Part XXXVIII - The One-Week War
The drive from her house back to the garage was the quietest ten minutes of Maria's life. In the passenger seat, Marcus stared blankly out the window, the ghost of Gary's predatory terms still haunting his eyes. In the back, Isaiah was silent, a small, still figure buckled into his car seat, his gaze already fixed on the future he was pulling into existence.
Maria's hands were tight on the steering wheel. The sheer absurdity of their life was overwhelming. One moment, she was the majority shareholder of a company making a life-or-death deal. Next, she was making sure her son's seatbelt was secure. Her son, who was also her boss, was the architect of their impossible situation.
When they pulled up to the garage, the tension was a physical presence. They walked inside. The thick stack of cash sat on the workbench where Marcus had left it, looking more like a bomb than a lifeline. Without a word, Isaiah walked past the money, his expression unreadable, went directly to his desk, picked up a pencil, and began to draw. The soft, methodical scratch of lead on paper filled the silence.
Marcus stared at the cash, then at Isaiah, who was already lost in his work. He looked at Maria, his eyes hard with a grim new resolve. There was no time to feel sorry for themselves. The one-week clock was ticking.
"I'll get the others," he said, his voice low and rough.
He left the garage and walked to the small back rooms where the twins and Rico slept. He didn't bother knocking. He flipped on the lights, the sudden glare making them groan and recoil. "Up," he ordered, his tone leaving no room for argument. "Now. Meet us in the garage."
A few minutes later, Rico and the twins stumbled into the workshop, rubbing sleep from their eyes, their confusion turning to alarm as they saw the tense atmosphere. It was then that they saw it: the stack of cash sitting ominously on the workbench.
Marcus waited until they were all assembled, a small, exhausted army gathered under the bare garage light.
"Everybody," he said, his voice now loud enough to carry over the scratching of Isaiah's pencil. "Gather 'round."
He then proceeded to lay out the brutal, unvarnished terms of Gary's deal. He explained the halved advance that left them with no room for error, and then he delivered the killing blow.
"He's given us one week," Marcus said, looking each of them in the eye. "Seven days. From the moment we deliver, that entire premium run has to sell out. If it doesn't, we have to buy back every single unsold copy." He slammed a hand flat on the table, the sound making them all flinch. "We'll be ruined. So, we don't just have to be good. We have to be a phenomenon. We have seven days to win a war."
The weight of his words crushed the remaining air from the room. Rico looked pale, and the twins stared at the floor. It was an impossible task.
Seeing their despair, Maria stepped forward. "It's not just a comic," she said, her voice cutting through the fear, forcing them to look at her. "It's what the industry calls an 'ashcan.' A preview. It's black and white, small, fast to produce." She looked at the faces of her small team, willing them to understand. "Isaiah's idea wasn't just to make a new comic. It's to create a collector's item. A 'first appearance.' We're not just selling a story; we're selling rarity. We're selling the future. That's the gamble."
It was into this fragile, newly-forged understanding that Isaiah moved. He had been silent at his table, seemingly oblivious to the tension. He walked over, his small form carrying a neat, perfectly aligned stack of paper. He placed it on the workbench next to the cash. It was the completed pages for the Pokémon ashcan, every panel a masterpiece of clean lines and charming design, ready for production.
He didn't offer a single word of encouragement. He didn't acknowledge the deal or the impossible deadline. He simply delivered the work, his expectation of their success absolute. Then, he turned and walked back to his desk to begin the next pages of Dragon Ball, leaving them to stare at the two objects on the table: the bomb and the bullet.
For a long moment, no one moved. They were a small, terrified army staring at their impossible orders. The despair was a physical weight, threatening to crush them before they even began. It was Maria who broke the spell. She looked from the cash to the pristine artwork, her face hardening into a mask of grim resolve. "Alright," she said, her voice quiet but sharp, cutting through the fear. "There's the bullet. Let's load the gun."
Marcus met her gaze, and in his eyes, she saw the same desperate fire. He gave a single, sharp nod, then picked up the stack of Pokémon pages. He turned towards the printing press, and the one-week war began.
The first day was a blur of frantic energy. The last was a slow, waking nightmare. The garage, once their headquarters, transformed into a sleepless, ink-stained factory floor. The rhythmic, deafening CLANK-CLANK-CLANK of the old printing press became the soundtrack to their war, a relentless drumbeat that measured out their dwindling time. For four straight days, the sun rose on a team that had not slept.
Isaiah was the engine at the heart of the storm. He sat at his desk, a tiny, unmoving pillar of creation under the harsh glow of a single task lamp. To the others, he was a child, drawing. In his mind, he was a god wrestling with the very physics of a new narrative. The relentless drumming of the press faded into a dull, distant roar as his entire consciousness focused on the page, on the precise kinetic energy required to depict a character's first energy blast.
