John stood there in front of the Trauma Team, dismantling corpse after corpse—or “half-finished products” that had yet to become corpses—packing away the slightly valuable cyberware one by one. Unfortunately, the ones in the tavern had been blasted into bone dust by the Pojun shotgun shells, costing him a tidy bit of income for nothing. Only Edwin had yielded a high-efficiency processing chip from the back of his neck, barely qualifying as four-star grade.
“Tsk. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have shot him in the head!”
Looking at Edwin’s headless corpse, John sighed, then said to the Trauma Team members, who did not dare expose their backs to him:
“Got any body bags? These few coworkers of yours aren’t enough!”
“Uh, well…” The Trauma Team captain watched this man stuff cyberware one piece after another into body bags looted from his colleagues’ corpses, and only felt that it was utterly absurd. But he also understood that salaried combat personnel like them were not the same as hard-to-train medical staff. Even with a full set of equipment, they were absolutely not worth the company sending people in to extract them.
No matter how many casualties the company suffered, it would rescue its members. That was for reputation, and no matter how much they lost, the client would foot the bill. But rescuing combat personnel? That loss belonged to the company itself. Compared to fishing people out, cutting losses in time was far more in line with the company’s interests.
And so, now that John had made his demand, no matter how outrageous it was, in order to survive, they could only agree. If he had asked for their equipment, they might have hesitated, but body bags…
“We have them!” Without needing to reach any consensus, they immediately opened the equipment compartments on the sides of their power armor. They did not even bother counting, directly pushing them over along with their first-aid kits.
“How could I possibly accept this?”
John glanced at the row of top-tier Trauma Team medical kits and casually took out a chip, handing it over—
“It’s definitely not enough to buy your gear, but the goods belong to the company anyway. You guys can just say I robbed you!”
“You’re actually kind of a nice guy!” The captain took the chip in a daze. Only then did he remember that his equipment had real-time monitoring installed, and his face instantly went pale. But immediately afterward, he discovered that at some point, his equipment had actually gone offline just like that!
How could it not have gone offline? The Dark Canopy John had activated after entering the tavern still had time left on it!
As long as they entered within twenty meters of him, all technological devices with monitoring or detection functions would be affected. And according to John’s will, he could choose to block them, mislead them, or directly paralyze them. If he had the energy for it, directly editing false video and audio was not impossible either.
John, however, clearly had no intention of paying attention to the Trauma Team’s thoughts. He stuffed his spoils of war, along with several medical kits, one by one into the body bags, then used silk sprayed out by his [Silk Spinning] skill to tie them into a bundle. Turning around, he found a large handcart in the tavern, then left just like that, swaying along.
“Captain, this…”
“Communications are back.” The captain glanced at the equipment signal and said nothing else. But the other members immediately understood what he meant. The few of them obediently remained in this increasingly bloody environment, made worse by John’s looting, and waited for the company to send people to pick them up…
……
“Creak—creak—”
After leaving the smooth ground of Feiyun Port, the hard wheels of the handcart, lacking lubrication and maintenance, began to let out wails one after another. One man dragging a cart full of goods was undoubtedly rather conspicuous. Yet in a district like this, where dragons and snakes mixed together, not a single person dared step forward. There was not even anyone who wanted to laugh!
For no other reason than that even a brute who had just crawled out of the garbage zone could smell the heavy stench of motor oil mixed with blood coming from that cart. Those with more experience could also tell that the bags used for packing were body bags printed with the Trauma Team logo.
Someone who could drag such things openly through the streets—regardless of what was inside—was absolutely not someone to provoke!
In this unseemly manner, John crossed the district, walking all the way from Feiyun Port to Quartz Gym…
“Sir…”
The doorman saw John’s posture and immediately stepped forward. But before he could finish speaking, he was kicked aside. The drones he had replenished from Kong Wu flew out from his waist, their flashing gunports aimed at the main entrance, and a cold voice rang out with them:
“Tell Saar to come out!”
With such a huge commotion, there was naturally no way Saar would not know. But he was also very clear that he could not run. A fixer’s “strength” was built upon a vast web of relationships. In other words, if he stopped being a fixer, then these supports would evaporate in an instant, and might even turn around to become the talismans demanding his life.
So he stayed at his post. If he did, there was still the slightest chance that John would take his connections into consideration. But if he ran, within a few days, he would die in some nameless corner.
Thus, he raised both hands, showing as much harmlessness as he possibly could, and walked out of the gym step by step.
Then, the instant he saw the body bags, his scalp went numb.
This madman had actually even attacked Trauma Team? And from the looks of it, he had won? The tiny bit of luck he had originally clung to—that John had merely escaped with his life—shattered in an instant. His raised hands stretched even straighter, while his back bent even lower—
“Calm down, John. No matter what happened, calm down first. This is Good Luck Alley. You won’t open fire here, right?”
“You can try me!” John raised his pistol, his fingertip resting on the trigger, as if he would fire in the very next second.
“Oh, damn it, I admit defeat! What do you want? Just say it!”
Saar looked into John’s eyes, then suddenly seemed to give up resisting and directly lowered his hands.
John’s brow twitched. With his left hand, he pointed at the huge pile of body bags behind him:
“Two Kerenzikovs, one pair of gorilla arms, seven sets of high-energy cores, three Trauma Team exoskeletons, one four-star spinal chip, a batch of Blacksteel International special-supply Trauma Team cyberware, battle-damaged edition, and all sorts of three-star little toys. Five million. You’ll still have profit to make.”
“You…” Saar gritted his teeth and forcibly swallowed his words back down. Could he come up with five million? Of course he could. After all, the commission he took from mercenaries every year was more than that. But that money was not all his. He had to grease the palms of big shots on all sides, pay tribute upward, and maintain his information channels. If he really took out this sum, then next month he would…
“Oh, then you’re useless.”
“Stop! Fine! Deal! I’ll raise the money right now. Ten… no, five minutes! Five minutes at most!”
Saar’s instincts told him that even if he spoke one second later, this madman would not hesitate to pull the trigger.
And if this pile of goods was truly as he said, then it definitely was not worth five million, but three million at least. If he could dig out some useful usage data, he might really be able to recoup the cost…
At Saar’s tactfulness, John nodded in satisfaction. Maintaining his posture with the gun raised, he said in a playful tone:
“You can contact the Skeleton Iron Society, can’t you? Pass a message to them for me.”
“Huh? No, that…” Saar was concentrating on operating his accounts, and when John suddenly said this, he almost failed to react.
But John did not care whether he had heard clearly or not, and said directly:
“Before, it was just business. Now, it’s personal.”