Isn’t that a line from "Taken"? Cosplaying Liam Neeson, are we?
Li Cheng curled his lips, tucked his phone into the dimensional storage, and severed the remote network connection to the surveillance cameras.
Sitting in the back seat, Caroline was at a loss for words, unable to utter a single one. She really hadn’t expected the company to arrive so quickly; if not for Li Cheng’s sudden appearance, she would have been captured by now.
Li Cheng snapped his fingers, jolting her back to reality, "It’s unrealistic to cross half of the United States with this clunker. Your original escape plan must have included flying, right?"
"Mm. I planned to go to Des Moines International Airport in Iowa this morning. Catch a flight to Angel City."
Caroline pulled up her ticket information, and without even looking, Li Cheng said, "Forget it, if the company can find you, they can find the channels that processed your fake passport.
They’ve probably already sent people to stake out at the main airports."
"What do we do then?" Caroline hesitated, "I still can’t get in touch with the Avalon Organization." Nᴇw novel chapters are publɪshed on N0v3l.Fiɾe.net
"If we can’t fly commercial, we’ll have to take this."
Li Cheng took out another phone, logged into Google, and quickly searched for a map of nearby farmlands, "Now it’s a race against Vanguard Company, to see who can act faster."
He abruptly turned the steering wheel and drove off the highway into the sprawling farmlands.
At the explosion site of the Motel, Alexander was giving orders in an orderly manner.
Police would arrive within ten minutes, and they needed to prioritize moving the injured and stage the scene as a gang shootout before the police arrived.
Considering the Sniffer claimed that there were still lingering scents in the air, and Caroline couldn’t have left more than half an hour ago, he marked on the map a thirty-minute drive radius, dispatching people to key traffic points and international airports to watch for families with children.
His actions were all transmitted back to headquarters in Chicago, with images and audio through a sports camera.
Cervantes stood at the tiered Command Center, rubbing his chin.
The hand grenades in the room and the blood writing on the wall were clearly the handiwork of another player.
That person was surprisingly... gentle?
Otherwise, they could have planted a more powerful bomb sufficient to bring down the entire motel, ensuring the death of all agents on site. The cost would be just a few more innocent lives.
"Agent Alexander, you’re doing very well."
Cervantes pressed a button on the table and spoke to Alexander, who wore a Bluetooth earpiece: "All the resources at every base in the surrounding states, safe houses, special ops teams, helicopters, spy satellites... you have full access.
Additionally, I’ve updated the bounty amount and address on the dark web to urge all superpower users who see the bounty to come quickly."
"Forgive my frankness, boss,"
Alexander couldn’t help but say, "Those civilian superpower users are completely useless, they’ll only cause trouble, increasing our workload to clean up and contain the information."
"I’m not counting on them to be useful,"
Cervantes smirked, "As long as they can hold off the Forth Level superpower user with Caroline until our people arrive, that’ll do."
That’s the difference between native NPCs and players in the script world; the former have too much to consider - social impact, personal interests, morality and law, risks of action...
While players need not worry about these things at all. What if the city gets blown up? They can simply dust off their pants and leave once the mission is over.
Cervantes’ smile grew wider, feeling a mixture of mockery and disdain in his heart for that unknown player, who was indecisive and excessively compassionate. There were far too many ways to deal with that.
Li Cheng was speeding down a country lane, crushing miles of cornfields beneath his wheels.
Most of Iowa is made up of flat and open plains, with fertile soil producing abundant corn and soybeans, earning its reputation as the breadbasket of the United States.
Guided by Google satellite maps, Li Cheng found a large farm with a hangar, casually tore through the perimeter wire fence, and motioned for Caroline and the others to follow through.
Afterward, he stored the car they arrived in within a stereoscopic warehouse, entered the farm, quickly disabled the alarm system of the hangar, and opened its large doors.
Gray Rain let out a whistle. Inside the hangar stood an 18-meter wingspan, yellow-painted two-seater agricultural plane—the AT-802.
This plane, developed by the famous Air Tractor Company (yes, that’s the name), is a propeller-driven agricultural aircraft with straight wings and a camelback-style dual-seat cockpit, equipped with a Pratt & Whitney PT6A-67AG turbine engine, an empty weight of three tons, and a maximum takeoff weight of seven tons,
often used for pesticide spraying and aerial firefighting, making it an excellent agricultural airplane.
How excellent? In 2008, Air Tractor Company collaborated with IOMAX to launch the armed version AT-802U Sky Warden, which is basically the AT-802 with additional armor, sensors, and communication equipment installed,
After attaching rocket pods or laser-guided bombs, it could transform into a propeller-driven attack aircraft, specialized for low-intensity ground-attack missions.
To find an AT-802 on a farm was quite fortunate.
Fully fueled, it could fly a range of one thousand kilometers, enough to reach Denver in Colorado, refill there, then fly to Las Vegas and finally to the West Coast.
Gray Rain was rubbing her hands together with eagerness; she had wanted to pilot a plane for a long time.
Li Cheng stood still, slightly furrowed his brows, surveyed the dim hangar, and spoke calmly, "Everyone, there’s no need to hide anymore. Come out."
After a brief silence, the sound of footsteps arose from a dark corner of the hangar, and six figures emerged.
Another four appeared from outside the hangar, encircling Li Cheng and his party.
These individuals included both men and women, wielding firearms, all dressed in leather jackets bearing skull patterns, with large tattoos covering the arms that protruded from their clothing, looking very much like the American biker gangs seen in movies.
Or, perhaps, they were just that.
Li Cheng observed the tattoos with interest—[AFFA]stood for ’Angels Forever, Forever Angels,’[1%]indicated the most notorious 1% of criminals, and a teardrop by the eye represented the number of people they had killed.
Their composition was quite complex; in addition to their biker gang persona, they were also superpower users of varying levels.
"How did you find us? We had masked our presence."
A girl around fifteen or sixteen years old with black smoky makeup and a buzzcut, squinting her eyes, spoke. She seemed to be the leader of the group, and her name, as indicated by the Information Integration Glasses, was Ella.
"I didn’t discover you. It’s just a habit of mine to say this whenever I enter a new and unfamiliar place."
Li Cheng spread his hands nonchalantly, "Like in a subway, classroom, bathroom, toilet, psychiatric hospital, cemetery, stuff like that."
Talking in graveyards to summon the ghosts, right?
Ella’s eyelid twitched, and she replied calmly, "We also detest Vanguard Company, but they’ve put up a bounty of ten million US Dollars. Business is business.
Seeing as we’re all superpower users, please don’t resist."
"The fact that you didn’t head straight to airports or stations but instead came to wait at a plane farm after the bounty notice was updated shows you’re smart.
Li Cheng suddenly raised his arm, smashing the head of a cloaked superpower user into the ground, "You made one mistake; I am not a superpower user."
"I am much stronger than you."