"Fuck me in the ass…"
Anansi Wolfe groaned like his skull had personally offended the universe and was now being punished for it. His head throbbed. Loud. Heavy. Every thought felt like it had to push through wet concrete just to exist.
You'd think after years of drinking and partying, he would've learned not to do that shit right before going to bed.
Well, assuming he actually went to bed.
The twins made everything after midnight unreliable.
Anansi Wolfe was not a deep thinker. That didn't mean he was stupid. Quite the opposite. His instincts were sharp, tactical, and fast. He just hated thinking. Thinking meant slowing down, and slowing down meant feeling things he didn't want to feel. So he charged forward instead, head first, consequences later.
That worked fine for fighting.
Life? Not so much.
He didn't care anymore. About plans. About people. About tomorrow.
That happened after the lotteries.
Plural.
Winning once would change a man. Winning three times would break one.
Three hundred million dollars.Four point six billion.And four million a week for life.
That kind of money erased the concept of "should."
Anansi was eighteen when he won the first time. He learned fast how little work it actually took to stay rich. Pay people. Avoid responsibility. Leave when things got annoying.
He covered his family, then cut them off when expectations followed. His mother would've lost her mind if she knew half the women he'd been with.
Hell, he was only about fifty percent sure some of them were even girls. Asia made it very hard to hell the difference.
He didn't work. Didn't invest. Didn't build anything. Why would he? His life was a blur of women, drinking, gambling, short-lived marriages to absurdly rich women, and reckless hobbies that looked impressive on magazine covers.
He spent his time drinking with friends, gambling obscene amounts of money for fun, playing polo because it pissed people off, racing cars because death was exciting, and flying his own damn plane from party to party like consequences were optional side content.
He bought the Playboy Mansion on a drunken dare, somehow revived the brand, and then went international with it. He even brought back Girls Gone Wild just because he could.
Anansi was honestly shocked he never caught anything from that lifestyle.
Hell, he even did a full Barney Stinson and made a playbook. The number of times that it worked shocked him greatly.
So when he opened his eyes, the first thing he noticed was—
"Oh shit."
He was wearing pants.
"Nice."
His accent slipped out naturally, thick and amused. He'd been experimenting with it for years. People loved it.
"At least dere won't be no paternity test dis time… hopefully."
His eyes gleamed with cautious victory. Lately, women had been showing up claiming he was the father of their kids. Which, yeah, made sense. A lot of them looked like him. Nearly half were repeats.
After the third, his mother sent bounty hunters after to bring him home.
Couldn't blame her.
Still… something was wrong.
He'd woken up in stranger places. Beds. Floors. A sewer once. A Swedish family's home where he stayed drunk for a month straight.
Somehow this was weirder.
He'd been drunk in stranger places than this. But as the fog thinned, he took his time looking around. Silk sheets. High ceilings. Furniture that didn't scream flashy idiot money, but quiet, old, terrifying wealth.
"…Please let dere be a princess," he muttered. "Preferably de right age. I got lucky the last two times."
Then he noticed his body.
Not in a fun way.
He lifted an arm. Felt it. Patted his chest. Froze.
"What de fuck?"
This wasn't his body. Not really. The arms were thick. Solid. Built. The kind of strength that came from training and discipline, not cocaine confidence. Tree-branch thick. Heavy with muscle.
Anansi had money. Money let you fake a lot of things.
This wasn't fake.
Before he could panic properly, pain detonated behind his eyes. His vision blurred as an unbearable migraine slammed into him and knocked him flat onto the bed.
"Yo—what de hell are dese memories?"
He also felt that his body was quite weird as well. He patted himself, then looked at his hands.
His eyes went wide with shock. Those were not the chubby arms of a lazy playboy. He didn't know why a chubby man got so much tail, but he stopped questioning it after it never stopped working.
"What the fuck?" He was very confused. His arms were physically fit and the size of tree branches. Sure, he was rich, but that required work and a good diet, which required even more work.
But before he could even process what was really going on, his vision suddenly became blurry as an unbearable migraine attacked him, knocking him onto the silk sheets of the bed.
"Yo. What the hell are these memories?" Anansi's head was filled with eighteen years' worth of memories, all not by him.
One hour later... (the author couldn't afford the guy from SpongeBob, so this will have to do)
Anansi had stopped twitching and foaming at the mouth. He lay there on the silk bed, rubbing his throbbing temples while taking in the situation.
"Damn, man, that was fucked up, man." He stirred as the migraine went away. He was transported into his alternate self.
Anansi Wolfe 33rd generation of a royal brat family, the Wolfe Corporation. The Wolfe Corporation is a worldwide megacorporation dealing in corporate security, weapons manufacturing, private military contracting, banking, and manufacturing.
The world did not collapse into magic.
It evolved into it.
Long before megacorporations ruled continents and private armies replaced national borders, magic existed in fragments. Rituals. Bloodlines. Relics. Small, unreliable, and dangerous. For centuries it was treated as superstition or buried by religion and early science, dismissed as coincidence or fraud.
That changed with convergence.
Roughly two hundred thousand years ago, several independent research groups across the world documented the same phenomenon: reality itself contained measurable anomalies. Energies that behaved neither like electricity nor radiation. Forces that responded to intent as much as stimulus. Magic, stripped of mysticism, was reproducible.
Once reproducible, it became industrial.
The Arcane Integration Era began quietly. Governments funded research. Militaries experimented in secret. Corporations saw opportunity before anyone else. Magic wasn't replacing technology — it enhanced it. Engines powered by runic stabilizers. Weapons that never overheated. Communication arrays that ignored distance. Artificial intelligences guided by arcane logic instead of pure code.
The first nation to weaponize integrated magic dominated its neighbors.
The second copied it.
The third sold it.
From there, borders stopped meaning much.
Corporations grew faster than governments could regulate them. They operated across nations, funded private armies, controlled logistics, banking, manufacturing, and infrastructure. When governments pushed back, corporations withdrew support. Power grids failed. Supply chains collapsed. Wars were lost before they began.
Within fifty years, megacorporations replaced nations as the true centers of power.
Countries still existed.
They just didn't matter as much.
The Corporate World Order
The modern world is divided not by flags, but by contracts.
Megacorporations control territory indirectly through employment, security agreements, and economic dependency. Entire cities exist under corporate charters. Citizens are employees. Laws are policies. Justice is arbitration.
Governments survive by partnering with corporations or becoming their subsidiaries in everything but name.
Private military contractors replaced standing armies. They are better trained, better equipped, and completely loyal to whoever pays. Conflicts are no longer fought over ideology. They are fought over resources, patents, and leverage.
Magic made this possible.
Magic made it permanent.
[Ding!]
[Create the Guild]
Anansi blinked.
Once.
Twice.
"…Huh."