182: Chapter 182 Silver Armor, Slaying Through the Entire Manor

Musk placed his empty cola can on the coffee table, walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and looked out at the private beach washed in silver-gray moonlight, his tone carrying a bit more genuine warmth than when he had been reporting the polling data just moments earlier.

"At first, I felt blowing up the earth was a bit of a pity."

"But Maoer Star is different."

"A new galaxy, a new planet, with native intelligent life to conquer, atmospheres to modify, continental shelves to rename, and an entire expanse of undeveloped starry skies to lay Starlink across."

"This isn't rearranging chess pieces on an old board; this is directly swapping it out for a brand-new board."

"I've been in aerospace for decades, and this new board is what I've been waiting for!"

Edward took his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair and laid it across his knees, remaining seated as he lightly turned his wine glass halfway around.

His tone retained the usual steadiness of a Nevada senator, but his phrasing no longer held any attempt to conceal his true intentions.

"The Warren Family has operated in America for over a hundred years, from mining to railways, casinos, and politics. By my generation, the absolute most we could achieve was being the final authority in Nevada."

"It's not that the people of the Warren Family aren't capable enough; my father was capable enough, and my great-grandfather was capable enough. It's simply that we arrived too late."

"When the Mayflower docked, the descendants of those people on board already filled every seat belonging to the hidden grand bankers of America. No matter how capable later arrivals might be, what they could snatch up in their hands would only be leftovers."

He placed his wine glass on the edge of the tabletop and raised his eyes to look at Prant and Musk,

"But Maoer Star is different."

"That is an unclaimed vacuum of power."

"As long as we complete the deployment of the Space Jump Gate in advance, the Warren Family can become the Mayflower nobility of Maoer Star on the very first day of landing on the New World."

"Not a century-old local tyrant of Nevada, but the biggest hidden banker behind the entire new human colony!"

Prant stood up from the sofa, walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Musk. Looking out at the mirror-calm surface of the Atlantic Ocean under the moonlight outside, his tone carried a near-religious certainty and self-expectation.

"Do you know how history remembers people?"

"Columbus, Magellan, Armstrong... just those few names."

"Everyone else, no matter how much money or power they had in life, at most gets written into a footnote on the third page of the genealogy after death."

"But this time is different."

"This time, it's not crossing the Atlantic Ocean, nor is it planting a flag on the moon."

"This time is humanity's maiden voyage into the era of interstellar colonization!"

"And I will be the one at the Pacific Ocean Joint Base who signs the No. 1 mobilization order for the 'Interstellar Expeditionary Force'."

"No one will ever use my tax returns and social media posting history to make an issue of what I did during my tenure."

"In the future, every history textbook will print my full name on the first page of this era!"

He placed his whiskey glass on the windowsill, turned around, and looked at Edward and Musk,

"You act as the hidden bankers of the New World for the Warren Family, and fill the entire orbit of Maoer Star for SpaceX."

"And I am reserving a spot for myself on the very first page of history."

"From day one, neither party will lose out on this transaction."

Edward picked up his wine glass again, and Musk picked up his cola can. The three cups clinked together once more under the warm yellow chandelier of the banquet hall.

Outside the window, the sea breeze brushed gently, and the moonlight washed clean. Every step leading to the future seemed to have been precisely calculated.

Then, from the hallway outside, a sudden, extremely brief, muffled sound came over.

There were no gunshots, and no explosions could be heard.

It was the dull, reaping sound of something sharper slicing through the air and immediately slamming into human soft tissue.

The next second, intense gunfire erupted simultaneously from both ends of the hallway,

The three-round bursts of M4 carbines and the explosive blasts of shotguns battered against the walls in waves,

Interspersed among them were the glass-like crisp sounds of shattered bone shells and the muffled thuds of knees hitting the hard ground as bodies collapsed.

The gunfire grew louder and denser, and the clattering sound of bullet casings bouncing back and forth on the hallway floor became faster and faster,

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped completely.

The doors of the banquet hall were violently shoved open from the outside,

A blood-soaked armed operative stumbled and rushed in,

Across his tactical vest were several neat scorch marks cut open by a high-temperature sharp blade. The smell of gunpowder smoke and the sweetish stench of burning flesh poured in simultaneously from outside the doorframe.

"Sir! Enemy attack! We can't hold her off... She's already entered the hallway..."

Prant, Edward, and Musk stood up from their seats at the same time, the relaxed expressions on their faces long since evaporated away.

Musk took a step forward to block the other two, his voice kept extremely low but his speech extremely fast:

"How many people?"

The armed operative braced himself against the doorframe with his left hand, which was still oozing blood. His lips trembled, and the edges of his eye sockets were covered in ruptured tiny blood vessels.

"One... just one person."

"She's wearing that kind of silver armor, and the surface is constantly flowing like water. Bullets sink straight into it when they hit, and then bounce right off—artillery shells are the same."

"She has a weapon in her hand like a lightsaber; whoever the blade sweeps across gets cut in half!"

"It's too demonic, no matter how many people we have, we can't stop her!"

Musk didn't speak, merely turning back to look at Edward.

This Mar-a-Lago safe house stocked injection packs of liquid zero, and all close guards and loyal retainers of the Warren Family had received injections within the latest active period.

Just then, another armed operative staggered in from the other end of the hallway, his back slamming against the doorframe.

His left arm was empty from the elbow joint downward. The stump wasn't blown off; it had been horizontally severed by something extremely sharp,

The edges of the bones and blood vessels were as smooth as a pathological slice precisely cut with a microscope.

He pressed his remaining right hand desperately against the stump, his face ashen, leaving only breathy sounds after his screams.

"liquid zero... it's useless. The people she slashed with that lightsaber cannot regrow their severed parts."

"The cells don't react at all, as if the tip of that blade carries some kind of suppression field that completely kills the regeneration program—severed means completely severed...!"

Edward's wine glass slid slowly from his hand onto the tabletop, producing a muffled collision.

Prant, who was about to press the backup call button leading to the basement escape tunnel, froze with his finger suspended in mid-air.

liquid zero was their trump card against all conventional physical damage:

shattered by missiles, they could regenerate; pierced through the skull by armor-piercing rounds, they could stand back up without a scratch.

But if there was a sword capable of making liquid zero's regeneration program completely ineffective,

then what they were facing was no longer a weapon from any technological field known to humanity.