180: Chapter 180 Assassination Attempt Fails, Injured, Hard-Hearted Man Fights Back

When Prant and the thousands of people in the audience raised their arms and shouted together, that heaven-shaking "MAGA" slogan,

his head finally stopped for about half a second during a certain extremely passionate upward-looking posture.

The gunman's crosshairs happened to land less than half an inch above his right ear.

He pulled the trigger.

"Bang!"

The moment the gunshot rang out, Prant suddenly crouched down,

not falling to the ground after being hit, but instinctively and reflexively shrinking beneath the podium.

He crouched behind the podium panel and subconsciously touched his forehead with his right hand.

There was nothing.

His forehead was intact.

Then he touched his right ear, and his fingers touched a warm, sticky liquid.

Pulling them away to look, his fingertips were covered in blood.

The bodyguard team on stage rushed up from both sides of the stage in less than two seconds,

and a dense crowd surrounded him tightly in the middle.

Two of the bodyguards were completely different from the others;

they wore the same black suits, but wore a black glove on one hand and a blue glove on the other.

These two people stood side by side in front of Prant, blocking all possible incoming ballistic angles.

"Rest assured, with people from the Tech Faction here, you don't have to worry at all."

One of the Men in Black turned his head slightly, his tone unhurried,

"Just now, that bullet was deflected in angle by the repulsion field waved from my hand."

Prant crouched behind them, holding his still-bleeding right ear, looked up at the Man in Black who spoke, and said nothing.

But the confusion in his eyes was almost overflowing:

Since you Tech Faction members are so strong, able to casually fight Grey Alien' fleet in the sky and turn Joshua into a bolt of lightning to strike into the second underground floor, how can you not even control the direction of deflecting a single bullet well, and instead let my right ear bleed a puddle of blood?

Another Man in Black looked at his expression, bent over slightly, and lowered his voice to a level only the two of them could hear, his tone as flat as stating a campaign strategy that had been verified countless times.

"Sir, sometimes getting a bit injured can mobilize voters' emotions to a greater extent and win you more votes."

"Isn't that right?"

Prant understood instantly.

Holding his dripping right ear, the corners of his mouth twitched slightly,

that slight arc was neither anger nor frustration; it was the calmness of someone who had struggled on the real estate negotiation table for decades, recalculating a losing deal into a profit within seconds.

"That's right."

"It's better to get a little hurt after all."

At this time, the entire rally venue had fallen into chaos due to the sudden gunfire.

The people in the front row screamed and threw themselves flat on the ground,

the crowd in the middle area pushed and shoved each other, not knowing which direction to run,

people in the back row began to climb over the isolation barriers and run frantically toward the parking lot.

Just when everyone was scared out of their wits,

Prant stood up from the layers of bodyguard human walls.

The blood from his right ear flowed down his neck into the collar of his white shirt, dyeing a large area of the collar an irregular dark red,

but the expression on his face was neither fear nor pain, but a stubbornness and fearlessness simultaneously ignited by adrenaline and stage instinct in a moment of extreme danger.

He raised his right hand into a fist, facing thousands of panicking faces off the stage, using all the remaining breath in his chest to repeatedly shout the same word:

"Fight!"

"Fight!"

"Fight!"

That scene was captured simultaneously by the lenses of countless mobile phones off stage, and within seconds, it spread throughout the Lighthouse Country via social media live broadcast signals.

A Prant who still refused to fall after being shot and still roared with his fist raised.

Many of the people at the scene who had just been screaming and fleeing stopped in their tracks, turned around, and raised their fists in response to the figure still shouting with arms raised on the stage.

"Fight!"

Someone knelt at the edge of the crowd, held the hand of a crying child, facing the stage together; the light with one side shattered still shone on the podium, silently mouthing the word.

"Fight!"

At that moment, Prant's image in the hearts of many people changed from "that blond real estate developer" to a deeper, more invincible existence.

And on the roof of that old office building two hundred meters away,

"Fuck!"

The gunman saw Prant stand up again and raise his fist through the scope, cursing fiercely.

He immediately put away his rifle and crawled back from the roof into the vacant office on the fifth floor along the pre-laid rope.

His evacuation route was planned in advance,

from the fifth floor down to the basement parking lot, taking the employee-only stairwell,

changing his outer garments, walking across the corner between the parking lot and the back door of the adjacent fast-food restaurant, and finally entering a parked, turned-off second-hand silver Corolla on the street outside the restaurant entrance.

But just as he walked to the very last step of the basement stairwell,

five hundred meters away, on another water tower,

another sniper who had been hidden in the dark and kept watch for many hours had gently moved the crosshairs of his high-power scope onto his temple.

"Bang!"

The second gunshot was almost simultaneously drowned out by the still-boiling slogans at the scene.

The back of the gunman's head exploded in the dim basement passage,

and his whole body pitched forward, rolling from the top of the stairs to the ground, instantly losing all signs of life.

Meanwhile, the second safeguard and silencing executor on the water tower executing the assassination mission, after confirming that the target was killed, immediately turned over, picked up the rifle case placed beside him, and crossed into the dark gray sedan parked on the roadside that had also been turned off in advance in a few strides.

However, the moment he stepped on the gas pedal,

the chassis of the dark gray sedan, as it rolled over the cast-iron cover of the drainage ditch, triggered an ultra-thin pressure-actuated detonation device pre-clamped beneath the grille.

"Boom!"

In the explosion, the entire body of the car turned into a rolling and expanding orange-black fireball, fragments splashing in the empty and uninhabited back street, burning completely into unrecognizable wreckage along with the person and the car.

Thus, the two gunmen involved in the assassination of Prant died one after another, completely leaving no dead evidence.

...

Public opinion over the next few days leaned entirely toward Prant like an irreversible landslide.

The anti-gravity levitation technology he demonstrated at the Butler campaign rally was repeatedly broadcasted by major news stations,

the image of Prant levitating in mid-air and waving to the crowd made the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post,

tech media dissected it frame by frame, from levitation height and aerial attitude stability to spectral analysis of the halo on the soles of his boots.

Even those current affairs columnists who had always been critical of him had to admit that when facing the threat of Grey Alien' million-strong fleet, Prant had at least produced solid things,

and Biden, aside from suppressing the news and sending the FBI to search the former president's private residence, had nothing.