Ghost Talent
“Hey hey hey!”
“Hey hey hey!”
“Hey hey hey!”
The megaphone kept repeating the same meaningless shout.
The robbers exchanged glances. Pig Head cautiously approached the door, and the automatic sensor door slid open.
Pressing himself against the wall beside it, he stuck half his head out to look.
At that moment, a dark object flew into the bank, struck the wall, and landed with a dull thud.
Every eye in the room snapped to it.
“This thing… looks like a bomb?” Monkey took a few steps closer, uncertain.
“Bomb!”
The hostages erupted into panic.
“Bingo!”
A voice rang out from outside.
Pig Head spun to look. A fully armed officer holding a blast shield was protecting a young man in a black suit. Taking advantage of the distraction, the two had already reached the bank entrance.
Pig Head startled and yanked himself back behind the wall.
The robbers inside, seeing this, instinctively took cover and trained their guns on the entrance.
Monkey grabbed a hostage, pulled her in front of him as a shield, and shouted, “Who are you? What do you want? Back off, or these people die!”
“Don’t be nervous.” Wen Yiqian wore a calm smile. “I’m here to negotiate.”
“We don’t negotiate with you. Get your squad leader!” Monk pulled the trigger.
The shot seemed to be a warning. It hit the blast shield and ricocheted away.
“Is that so…” Wen Yiqian nodded, reached into the officer’s vest pocket, and pulled out a palm-sized sphere. He tossed it casually toward an empty corner of the bank.
Pig Head was crouched nearby. He watched the sphere roll to a stop beside him and blinked, thrown off.
“What are you playing at?” Monkey pressed the muzzle harder against the hostage’s forehead. “Go get your squad leader right now, or don’t blame me for what happens next!”
“That,” Wen Yiqian said, raising an eyebrow, “is a small bomb. Let me show you some fireworks~”
He pulled the officer back a few steps and held up a small transparent marble.
Pig Head sensed something was wrong and scrambled away from the sphere.
Wen Yiqian lightly squeezed the marble.
Boom!!
The explosion was deafening. Flames tore outward in every direction. The shockwave, carrying a wall of heat, sent Pig Head flying before he’d made it halfway across the room.
The hostages screamed. Some tried to flatten themselves against the floor. Others weren’t fast enough and were caught by debris, their cries of pain swallowed by the noise.
Outside the perimeter, the squad leader and Li Weiguo heard the blast and felt their hearts seize.
Neither of them could explain, even now, why they had agreed to hand over full command to Wen Yiqian and cooperate with something this reckless.
Looking back, they couldn’t account for it.
Maybe it was his unshakeable confidence. Maybe he simply possessed some quality that made people fall in line.
Or maybe they’d had no other options.
The officer raised the blast shield again and walked Wen Yiqian back toward the entrance.
“Are you insane!”
Monkey, crouched behind a pillar, poked his head out and roared.
“The one I threw in first?” Wen Yiqian pointed to the sphere still resting quietly against the wall. “That was the small one. The one in the corner has twenty times the yield.”
All these devices had come from Liao Tong, the son of Ditan City’s wealthiest man. Young as he was, the boy was a genuine prodigy when it came to explosives.
The robbers didn’t want to believe it. But what they had just witnessed made doubt difficult.
This man was a lunatic.
An absolute, unequivocal lunatic.
Pig Head was still on the floor. That settled it.
“Are you insane? We’ll be blown up too!”
“Aren’t you a police officer?”
“Aren’t you here to save us?”
“What are you doing?”
The hostages were shouting now, voices overlapping in a wave of accusation.
“That’s right. I’m here to save you.” Wen Yiqian smiled, reached into the officer’s pocket again, and lobbed another sphere toward the hostages.
“Ah!”
They scattered in every direction, screaming. Even the robbers standing among them stumbled back in a panic.
“Hahahaha…”
Wen Yiqian laughed, long and loud, like a child who had pulled off a perfect prank. The sound bounced off the walls and carried through the building, saturated with a kind of gleeful wrongness.
Fear spread through the room like a gas leak: invisible, total, inescapable.
The hostages felt it. The robbers felt it. Even the officer behind the blast shield was sweating through his uniform.
If he hadn’t sworn absolute obedience to every order before stepping inside, he could not have stood there looking calm.
“What do you actually want?” Monkey cautiously peered out from cover. The bomb hadn’t gone off.
“Are you a fish? I already told you: I’m here to negotiate.” Wen Yiqian looked genuinely puzzled.
“Who negotiates like this?” Monkey shouted.
“Fine. I’ll be more professional.” Wen Yiqian held a marble pinched lightly between two fingers. “This is the detonator for the bomb in the corner. One squeeze, and the entire bank…”
His voice dropped.
“…becomes rubble.”
Silence.
Monk stepped forward from cover. He walked directly to the large device, fingers trembling, and picked it up.
“If you set that off, you die too.” He turned to face Wen Yiqian, voice firm. “I don’t think you dare.”
“Sharp.” Wen Yiqian’s lips curved slightly.
He tossed the marble into the bank.
The room detonated into screaming.
Cries of terror, of despair, of people convinced they were about to die, filled every corner of the building. It was deafening.
Monk stood holding the device, mind completely blank, body locked in place, unable to move a single muscle.
Tap~
Tap~
Tap-tap-tap~
The marble bounced across the floor, each contact ringing out clean and crisp in the chaos.
Time seemed to stop. The faces around the room, frozen mid-scream, mid-prayer, mid-collapse, held the expression of people who had already accepted death.
Then nothing happened.
The relief hit all at once, crashing through the room like a wave.
Monk’s legs gave out. He folded to the floor, the device still in his hands, strength gone completely.
“You didn’t actually believe it, did you?”
The voice from the doorway was warm with amusement.
(End of Chapter)