distressed Asset Portfolio," she commanded.

The room shifted. The financial data of the city’s underworld materialized. g**g territories were represented as heat maps of potential revenue. Slave markets were actuarial tables of depreciating labor.

She paused on a file marked Werewolf Clan: Silver-Fang.

"Asset status?"

"Insolvent," the system replied, its voice as smooth as glass. "Territory yield has dropped by 15% due to internal conflict. Alpha male shows signs of cognitive decline."

Isabelle didn't hesitate. "Initiate foreclosure. Sell their territory rights to the ghoul syndicates. Harvest the Alpha for alchemical components. His liver should still fetch a decent price on the black market."

"Confirmed. Liquidation in progress."

Pity was a variable she had eliminated years ago. It ruined the projection models. The clan was an underperforming asset. She was merely correcting the market.

Isabelle leaned back, letting the cold air circulate around her synthetic skin. This was the burden of leadership. The Elders below slept in their crypts, dreaming of ancient conquests, while she kept the lights on. She managed the portfolio of an empire that was slowly rotting from the inside.

A red light blinked in the bottom left quadrant. District 13. The Slums.

Isabelle frowned. That sector was supposed to be a write-off. A garbage dump where the city’s sewage and failed experiments went to rot. The projected ROI for District 13 was zero.

But the light was pulsing.

She expanded the data stream. It wasn't a riot or a plague—those were common variance. This was a transaction.

Item: Scrap Metal (Classification: Unknown Alloy).

Seller: Iron-Jaw (Status: Presumed Deceased/Defected).

Buyer: The Smelter's Guild.

Purity: 99.9% Refined Stygian Iron.

Isabelle tapped the timestamp. "Transaction Date: Fourteen days ago."

She scoffed. "Typical. The Smelter's Guild tried to cook the books. They held the asset in a dampening field, likely hoping to melt it down before the quarterly audit. But they underestimated the isotope scanners."

It was a clumsy attempt at embezzlement. But their incompetence was her opportunity.

Isabelle’s eyes, pale as spreadsheets, narrowed. Stygian Iron didn't exist in the slums. You couldn't refine it in a trash can. It required an industrial-grade alchemical furnace, the kind that cost more than the entire district combined.

And then, the second anomaly hit.

A spike in the Ethereal Resonance Index. It was brief, a millisecond blip, but the signature was unmistakable. It was old. It tasted like dust, velvet, and absolute authority.

Source: Progenitor Class. Lineage: Bathory.

Isabelle sat up. The tube at her collarbone detached with a soft pneumatic hiss.

"Impossible," she whispered. The Bathory line was insolvent. Their assets had been liquidated centuries ago. The Matriarch, Carmilla, was a fugitive—a 'Toxic Asset' to be avoided at all costs.

But the data didn't lie. Carmilla was in District 13. And she wasn't hiding in a sewer. The resonance signature suggested she was... clean. The energy wasn't erratic or decaying. It was stable. Optimized.

Someone had fixed her.

Isabelle tapped the console. "Initiate Hostile Takeover Protocol. Target: District 13, Sector 4."

"Negative," a synthesized voice replied. "Sector 4 is flagged as a Hazard Zone. High probability of feral ghoul infestation. Council Recommendation: Purge via Incendiary Bombardment."

"Overruled," Isabelle said. She stood up, her heels clicking on the glass floor. Beneath her, two hundred floors down, the city was a chaotic blur of suffering. But up here, everything was clear.

"Connect me to the Board."

The walls of the room darkened. Three towering silhouettes appeared, projected in static-laced blue light. The Elders. They sat on thrones of bone in some deep, dark crypt, refusing to embrace the digital age. They looked like monsters. Isabelle looked like a CEO.

The Elder on the left was chewing on something wet and struggling. The sound of snapping bone echoed through the high-fidelity speakers.

"Isabelle," the central figure rumbled. His voice sounded like grinding stones. "Why do you disturb our slumber? Has the stock market crashed?"

"Opportunity," Isabelle said, smoothing her white suit. "I have detected a Grade-A anomaly in the Slums. A high-purity alloy production source co-located with a stabilized Progenitor entity."

"Carmilla," the Elder hissed. "The Abomination. We voted to terminate her contract of existence."

"You voted to waste resources," Isabelle corrected, her tone flat. "If Carmilla is stable, she is no longer a liability. She is a vintage asset. And whoever stabilized her... whoever refined that iron..."

