My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0017 - The Wolf's Feast

The air in the warehouse didn't just smell of dust anymore. It smelled of ozone and wet dog.

Victor watched from the shadows of the mezzanine, his hand gripping the cold iron railing. His hip throbbed, a dull, rhythmic ache that synchronized with the whirring of the drones above. He didn't look at the pain. He felt the numbers.

They weren't floating in the air. They were itching behind his eyes. A hundred thousand invisible parasites burrowing into his optic nerve. The air grew heavy with the static of mass observation, a pressure that had nothing to do with atmospherics and everything to do with the density of attention.

"Clear the sky," Victor whispered.

It wasn't a shout. It didn't need to be. The shadow crouched beside him didn't obey laws of physics, let alone acoustic commands. Fenrir didn't jump; he erupted.

The floorboards didn't just creak; they screamed. A crater of splintered wood exploded where the wolf had been, and then the massive, furred shape was airborne, a blur of darkness against the strobe-lit ceiling.

Wet metal shrieked. It sounded like a car compactor chewing on a bag of silverware.

The sound was final.

Three drones vanished from the formation before the noise even hit the microphone. One moment they were hovering, their camera lenses focusing on the "set," and the next, they were scrap metal raining down onto the concrete.

"HOLY s**t!" Kai screamed, his voice cracking. He was staring at the tablet screen, his face illuminated by the chat feed. "DID YOU SEE THAT? LOOK AT THAT FRAMERATE! NO BLUR! ZERO BLUR!"

He wasn't looking at the monster. He was looking at the capture.

Jinx was backing away, her camera shaking in her hands. "Kai..."

"It's practical effects!" Kai yelled, spinning around to face his camera, manic grin plastered on his face. "Guys, are you seeing this? They must have a wire rig up there! That speed is impossible! This is movie quality! No, this is better than movie quality!"

Above them, the swarm reacted. The remaining drones—two dozen of them—shifted formation. It was a fluid, algorithmic movement, a wave of carbon fiber and plastic logic responding to an illogical threat. They moved with the jerky, synchronized twitch of a single, agitated organism. Their programming identified the anomaly. Red lights blinked in unison, a constellation of angry stars in the gloom. They dove.

Fenrir didn't land. He kicked off a steel support beam, his claws tearing through the metal like it was wet cardboard. Sparks showered down, a cascade of gold and orange. The wolf twisted in mid-air, a defiance of gravity that made Victor's inner ear ache.

Jaws snapped. A drone was caught mid-dive.

HISS.

Batteries ruptured. Lithium-ion fluid sprayed across Fenrir’s muzzle. It sizzled against the shadow-fur, boiling instantly. The reaction was violent and immediate. Black smoke billowed from the wolf's snout, but the creature didn't slow down. If anything, the pain seemed to fuel him.

The smell hit them a second later—a toxic cocktail of acrid chemicals, burning plastic, and the ancient, musk scent of a predator that had hunted in forests older than humanity. It was a sensory assault that watered the eyes and burned the throat.

A drop of the burning fluid landed on the concrete floor near Jinx’s boot. It didn't just splash; it hissed like a living thing. The liquid ate through the layer of warehouse dust and pitted the cement, bubbling and frothing as it chewed into the foundation. It sent up a thin, spiraling wisp of white smoke that smelled of death and batteries.

Jinx stopped moving. She stared at the pockmark in the floor. Her eyes widened, not with the performative shock of a streamer, but with the hollow, cold dawn of realization.

"That's acid," she whispered. She looked up, her gaze locking onto the wolf as it landed on a stack of crates, crushing them into splinters. "Kai! That's battery acid! It's real!"

"It's immersion!" Kai roared, punching the air. "Smell-o-vision! They got the scent canons working! We are hitting 150k concurrents! Keep the camera steady, you useless—"

"It's not a prop!" Jinx screamed. She dropped the heavy stabilizer rig. The camera clattered to the floor, the lens cracking, but the feed kept running, filming the ceiling at a crooked angle. "There are no wires, Kai! Look at the beam! He tore the steel!"

She scrambled backward, her heels skidding on the grit. "I'm out! I'm done! This isn't a show!"

She turned to run for the basement door, the only exit she knew.

Kai grabbed her arm. His grip wasn't protective; it was ownership. His fingernails dug into her jacket. "Are you crazy? We are peaking! Do you know how much this stream is worth right now? Don't you dare cut the feed!"

"Let me go!" Jinx clawed at his hand. "That thing is going to kill us!"

"It's a suit! It's a robot! It's—"

The impact shook the floorboards through the soles of Kai's shoes. A vibration that traveled up his shinbones and settled in his teeth.

A drone carcass, stripped of its rotors and crushed into a ball of metal, slammed into the ground between them. It was smoking. It smelled like burnt hair.

