Liverpool’s docks stood eerily silent. No midnight exchanges. No blood in the gutters. Even the rats seed confused by the sudden peace.
Arthur sipped his morning tea, watching news reports scroll past on his laptop. Cri rates across Europe had plumted to historic lows. The Great Erasure had accomplished its purpose with surgical precision.
The would-be cri lords who’d tried to seize power after the three Lords’ deaths? Gone. Their lieutenants? Vanished. Every ambitious thug who’d mistaken chaos for opportunity had learned the sa final lesson.
Now they cowered in their holes, afraid to even discuss business louder than a whisper.
"Perfect pest control," Arthur murmured, setting down his cup.
But he harbored no illusions. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and the criminal underworld was nothing if not natural in its predatory cycles. Soone would eventually grow bold enough to test the waters again.
He was right.
Three weeks into the new quiet, he started noticing the chess pieces moving again. A new order was being established, far sooner and more efficiently than he had expected.
The Hand had dispatched a new man to take over their European operations. He was cunning, ruthless, and efficient. After a few initial, cautious moves—testing the waters to see if the mysterious Eraser was still active—the man saw his opening.
Within days, he’d absorbed everything worth taking. The lucrative drug routes, high-end smuggling operations, money laundering networks—all of it flowed into the Hand’s grasp with clockwork precision.
They left scraps for the smaller gangs. Protection rackets in poor neighborhoods. Street-level drug dealing. Petty theft rings. Just enough to keep local criminals busy and distracted while the Hand claid everything that actually mattered.
Arthur watched it unfold with professional appreciation. Clean. Efficient. Ruthless.
The Ten Rings, who might have contested this expansion, had gone mysteriously quiet months ago. Their operations had simply... stopped. No explanation, no power struggle, just silence. Arthur filed that anomaly away for future consideration.
As for Hydra? They were too smart to get involved. High-profile criminal wars attracted attention, and attention was poison to an organization that had survived by being a secret cancer in society’s bones. They’d wait, watch, and infiltrate whatever structure erged—their usual playbook.
For a fleeting mont, Arthur considered another cleanup. But the thought was dismissed as quickly as it ca.
Say he did another Great Erasure. Then what? The Hand would send another operative. He’d trap himself in an endless ga of whack-a-mole, forever reacting, forever cleaning up sses.
His goal was never to eradicate all cri—an impossible and frankly uninteresting task. It was to stop the sloppy, indiscriminate violence his actions had unleashed. Now that it was over, it was ti to move on.
With the underworld quieting down, the news finally, officially, announced the deaths of the three Lords. The story was buried on page seven, frad as a tragic yachting accident. Since they were not very public figures, the world barely registered their passing.
His revenge was complete. The fallout was managed. His life returned to a state of unnerving normalcy.
With no Kamar-Taj classes and no pressing threats, his days consisted of training, devouring arcane tos, and sleeping.
Slowly but surely, a profound sense of boredom began to set in.
—
The realization struck him one afternoon as he practiced wandless magic, effortlessly weaving complex illusions in the air. He had sought power for security, to build a fortress around himself in this dangerous world. He had succeeded.
But what was a king to do in a fortress with no subjects and no enemies at the door?
The closest enemy, Voldemort, did not interest him. Too weak. The others were a decades away. What was he supposed to do until then? Live a monotonous life of pure training?
The road to becoming as strong as a cosmic being was a long one, and the journey looked mind-numbingly dull.
This wasn’t a ga where he could just grind levels until he was strong enough for the final boss before starting anew. This was his life, and he wanted to live it.
At Hogwarts, there was always sothing exciting happening. Kamar-Taj had been a universe of new knowledge to explore. This was the longest he had gone without any real entertainnt, with only Winky for company.
He could venture out and play the hero, but he recoiled at the idea. He had no desire to run around saving the world. That path was for people with an unshakable moral compass he simply didn’t possess. He had wanted strength to live a life free from trouble, not to seek it out constantly.
He needed a new project. A new purpose. The answer was obvious. He needed to build sothing.
Since the life of a hermit and the path of a hero were equally unappealing, the only other option was to beco soone of influence. In any world, that was the ultimate defense against injustice. Raw power was a blunt instrunt. Influence—financial, political, social—was a scalpel. It was the kind of power that made powerful people think twice.
Arthur decided he would build an empire.
His first thought was a high-tech company. The idea was tempting, but a quick analysis revealed the flaw: it required astronomical startup capital and years of R&D. He had ideas from the future, but he needed people to bring them to reality, which would consu ti and money. He was rich, but not that rich.
He pivoted to a more practical idea: an investnt firm or hedge fund. Not the small-scale investing he was currently doing, but sothing on a global scale.
He knew the major market currents of the next few decades, making large-scale success almost a certainty. It would also be the perfect machine to launder the mountains of stolen cash from his recent campaign.
The idea sparked a flicker of genuine excitent in him. But the fla was quickly doused by a wave of crushing reality.
He had absolutely no idea how to actually start one.
The sheer volu of regulations and the legal labyrinth was a world completely alien to him. He spent weeks buried in books on financial law, and the conclusion was disheartening. It was going to be an imnse amount of tedious, troubleso work. He even entertained the ridiculous notion of enrolling in Oxford, not for the education, but simply to rub shoulders with the right people.
Lost in his frustrated planning, he almost missed the subtle shift in his neighborhood’s rhythm. Almost.
Every ti he went out, their surveillance was laughably obvious. A black sedan. A man reading the sa newspaper for an entire afternoon. A few subtle mind probes confird it: a motley crew from SHIELD, MI6, and others were still investigating the Lords’ "accident."
He was a person of interest, but without evidence, they were just wasting their ti. He paid them no more attention.
Days later, he was sitting in his study, staring at a financial docunt so complex it might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, feeling utterly defeated, when a soft, lodic chi echoed in his mind.
It was one of the outer wards of the manor, signaling a visitor had passed the main gate. Not an intruder; the ward was calm. Just a visitor.
Arthur frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Closing his eyes for a second, he focused, scrying a hazy image of his own front door. He saw a man standing there, waiting patiently to knock. He was of Chinese descent, perhaps in his mid-thirties, dressed in a simple, well-tailored but unremarkable suit.
He looked... ordinary.
Intrigued, and sensing no imdiate threat, Arthur rose from his chair. This was a deviation from his boring routine he would welco. He walked down the grand staircase to open the door himself.
The man on his doorstep t his gaze directly. His eyes, sharp and analytical, held a look of profound, calculated determination.
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