148: Chapter 148 Armor Shatters, Old Monster Explodes to Pieces

Isabelle DuPont's lips moved slightly.

She wanted to say, "Just use bunker-busting missiles to level the entire basement along with Solomon," but she swallowed the words back.

His Highness Prince Dao Dun was, in all likelihood, being held prisoner in a room at the very bottom of the manor's basement.

Using artillery to level the basement would certainly guarantee the elimination of Solomon, but it might also accidentally blow the Fourth Prince to pieces.

She didn't dare take that risk, and The Five Great Families didn't dare take that risk either.

She swallowed the artillery plan back down and, in the end, said nothing.

Rockefeller III did not look at them again.

He turned and stepped down the stone stairs, walking along the rubble-strewn ground of the now half-empty courtyard toward the basement passage, with the other four heads of The Five Great Families and their respective personal bodyguards behind him.

...

The alloy blast door between the manor courtyard and the basement corridor had already been blown open by the demolition team.

The pale light from the emergency lamps on both sides of the corridor refracted back and forth between the orderly, advancing formations.

A queue of hundreds of armed men brushed against the walls as they moved deeper inside.

At the very front of the basement passage, the vanguard team had stopped in front of that massive alloy sealed door.

This door was much thicker than any of the blast doors in the outer corridor, its surface covered in matte anti-corrosion alloy panels, embedded with heavy-duty anti-pry latches, and the edges of the door frame still retained dark gray fragments of sealing rubber.

A professional detection team was using various scanning instruments to sweep back and forth in front of the door, scanning the entire door structure from the embedded frame down to the base.

The detection results showed:

There was nothing behind the door; there was no one there.

Within a hundred-meter radius of the basement, apart from the elite armed forces of The Five Great Families, there were no other living signals.

After the leader of the vanguard team finished reading the detection results, the flush of excitement on his face—visible even through his night-vision goggles—could not be suppressed under the emergency lights.

"Solomon no longer has any armed guards by his side."

"Those armed attendants who ran errands for him at the Crane Family manor have either surrendered or been wiped out. There's no one guarding the door for him; he's just in there waiting to die."

"Brothers! The Fourth Prince is right behind this door, waiting for us to go in and save him!"

When the surrounding armed personnel heard these words, their expressions all changed.

From the moment they lined up outside this door, Solomon's head was no longer just a head in everyone's eyes; it was the only pass to leap into a new social class.

Whoever was the first to rescue the Fourth Prince from behind that door in one piece, even Samuel would have to lower his head when he saw them in the future.

The demolition team, at the same second the vanguard order was given, detonated the explosive charges planted on both sides of the door frame.

The entire alloy door was shaken inward by the shockwave, and the debris, before it could even hit the ground, was blasted into dust by another round of clearing shotgun fire.

Before the smoke had even cleared, the front-row tactical team members, crouching low with guns raised, charged into the void behind the door.

The hoarse roars of the charge, mixed with the dense footsteps of hundreds of people behind them accelerating simultaneously, made the entire basement hum with echoes.

This scene was no longer the calmness and discipline an army should have; it was a herd of beasts ignited by both hope and greed, trampling over all caution as they charged forward regardless of everything.

Rockefeller III and the others were following in the middle of the queue, advancing into the depths of the basement passage.

The row of embedded cold-light lamps overhead, after the continuous artillery roar, was still flickering unsteadily.

Samuel walked diagonally behind him and lowered his voice to say:

"Your brainwashing speech is quite toxic. In less time than it takes to eat a meal, you've made this group of people think that what lies ahead is instant wealth and a coronation seat for nobility."

Isabelle pulled her hand-actuated bulletproof cloak to her elbow and tilted her head, adding:

"When they were charging forward, not one of them even glanced at the battle-damage evacuation channels on either side."

Rockefeller III did not reply.

He suddenly stopped, extended his right hand forward to block Samuel and Isabelle, his backhand stopping their momentum as they continued forward, and then whispered:

"It's too quiet... this feeling is wrong. Retreat."

Jacob and William both retreated several steps the very instant his words fell.

The remaining personal bodyguards simultaneously placed their bulletproof shields in front of the several heads.

The queue was forced to stop, separated from the tail end of the crowd still pouring into the door far ahead by about the distance of a long, straight corridor.

And just in the next second, among the large crowd that had just rushed into the underground space at the very front, a burst of dense screams suddenly erupted.

It was something faster than bullets and sharper than blades, sweeping across dozens of bodies simultaneously in the most densely packed part of the crowd.

Severed limbs and blood mist splashed in all directions under the cold light of the emergency lamps.

That mass of black smoke had no warning; after the first wave of encounters, it reconverged into a human shape.

His entire body was completely covered in black carapace, with a pair of deep black wing membranes, thin as cicada wings, unfurled on his back. His compound eyes glinted with a dark red, bloody light under the cold lamps.

"A bunch of lowly insects!"

"The technology that my Crane Family spent three generations and over a hundred years reverse-engineering was not meant to be trampled to pieces by you guard dogs of The Five Great Families using human-wave tactics!"

As soon as he finished speaking, the wing membranes on his back vibrated, and he instantly vanished from his spot.

When he appeared again, he had already landed on the flank of the densest part of the crowd.

The black carapace blades extending from the ends of each of his arms slashed out large, splashing arcs of blood.

The crowd was fighting back desperately.

For a time, bullets and directional explosions were all hurled at that rapidly flickering, moving mass of black smoke.

There was no strategy; it was all about using human lives to drag Solomon into the single-soldier firing range time and time again.

The barrage gradually caught up with the frequency of his feather-armor's changes in direction.

Someone used a laser designator, locking tightly onto the brightest reflection of his compound eyes to provide a targeting baseline for surrounding teammates.

Someone at close range fired various large-caliber armor-piercing rounds, crossing fire into the seams of the black carapace on his abdomen, knocking him back against a slanted bulkhead, the wing membranes on his back constantly shattering under the impact of the dense rain of bullets.

In the rear, Rockefeller III took it all in, separated by a transparent bulletproof shield.

He waved his hand, giving the order to the team of specially equipped personnel who had long been standing by behind him.

A dozen specially equipped personnel holding sonic focusing cannons quickly lined up in an attack formation.

All cannon muzzles simultaneously locked onto the black-armored humanoid, whose movement frequency had begun to noticeably slow due to continuous exhaustion.

The instant the order was given, the air in the entire corridor seemed to be compressed to the limit and then suddenly released.

High-intensity directional sonic waves slammed into the Nano-Carapace, which was already constantly shedding fragments, blasting Solomon off the ground and slamming him into the bulkhead in the distance.

Immediately after, the surrounding assault groups pounced on him, pouring all their remaining ammunition and explosive devices onto that mass of carapace debris that was still trying to reconverge into a shape.

Solomon's body was blown to pieces, flesh and blood flying everywhere.

Fragments of internal organs and shards of black carapace splattered across the floor and walls of the entire corridor.

His head, wearing the damaged compound eyes, detached from his torso in the shockwave and, like a kicked ball, bounced several times on the ground before finally rolling into a corner.