The lines must convey not just light, but weight, he thought, his small hand moving with a speed that defied his age. The impact must feel absolute. Foundational. This single panel must sell the entire concept of ki manipulation. He felt a leaden pull on his eyelids, an irritating system notification from the inadequate vessel he inhabited. Fatigue. Unacceptable. He pushed it away, delving deeper into the work, his mind a universe away from the ink-stained workshop. The trajectory is wrong. Recalculate the force vector…
The pull became a physical weight, dragging his head down. He fought it, a titan refusing to yield to the pathetic demands of a child's biology. But the vessel was failing. The universe of creation dissolved into a frustrating, encroaching darkness. His final coherent thought was one of pure, cold rage. System failure…
The pencil slipped from his suddenly slack fingers, clattering softly on the desk. His small body, which had been held rigid with concentration for hours, went completely limp in the chair.
It was the abrupt silence from his corner of the garage that made Maria look up. The relentless scratching of pencil on paper had stopped. Wiping ink from her fingers with a rag, she saw his small head, no longer supported by the titan's will, slump forward until his cheek pressed against the half-finished drawing. For a moment, she felt a surge of relief—he was finally resting. But it was immediately replaced by a wave of profound sorrow.
"Oh, mijo," she whispered, her voice lost in the din of the press.
She walked over to his desk. A thin line of drool was already smudging the pristine ink of his drawing. He was utterly limp, completely surrendered to the exhaustion his mind refused to acknowledge. She gently brushed the hair from his forehead, her heart aching. She lifted his small, limp body from the chair. The weight of him was a paradox—he felt both impossibly light, a fragile child she could hold in her arms, and unbearably heavy, a burden of genius and terror that she feared would one day crush them all. As she carried him to his bed, the press clanked on, a merciless drumbeat in the war he had started.
The next afternoon, he was back at the desk, his focus absolute. He was detailing a critical action sequence for the Pokémon ashcan: the first battle. He was capturing the frantic energy of the small, yellow creature—Pikachu—leaping into the air, its body crackling with barely-contained electricity as it prepared to strike a bird-like opponent.
The electrical discharge must feel wild, untamed, Isaiah thought, his focus narrowing to a pinpoint. Not a clean beam, but a chaotic burst. It must sell the creature's raw, natural power. He pushed his mind harder, demanding more from the flawed neural pathways of his brain, and felt a sudden, sharp spike of pressure behind his eyes. The world flickered, a strange, crimson haze clouding his vision. System overload. Biological failure imminent. Then he felt a warm, wet trickle from his nose.
Maria was sorting pages when she saw him go rigid. "Isaiah?" she called out, a knot of fear tightening in her stomach. He didn't answer. Then she saw it. A single, bright red drop of blood fell from his nose, splattering onto the perfect white of the paper, right across the image of the yellow mouse. Then another.
"Oh, God," she breathed, rushing to his side. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She grabbed a clean rag, her hands shaking. "Isaiah! Mijo, are you okay? Look at me."
He finally looked up at her, his expression not of fear or pain, but of cold, profound annoyance. He ignored the rag and pointed a small, trembling finger at the bloodstain on his art.
"The page," he said, his voice a tight, frustrated hiss. "It is… compromised."
"Forget the page!" she cried, pressing the cloth gently against his nose. "Tilt your head back. Just breathe, mijo. Please, just breathe."
He resisted for a moment, his gaze still fixed on his ruined work. The biological failure was infuriating, the compromised art a needless loss. But Maria's frantic, desperate energy was a new variable—a disruption.
Her distress was… inefficient, he thought, analyzing her shaking hands and the panic in her voice. Counter-productive. She was his most vital asset, the emotional bedrock of the entire operation, and her state was becoming unstable. An unstable asset of her importance jeopardized the entire enterprise. Stabilizing her was now the primary objective.
The tension in his small shoulders eased, just a fraction. The trembling finger that had been pointing at the artwork slowly lowered. With a soft, almost imperceptible sigh of pure annoyance at the entire situation, he relented. He tilted his head back, giving her control, his cold, analytical gaze shifting from the ruined page to the garage ceiling.
Maria's own breath hitched, a wave of relief so powerful it almost made her knees buckle. For that one, fleeting, precious moment, the titan was gone. She wasn't managing an asset or placating a genius. She was simply a mother, quietly and carefully tending to her small, bleeding child.
She stayed with him until the bleeding stopped, the silence of the small back room a stark contrast to the relentless clanking of the press outside. She gently wiped his face clean, laid him down on his cot, and pulled a thin blanket over him. As she watched him sleep, the innocent rise and fall of his small chest, the moment of peace began to recede. The sound of the press, which had faded to a distant hum, came roaring back into her consciousness, a brutal reminder of the war waiting just outside the door. Her brief reprieve was over.
