Vash and Cerberus VS Наталка Груздова, бізнес відьма

The plaza had been a marketplace once, before the Monopoloid Marauders turned its ledger-stalls into glass and its fountains into frozen ink. Now it stretched open and pale beneath a sky the color of unspent receipts, and Vash walked its center with his hands loose at his sides while Cerberus paced a half-circle behind him, all three heads low, all six eyes tracking the woman in red.

Наталка Груздова stood on the far edge, heels clicking against the cracked flagstones as though she were balancing a budget on them. Her phone glowed in her right hand — the telltale hot-white of a screen that had stopped pretending to be a screen. She tapped it twice, and the air around her rippled into faint ruled lines, columns, a scaffolding of faint golden ink that hung over the plaza like the ghost of an abacus.

"You're late to the merger," she said, pragmatic, almost kind. "I've already valued the battlefield. Your partner is a liability with three depreciation schedules."

Vash laughed. It was a real laugh, warm, and it rang off the empty stalls. "Cerberus, she's calling you a liability. That's the first time anyone's ever called you cheap." The middle head growled; the left head yawned theatrically; the right head simply stared, unblinking, at the woman in red. Vash drew his sidearm — a low-slung revolver worn at the hip — and rolled his shoulder.

Then the phone chimed, and Наталка smiled, and the fight began.

Her first spell was not a strike. It was an entry. The golden scaffolding overhead bloomed into a bookkeeping fence — columns and rows, debits and credits, a lattice of light that closed around Vash like the pages of an enormous contract. *Витратна лінія балансу.* Every motion he made would be tallied. Every shot would be charged. She raised the phone and the fence pulsed, and Vash felt his own weight appear on someone else's sheet: a small red number ticking upward.

He fired anyway, three quick shots — one at the fence, one at her phone, one at the ground between her heels. The first shot was absorbed; the fence drank it and the columns glowed a richer gold, and a line of interest appeared beside his name. The second went wide as she stepped sideways. The third cracked a flagstone and sent a spray of dust across her dress.

"Everything you spend," she said, "I keep."

"So it's a race," Vash said, and moved.

He ran — not at her, but along the plaza's edge, dragging the fence's attention with him. Cerberus broke the other way, three heads fanning into a wide flank, paws drumming a language of their own on the stone. The plaza answered. Where Vash's boots struck, the old fountain cracked and vented a hiss of stale air; where Cerberus ran, the flagstones tilted, unlatched, forgot they had ever been a floor. The battle was opening the ground beneath itself, and Vash watched the fractures spread like a smile across a ledger.

Наталка saw it too. She pivoted, heels precise, and swept the phone in a slow arc, and the golden fence reordered itself — columns collapsing into a single thick line, a spine of credit running straight through the plaza toward her, drawing the ground's energy back to her like a dividend. She was converting the battlefield itself. Every broken stone became profit; every gust became revenue. The fence tightened and Vash's left arm went heavy, as though an invisible accountant had assigned it a cost too large to lift.

He dropped the revolver to his other hand with a practiced toss. "Okay," he said, "she's charging me for breathing. Rude."

Cerberus answered. The left head seized a fallen stall-post and hurled it, spinning, at Наталка; the right head broke a fountain basin loose; the middle head simply charged, a battering ram of fur and metal collars. Наталка raised the phone and the fence flared — the post and the basin were caught mid-flight, tagged, and remitted back at half speed, redirected neatly into the ground at Cerberus's feet. She was not deflecting. She was *filing.*

But Cerberus was three animals in one skin, and she had to file each separately. The middle head took the impact and rolled; the left head was already circling; the right head had gone silent, low, patient, and it was the quiet one that worried her.

Vash saw the flicker. The fence, for one breath, had a seam — a place where the columns didn't quite meet, where the arithmetic of the plaza hadn't yet been reconciled. He understood the shape of it the way a man understands a door: not by reasoning, but by the sudden certainty that it is a door.

"Cerberus," he said, quiet now, cold now. "Floodgate."

The three heads understood. They broke the crater rim together.

The plaza was already shattered; they shattered it *deliberately,* all three sets of jaws striking the same fault line, and the ground opened like a mouth remembering how to speak. Stone shards flew up in a bright storm. Vash fired three shots into the rising cloud — not at Наталка, but into the light of the fence itself. The first shot scattered the golden columns into loose glitter. The second caught the phone's beam midway and split it, breaking its alignment, sending the spell's spine curling back on its own ledger. The third shot drove a shard of crater-light straight into the core of the fence where it had absorbed his shots — and the absorbed light, overloaded, came apart.

The fence did not fall. It *defaulted.* Columns collapsed into one another, credits ran backward, and the golden spine that had been drawing the battlefield's worth to Наталка's heels snapped free and vanished. Her phone's glow stuttered — hot-white, then dim, then the flat gray of a dead screen. She took one step, and the flagstone beneath her heel gave way.

The ground had been opened by three jaws and three shots, and the woman in the red dress fell into the crater they had made, not deeply, but decisively — one boot slipping, balance gone, the phone skittering from her fingers across the broken stone and going dark in a puddle of fountain water.

Vash walked to the crater's edge and looked down at her. He was breathing hard, and his left arm was still heavy with a debt that no longer existed anywhere. He holstered the revolver and offered a hand, casual, jokey, but his eyes were not joking.

"You know," he said, "you were right about one thing. You kept everything I spent." He glanced at the dead phone. "You just didn't keep the change."

Cerberus stood behind him, three heads panting, collars bright, and all of them watched the plaza settle back into an ordinary ruin — a marketplace again, not a ledger, not a mouth. Наталка looked up from the broken ground, her red dress gray with dust, and for a moment she did not look like a witch at all. She looked like a woman who had just been audited.

She did not take the hand. She gathered her phone from the water, and it stayed dark, and the golden fence did not return.