System S.E.X. (Seduction, Expansion, eXecution)

Chapter 384: The Weight of a Mountain

"Eth... Ethan... he... I..." stuttered Chloe, her voice breaking as months of repressed longing collided with the crushing reality of her current nightmare.

McKenzie’s smile didn’t drop, but it curdled. He wasn’t a warrior, but he was a shark in the boardroom; he could smell the history between them like blood in the water. His face distorted for a fraction of a second—a flash of pure, ugly jealousy—before he forced his composure back into place. He reached out a hand, aiming to pull Chloe back toward him, a desperate attempt to mark his territory in front of the most powerful man in the room.

"Is something the matter, my love?" asked McKenzie, his voice dripping with a forced, sugary possessiveness.

He never reached her.

Before his fingers could even brush her sleeve, two blurs of black tactical fabric intercepted him. One Falcon gripped his shoulder with the force of a hydraulic vice, while the other wrapped a gloved hand around the back of his neck. They didn’t speak. They simply stared at him with cold, vacant eyes, as if they were looking at a corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.

"What is the meaning of this, Mr. Ethan?" hissed McKenzie, his voice cracking with a mix of indignation and rising terror. "Isn’t it a bit beneath a man of your stature to try and steal another man’s woman?"

The word ’woman’ hit the air like a match dropped into a powder keg.

Ethan turned his head slowly, his amethyst eyes locking onto McKenzie’s with a gaze so heavy it felt physical. As he shifted his weight, the reinforced marble tile beneath his custom-made shoe shattered into a web of white dust. A tremor shook the floor, causing the champagne flutes on the surrounding tables to rattle and chime. The entire gala went silent, every head turning toward the source of the seismic pressure.

"Whose woman did you say she was?" said Ethan.

His voice wasn’t a shout. It was a low, that seemed to bypass the ears and strike directly at the bone.

Behind McKenzie, several of his associates—young heirs and vice presidents fueled by liquid courage and arrogance—started to move forward to defend their leader. They didn’t make it two steps. The remaining three Falcons stepped into their path, their hands hovering inches from their sidearms. The message was written in the scars on the soldiers’ knuckles. One more step, and this floor becomes a slaughterhouse.

Mr. Brooks stood frozen, watching the scene unfold. He saw the way Ethan looked at his daughter—not as a prize, and certainly not as a business asset, but as something sacred that had been defiled by the very mention of McKenzie’s name.

Anne, still seated at the table, swirled her Darkice wine, her eyes glowing with predatory delight. "Oh, Ethan," she whispered to herself. "You really do have a flair for the dramatic when your heart is involved."

Just as the first drop of blood seemed inevitable, a wet, wheezing laughter echoed from the back of the hall.

Ethan’s expression shifted instantly from cold fury to disgust. He turned his head slightly, his eyes narrowing as two figures approached. Leading the way was a middle-aged man with a grotesquely obese frame, his expensive silk suit struggling to contain his bulging waistline. But it was the man behind him who drew Ethan’s true focus. He looked just as massive, an elder with a similarly prominent stomach, but to a trained eye, the difference was terrifying. The elder wasn’t made of fat; his body was a pillar of hyper-extended, overdeveloped muscle. Even his protruding belly was a solid mass of hardened core strength.

Ethan recognized the first man immediately—the Leader of the Scavengers. The second, however, was a complete stranger to him, though they shared similar facial features as if they were family. His aura was dense and blood-red, vibrating with a power that rivaled Ethan’s own.

"My good and esteemed young Ethan... it has been quite some time," the Scavenger Leader wheezed, his voice oily and thick.

"I would have preferred never seeing your disgusting face again for the rest of my life," Ethan replied, his voice cutting through the leader’s false pleasantries like a serrated blade.

A collective gasp rippled through the gala. The title of Scavenger Leader wasn’t empty; it represented absolute control over a vast, brutal territory. No one was insane enough to insult him so openly—especially not in the presence of his Ancestor. The Guardian of the Scavengers rarely appeared, but whenever he did, the enemies of the clan tended to vanish. In this era, few possessed the strength to even stand in the old man’s shadow.

"You are as arrogant as they say, boy..." the Ancestor growled, his voice like grinding stones.

Ethan didn’t even grant him a direct look. "And what is this thing accompanying you? Is he your husband?"

The Ancestor’s fury reached the heavens. In his long, blood-soaked life, when had he ever been belittled? When had he been treated as anything less than a god walking among mortals? To be called a "thing" by a brat half his age was a stain that could only be washed away in gore.

Losing all semblance of restraint, the Ancestor moved. Despite his mountain-like size, he blurred into a streak of impossible speed, his massive fist aimed at Ethan’s head.

He never touched a hair on Ethan’s head.

The five Falcons moved even faster, their Bone Refinement bodies, supercharged by the Queen Worm’s Nectar, reacting with precision. They didn’t just block; they destroy his attack.

The first Falcon struck the inside of the Ancestor’s shoulder. The second hit the inner hinge of the elbow. The third seized the wrist. The fourth met the front of the fist with a counter-thrust, and the fifth delivered a devastating palm strike to the elder’s torso.

Though the Ancestor’s raw strength was colossal, the Falcons’ strikes were surgical. By hitting the critical joints and nerve clusters simultaneously, they completely neutralized his momentum. The massive force of the elder’s punch vanished into thin air, leaving him frozen in a geometric lock, his power redirected and dissipated before it could even vibrate the air around Ethan.

Ethan stood perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, looking at the trapped Ancestor with a bored gaze.

"You’re a little too fast for a ’funny chubby guy,’ don’t you think?" Ethan whispered.