Three blocks away from Alice's crumbling apartment building lay a gray zone forgotten by the city planning department.
This was one of the temporary strongholds of a local small-time gang, the Wild Wolf Gang.
It was a notorious dead-end alley, flanked by two abandoned red-brick factories with peeling paint that looked like a severe skin disease, exposing the blackened concrete skeletons beneath.
Even the streetlights here seemed to suffer from cataracts, their bulbs flickering incessantly.
The gang's name sounded somewhat savagely fierce, but in reality, these so-called Wild Wolves were nothing more than scum excreted by decent society.
The gang was merely the most inconspicuous link in the bottom-tier ecosystem of Queens.
They made a living by extorting small Asian vendors on the street, intercepting students at middle school gates for protection money, and peddling small amounts of low-quality contraband.
Four tattooed men were huddled around a dilapidated Ford van.
The body of the van had originally been white, but it was now covered in crude graffiti and mud splatters, looking like a coffin dug out from a trash heap.
The rear doors were open, revealing a bulging black gym bag inside, its zipper half-open, exposing the contents.
"Fuck, is this all the take for tonight?"
A large man with a red mohawk and a gold-plated brass chain around his neck spat viciously.
"Only a little over twenty-four hundred? This isn't even enough for me to find a decent girl in Manhattan."
The man with the mohawk shook the money in his hand angrily.
"Did that old man at the convenience store hide some of it? I clearly saw that Korean guy stocking up on plenty of goods last week."
"Forget it, big guy."
Beside him, a guy as thin as a dehydrated monkey was leaning against the car door, lighting a cigarette.
The flash of the lighter illuminated his sallow, sunken face, the result of long-term substance abuse.
He took a deep drag, exhaled a ring of smoke, and said with a tone of impatience and disdain: "That old man cried like a woman, hugging my thighs and begging for mercy, saying business has been bad lately and he can barely pay the rent. I searched under the cash register and even dug out the money he hid in his underwear. That's all there is."
The skinny monkey chuckled, pulled a few unopened packs of cigarettes from his jacket, and tossed them in his hand: "But I didn't come away empty-handed. I grabbed a few packs of Marlboros on the way out; they're worth at least a hundred bucks."
"Whatever, every little bit helps."
The man with the mohawk grunted. Although dissatisfied, he stuffed the money into his pocket.
"Let's split the money first. Five hundred each, and take the rest to the boss."
The other two thugs laughed when they heard they could split the money, their words full of mockery for their victims and smug satisfaction with their own despicable actions.
Their uninhibited laughter echoed in the empty dead-end alley, startling a few rats scavenging in the trash cans and sending them scurrying.
In this dark corner where even Police patrol cars avoided, they felt no need to be wary of anyone.
At least, that's what they believed.
Yet they completely failed to notice a gray figure slowly walking out from the darkness at the alley entrance.
Alice didn't hide in the shadows like an assassin in the movies, nor did she sneak along the wall.
She walked brazenly down the middle of the road, along the edge of the streetlight's halo, right into the center of the thugs' field of vision.
The red patterns on her mask appeared both comical and ferocious under the flickering streetlight.
Under normal circumstances, even a drunkard would have become alert immediately upon seeing someone wearing a bizarre fox mask appear suddenly in the alley, either drawing a knife or turning to run.
The instinctive human fear of anomalous things is etched into our genes.
But at this moment, it was as if the World had glitched.
The man with the mohawk had looked up once while counting the money; his gaze had even swept across the direction where Alice was, and the gray figure was reflected in his pupils.
If you were to slow down this second, you would see that his retina had indeed received the image signal.
But his brain's processing center, as if infected by a virus, automatically marked this signal as meaningless and unworthy of attention.
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