She pulled up the transaction log again. The scrap metal had been sold for a pittance. The seller didn't know its value.

"Someone down there is performing high-level alchemy," Isabelle said. "But they are operating without a license, without market awareness, and likely without capital. They are sitting on a gold mine and selling the ore for pennies."

"So?" the Elder growled. "Burn them. Take the gold."

Isabelle sighed. This was why the Elders were obsolete. They lacked vision. They were stuck in the feudal era of 'Raiding', while she was playing the modern game of 'Acquisition'.

"If you burn a factory, you get ash," she explained, as if talking to a slow child. "If you acquire the factory, you get production. This isn't a threat, my lords. It's a startup. An unregulated, undervalued startup with proprietary technology that can cure a Progenitor."

The silhouettes shifted. Greed, unlike technology, was a universal language.

"What do you propose?"

"An audit," Isabelle said. "I will go down there. I will assess the facility's capabilities. I will inspect the books. And if the 'management' is competent, I will offer them a restructuring plan."

"And if they refuse?"

Isabelle checked her reflection in the glass wall. Her face was perfectly symmetrical, terrifyingly blank.

"Then I will initiate a leveraged buyout," she said. "Which, in layman's terms, means I will repossess their organs."

The Elders grunted in approval. The connection severed. The room returned to its pristine, icy brightness.

Isabelle walked to the window. Far in the distance, hanging low over the horizon, the Red Moon was rising. It was fuller than usual, swollen with a sickly crimson light. The market indices for 'Apocalyptic Events' were trending upward.

She pulled up the 'Red Moon Index'. The graph was a steep, jagged climb.

Probability of catastrophic dimensional breach: 78% within 30 days.

A storm was coming. The Crimson Court needed resources. They needed bunkers that could withstand a reality collapse. They needed talent that could fix the unfixable. If this 'startup' in District 13 had actually cured a Bathory... they were more valuable than the entire stock market.

She picked up her briefcase—a sleek, carbon-fiber box that contained not papers, but a set of surgical dismantling tools and a blank check.

"Prepare the transport," she told the room. "And authorize a withdrawal from the reserve blood bank. I have a feeling this negotiation might require... liquidity."

She stepped into the private elevator. The doors slid shut, sealing her in a capsule of silence.

Gravity took hold.

The numbers on the display plummeted, counting down from the heavens to the hell below.

Floor 200. The Executive Zone. Clouds drifted past the windows. Here, the air was filtered, and the sun actually shone. It was the domain of the Apex Predators, the ones who owned the city. She could see the floating gardens of the High Elves and the obsidian towers of the Necromancer's Union. It was a paradise built on the backs of the damned.

Floor 150. The Upper Corporate Belt. The sunlight turned gray, filtered through the smog layer. The buildings here were functional, brutalist blocks of concrete and steel, housing the mid-level vampires and the human collaborators who sold their souls for a pension plan. Isabelle sneered. This was the realm of middle management—creatures who had just enough power to be cruel, but not enough to be significant.

Floor 100. The Filtration Grid. A massive layer of industrial air scrubbers that separated the breathable air of the upper city from the toxic soup below. Passing through it was like diving into a muddy river. The elevator shook as it pierced the barrier. The light outside the window vanished, replaced by the flickering orange glow of sodium lamps.

Floor 50. The Industrial Spine. The view disappeared, replaced by thick, choking smog. The lights were artificial neons, flickering and dying. The architecture became cancerous, buildings growing on top of buildings like tumors. Pipes leaked glowing fluids, and steam vented from cracks in the walls. This was the engine room of the city, where the gears ground the bones of the poor into dust.

Floor 25. The Residential Warrens. A hive of humanity. Cramped, dirty, and desperate. Isabelle could see figures moving in the shadows, scurrying like rats. They were the labor force, the battery cells that powered the economy. They lived, worked, and died without ever seeing the sun.

Floor 0. District 13.

The elevator shuddered as it hit the bottom. The doors opened, not to a lobby, but to a world of noise. The scream of sirens, the roar of illegal engines, the constant, low-frequency hum of misery.

Isabelle stepped out. Her white suit was a beacon in the grime. The air here tasted of rust and desperation. It was heavy, humid, and clinging.

She checked her wrist-comp. The signal was strong.

"Asset located," she whispered.

It was time to go shopping.