Victor stepped out of the shadows. He walked with a slight limp, leaning on the iron ladle as if it were a gentleman's cane. The pain in his hip was a sharp, grounding anchor. He needed it. Without the pain, the adrenaline would have floated him right off the floor. He adjusted his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. The plastic frame was slick with sweat.

The world tilted slightly to the left. A taste of copper flooded Victor's mouth—the flavor of stabilized greed. The spiral in his vision slowed, hardened into a cold, golden arithmetic that overlaid the physical world. He saw the drones not as machines, but as flying dollar signs, their destruction calculating in real-time deductions. He saw Kai not as a person, but as a walking viral coefficient.

"The show," Victor said. His voice was flat. Bored. The voice of a man disputing a parking ticket. "Is over."

Kai spun around. "Over? We're just getting started! The audience loves the villain entrance! Give me a monologue! Tell them you're the... the Dungeon Master! The Wolf King!"

Fenrir dropped from the ceiling. He landed silently behind Kai. The wolf was massive, his head brushing the hanging lights. Drool, mixed with black smoke, dripped from his jaws. A low growl started deep in his chest, a sound that vibrated the floorboards and rattled the teeth in Kai's skull.

Kai froze. He didn't turn around. He felt the heat radiating from the beast. He smelled the blood and the ozone.

The last drone fell from the air, batted down by a casual swipe of a shadow-tail.

Silence returned to the warehouse, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the sizzling of ruined electronics.

Victor approached Kai. He didn't look at the streamer. He looked at the phone in Kai's hand, the one still broadcasting the face of a terrified man standing in front of a nightmare.

"Did... did you get that?" Kai whispered, his voice trembling. He was hyperventilating, his eyes darting from Victor to the massive shape breathing down his neck. "Please tell me the bitrate held up."

Victor reached out. His fingers were long, pale, and steady. He plucked the phone from Kai's numb grip.

"We got it," Victor said. He looked at the screen. The chat was moving so fast it was a blur of color. The viewer count was climbing.

"Now," Victor said, tapping the screen to end the stream with a deliberate, final click, "the fee."

"F-fee?" Kai stammered, his eyes bulging. He looked small now, stripped of his digital armor. "I... I can pay. I have subs. I have ad revenue. We can split it. 50/50? 60/40? I can transfer it right now! Just don't hurt me!" He fumbled for a wallet that wasn't there, then remembered his phone was in Victor's pocket. His hands shook uncontrollably, hovering in the air like he was trying to catch invisible flies.

"You don't understand," Kai pleaded, his voice rising to a desperate squeak. "That phone... that account... it's my life. It's my algorithm! You can't just take it! It's verified!"

Victor slipped the phone into his breast pocket, patting it gently. "I don't want your money, Kai. And I don't care about your verification tick. I want your asset. You came here to steal a show. Consider this the production cost."

He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper that carried more weight than a shout. "And be grateful. The other payment option involved you becoming dog food."

He turned to Fenrir, who was watching the exchange with a hungry, yellow intensity. "He's leaving. Escort him. If he stops running before he hits the city limits, you can have a snack."

The wolf snarled.

Kai didn't need to be told twice. He bolted, running past Jinx, scrambling up the stairs, leaving his equipment, his cameras, and his dignity behind. Jinx followed him, not looking back, her breath hitching in sob-like gasps.

The heavy metal door slammed shut above them.

Victor stood alone in the wreckage. He looked around the warehouse. It was a mess. Debris was scattered everywhere. The floor was pitted with acid. The air was thick with smoke.

But the silence... the silence was expensive.

Yggdrasil emerged from the concrete floor, a slow, agonizing extrusion of wood and spirit. Roots burst through the acid-pitted cement, weaving together to form the face of an old man, etched with the rings of a thousand years. Dust and debris cascaded off his bark-skin features. He looked around the warehouse, his hollow eyes taking in the wreckage of the drones, the scorch marks on the walls, and the lingering smoke.

"Messy," the spirit grumbled, his voice sounding like dry leaves rustling in a gale. "Very messy. Do you know how hard it is to get lithium stains out of the spirit web? The cleaning bill will be astronomical. And the mana consumption... we are in the red, Victor. Deep in the red."

Victor ignored the botanical complaint. He pulled the phone out of his pocket, wiping a smear of Kai's sweat off the screen with his thumb. The glass was cracked, a spiderweb fracture running diagonally across the display, but the recording was saved.

A notification pinged in the air, a bright gold glitch against the gloom.

NOTIFICATION: VIRAL EVENT DETECTED.

Reputation: +500.

Revenue: Pending.

Victor smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who had just realized that in a world gone mad, the only currency that mattered was the ability to broadcast the insanity.

"Upload it," Victor said to the empty air. "Monetize everything."

He turned and walked toward the kitchen, stepping over the ruin of a drone. He needed coffee. And maybe a calculator.