She took a deep, steadying breath, the mother receding as the commander took hold once more. She walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.
The wall of noise and frantic energy hit her the moment she re-entered the garage. The press was clanking in its relentless rhythm, Marcus was wrestling with a jammed paper feed, and Rico was hunched over his desk, his posture a knot of furious tension. For a moment, she felt the wave of exhaustion threaten to pull her under. She pushed it down. There was no time. She walked directly to the output tray of the press and grabbed the top, still-warm sheet. The ink was still tacky. Her fingers were instantly stained black.
This was her world now. She was the commander, a ghost fueled by black coffee and sheer force of will. Her entire existence had been reduced to a series of critical tasks: quality-checking every page that came off the hot press, managing the rapidly dwindling supplies of paper and ink, and navigating the fraying tempers of her exhausted team. She was pushing past her own breaking point, her iron will the only thing holding the crumbling walls of their empire together.
Rico was the resentful soldier. He worked with a furious, bitter precision, his inking pen flying across the pages. Each stroke was perfect, and each stroke was an act of rage. He saw Isaiah, the child-god, producing miracle after miracle, his own considerable artistic talent reduced to the factory work of a high-speed tracer.
Marcus and the twins were the infantry, the exhausted soldiers on the front line. They were covered in ink and grease, their bodies aching from the ceaseless, repetitive labor. They fed paper into the hungry mouth of the press, collated the warm pages as they came out, and manned the staplers until their hands were raw.
It happened on the final night. The air was thick with the haze of exhaustion, every nerve frayed raw. Rico, his eyes red-rimmed and his hand cramping, suddenly threw his inking pen down. It clattered against the workbench, the sound unnaturally loud in the clanking din of the press.
"No more," he said, his voice a low, dangerous growl.
The twins froze. Marcus stopped the press. The sudden silence was deafening.
"This is a factory, not a studio!" Rico confronted Maria, his voice rising with a week's worth of suppressed rage. "I am not an artist here. I'm a machine. A machine that traces his miracles." He pointed a shaking, ink-stained finger towards Isaiah's corner. "When do I get to create something? When do I get to be more than just a tool?"
Maria, pushed to the absolute limit of her own endurance, felt a surge of anger. But she choked it down. She looked at Rico's pale, exhausted face, saw the desperation in his eyes, and knew that yelling would break him—and them. She walked over to him, her own exhaustion making her voice raw and quiet.
"You get to create when we survive," she said, her voice soft but unwavering. She met his furious gaze without flinching. "Rico, right now, you are not a tracer. You are the hand of this empire. The only one we have. And if your hand fails, we all fall."
She let the weight of that truth settle. Then she made her move. "When this is over," she said, "and we win, you get a bonus. A real one. Named. For you. As the lead artist of Phoenix Empire."
It wasn't the creative freedom he craved. It was something harder, something more real. A stake. A title. A promise that his sacrifice would be recognized. It was a desperate, brilliant act of management.
Rico stared at her, his jaw tight. The anger in his eyes slowly faded, replaced by a deep, weary resignation. He looked at the rest of the exhausted team watching him, and then he slowly, deliberately, picked up his pen. "Get the press running again," he said, his voice rough. "We're burning daylight."
United by Maria's desperate plea, the team fell back into their work, the crisis averted. The garage became a blur of motion, a final, frantic push to the finish line fueled by the last dregs of their adrenaline. They worked through the dawn, the rising sun casting long, weary shadows across the factory floor.
And then, it was done.
The last bundle was stapled. The last box was sealed. The garage was filled with neat, towering stacks of the premium Dragon Ball / Pokémon bundle, each one a testament to their impossible, sleepless war.
As the sun climbed higher, casting a golden morning light into the garage, Marcus and the twins began loading the boxes into their worn-out van. The finality of the act was surreal. Box by box, the fruits of their hellish week vanished from the garage.
When the last box was loaded, an almost unnerving quiet settled over the space. The press was silent. The smell of ink still hung heavy in the air, but the frantic energy was gone, replaced by a profound, hollowed-out exhaustion.
The team stood together for a moment, shoulder to shoulder, covered in ink and grime. They were utterly spent. They stared at the empty space on the floor where the mountain of comics had been just moments before.
The physical battle was over. They had made the deadline.
Marcus met Maria's gaze, a universe of anxiety passing between them in a single, silent look. "Time to deliver the payload," he said, his voice rough.
He climbed into the driver's seat of the van, the engine sputtering to life. Maria, Rico, and the twins stood in the garage doorway and watched as he drove off into the early morning light, their impossible creation now completely out of their hands.
The one-week clock on their potential doom had just started ticking, and they all knew the war was far from won.