At this moment, Caster felt only regret in his heart, yet he didn’t know how to express it to his lover. After a few seconds, he slowly spoke.
"You... take our son to the Taiping Continent, I’ll come to find you right away... Also, there’s a secret cabinet under the study, inside is an archaic submachine gun and some cash, take it with you. If there’s danger, shoot, no matter who it is..."
Upon hearing her husband speak , Megan’s heart sank, realizing that things were far more complicated than he had said.
Wasting no more of his time
"I understand, I’ll take our son there immediately, you... must come back alive."
"..." Caster nodded, "I will."
Just as Megan was about to hang up the phone, pack her luggage, and leave with her son, the door was knocked.
The sound was violently loud, as if the door would be broken down at any moment.
"Open the door, we’re the Trauma Team, here to reclaim company assets..."
With the same speed they use to save members, in less than seven minutes, the Trauma Team’s armed forces surrounded Westbrook’s villa tightly, as if they were afraid someone inside might flee with the funds.
After all, this was a regional manager’s place, holding many of the company’s confidential transactions, it was impossible for headquarters to really let anyone leave.
Megan’s eyes were full of panic as she looked immediately toward her husband in the video call, while he could no longer maintain his calm, his lips trembling, seemingly wanting to say something, yet unable to utter a word.
As the knocking on the door became more intense, the once weak woman holding her son had her eyes grow steadier.
She nodded towards Caster and said,
"I will take our son to Taiping Continent."
With that said, she put down her son and walked alone into the study.
Caster stared blankly at the empty screen as a few seconds of fierce gunfire sounded, and then everything returned to silence.
His mind became a jumbled mess, he opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
It wasn’t until a hand from that side suddenly reached out and turned off the video that he murmured, like a lost soul,
"Bring the car down, let me go."
The hovercar remained motionless, floating in mid-air.
"I said... bring it down..."
He repeated himself once more.
But all he received was the mechanical electronic voice of the in-car AI replying,
"I’m sorry, you are not a Trauma Team employee, you have no authorization for hovercar commands. I’ve notified the nearest..."
Caster’s lips trembled slightly, his breathing became gradually heavier, his pupils dilating without any highlights.
Everything he had experienced, like a sharp knife, pierced his heart, with his wife’s words replaying over and over again in his mind.
Where exactly did it go wrong?
Where exactly did things go so wrong for him to end up ?
The electronic noise in his ear began to twist and irritate, as if it were the exclusion from colleagues, the disdain from Mercenaries, the ridicule from superiors when he first joined the company a decade ago...
Obviously, I’ve gotten this far, climbed this high, doing whatever you told me, why did the thing I’ve been avoiding still fall on my head?
Where exactly did it go wrong?
He looked at the Trauma Team’s company logo that was everywhere in the hovercar.
His expression gradually turned hideous, his pupils trembled madly, drool dripping from the corners of his mouth as he panted heavily.
He picked up the grenades and rifles prepared for the armed forces, aiming at the hovercar’s control console.
"Screw your company!"
The sound of gunfire erupted from a hovercar above, but on the furious battlefield below it was too insignificant, until an explosion from a grenade slightly drew everyone’s attention upward.
Watching the hovercar above suddenly explode and plummet into a distant crash, Lin Miao was a bit astonished.
Did someone shoot at this hovercar just now?
He clearly didn’t even have a gun, how did it crash on its own?
An extortion attempt?
He remembered this particular hovercar seemed to be the one the regional manager was in... What’s happening?
This sudden event stopped the Trauma Team surrounding Lin Miao.
After a brief return to rationality, they realized the place was already a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, torn bodies everywhere, with red blood and white synthetic blood mixing together, splintered organs and prosthetics scattered around.
In the center stood Lin Miao, holding a head taken from someone unknown, completely unscathed, not even a drop of blood on him.
His killing had become more efficient over time.
However, this didn’t mean the situation was improving.
Because more and more hovercars flew in from the sky toward the street, hundreds came in dribs and drabs, and there were armored vehicles accompanying them on the ground.
Among them, the Trauma Team outnumbered everyone else, along with NCPD, the Anti-Terrorism Squad, and even those with heavy firepower.
Clearly, they intended to take Lin Miao down, treating him as a cyber-psycho.
Compared to them, Lin Miao’s personal combat force was insignificant and would be easily crushed.
Even with system assistance, it wasn’t enough.
Unless these people opened their network interfaces, allowing Lin Miao to take them down one by one, otherwise, it seemed unlikely.
However, this didn’t mean he truly had no other recourse.
He brought this exoskeleton out to kill so many people, not for grandstanding.
Just like in that fight against the Night Wanderer in the Stone Ridge Mountain tunnel, this was actually a demonstration.
A demonstration for Military Science.
Dozens of armored vehicles drove up from the street behind Lin Miao, with an extremely domineering presence, not even slowing down for the NCPD in the road ahead, forcing the NCPD police cars to retreat.
Additionally, there were even more floating gunships than the Trauma Team’s numbers.
The black paint, heavy armor, and familiar logos all marked the identities of the arrivals.