Chapter 20

The Lord of Vermilion’s Test 3

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The Next Day

Morning

Vermilion City Business District

FNN Headquarters Vermilion City Branch

As you’d expect of one of the richest cities in all of the most powerful nation in the world, Vermilion City’s downtown was filled with really tall buildings.

Theo would never enter this part of town on his own will.

He never had any business in the area to begin with.

Ever since the Black Bible incident, he made an effort to avoid this part of town.

The people of the media were so annoying that he wish he had no conscience and just pepper them with bullets.

Anyone would feel annoyed if the media pestered every last one of your acquaintance to get an interview.

Their pestering died down a fair bit as of late, but it was still there.

Against Theo’s own better judgement, he cut class and proceeded to do some reconnaissance of the target area: The FNN Headquarters

While Lord did give him a large chunk of info yesterday, Theo preferred to see for himself if the info was accurate.

Using 4 spy drones and his own vision, he studied his next battleground.

The FNN Headquarters was 3 40 stories towers positioned relatively close to each other in a triangle formation.

Every 10 floors, there was a hall way that connected all 3 buildings together.

Theo couldn’t help but wonder how much fake news did FNN do to get this overly expensive building.

All in all, the FNN building was exactly what Lord’s data made up to be, it was a normal office building with a 5 star hotel at the very top of each floors.

It had a Jacuzzi , a fountain, a mini golf course and a lot of armed guards.

It had everything.

Aside from the armed guards and large amounts of surveillance cameras, it was relatively easy to break into.

They probably thought they were at the top of the world and nothing could touch them.

They’ll experience a very rude awakening in a couple of days.

The problem was getting out.

Since the FNN building has an archon generator as a backup power source, sabotaging the power grids wont stop the surveillance cameras.

Disabling the archon generator took too long and had a very big chance of blowing up, thus this idea was also scrapped.

And since the surveillance jumps to insane heights at the top 3 floors, it was literally impossible to approach the targets without alerting them.

And then there was the rumor that the FNN has a couple of superheroes in their payroll.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Quite simply, the kidnap mission had a 100% chance of shit hitting the fan.

While Theo was trying to predict what Lord’s plan was, his phone rang.

The caller ID had Miss Samantha on it.

“Yes?”

“Care to explain why you’re not in school?” asked Miss Samantha

“That’s 100% your fault you two faced hag!” roared Theo in an uncharacteristic rage. “You just had to drop my name didn’t you?! Now I have to go through a freaking suicide run!”

“Hahaha! Don’t be so bitter kid. I’m sure you were planning on doing something on redeeming the superheroes yourself”

“Well yeah! Obviously! But I rather make my own plans than be swept along with someone else’s shit!”

Just to be crystal clear: Theo NEVER hated Superheroes.

He still believed in their idea of fighting for the greater good.

However, he despised how inefficient the Superheroes’ standard MO.

Not killing a criminal that broke out from jail and killed scores of people multiple times was the stupidest thing anyone could do.

Thus the reason why Theo was walking a very different path.

He felt really guilty for dragging the integrity of Superheroes down the mud.

Naturally, he wanted to correct it.

Truth be told though, he was doing this for a more personal reason.

Since Theo was technically a Superhero-in-training due to being an HAA student, the negative press the Superheroes were receiving directly affected him.

Earlier, he was screamed at by some mindless protestors when they saw his uniform.

To them, Superheroes were the tyrants that lorded over them.

What a bunch of dumbasses.

Superheroes have probably saved their lives multiple times, yet the dumbasses completely forgot this fact and blamed the heroes for every little shit they went through.

They even went as far as pressure politicians to enact some laws that limited superhero activities

Theo would never allow others to be punished for the sins he committed.

Thus he promised to find a way to stop this unjust blame towards Superheroes.

Since he didn’t have any concrete plans in mind, going with Lord’s plan would have to do.

“Well, at least you’re doing your ‘research’ for the ‘project’ I gave you. Don’t worry about your attendance for today. I’ll make an excuse on my end.” Said Miss Samantha

Theo did dread how he’ll explain this one.

This worked to his advantage.

“That’s good. By the way, since you seem to be in on this crap, do you know anything about the targets? Lord was annoyingly vague for some reason.” asked Theo

“*sigh*… that’s just how he is. He’s unnecessarily cautious in most cases. That just means that he doesn’t trust you. Don’t take it the wrong way” said Miss Samantha.

“The feeling is mutual, so it doesn’t really bother me. But I still need info on the targets though.”

“And that’s why I’m here for. I suggest you head for a café or something. This is going to take a while.”

Following Miss Samantha’s words, Theo went for the cheapest thing he could find, namely a hotdog stand, and began eating in a nearby park. At the same time, he commanded his spy drones to return to base.

At that time, Theo listened to Miss Samantha’s explanation.

The targets were 3 people:

The son, the wife and the brother of Jerome Fraskith, the head manager of FNN for the whole region.

Officially, the mission was to kidnap at least one of them and use them to twist Jerome’s hand.

While it was verified that the 3 was housed in the top floors of FNN headquarters, it was hard to pinpoint where exactly among the 3 they stayed in.

Based on the infos, they sometimes stayed in 1 area, 2 stay in one area while the other one was on a separate area or they all stayed in separate from each other.

As far as their investigation team could see, there was no particular pattern to this.

The 3 just stayed where their whims dictated.

Humans were dictated by their desires after all.

Since they couldn’t predict where the 3 will be staying, the only choice was to assault all 3 locations and hope for a jackpot.

“The mission is going to be executed 8 days from now. Be ready” said Miss Samantha.

“Why wait for 8 days?” asked Theo

“That’s because there’s something big happening in the Heroes Alliance atleast 7 days from now. Based on the Lord’s suppliers, the Heroes Alliance logistics went into overdrive 2 days ago. It seemed they wanted as much food, fuel and other daily necessities as possible. They said to have it delivered about 5 days from now. There also has been sighting that a decent number of the Heroes’ spaceships were being prepared for a voyage.”

“Oh? Is this one of those inter galactic incidents I’ve heard about?”

“Most likely. While the Heroes are tight lipped about it, this stuff has happened quite a few times in the past. At the very least, we can expect that the big guns like Omegaman, Crow and Mechanicus will be off planet during that time. This leaves us with the heroes of B rank and below to deal with. If there’s a time to pull off something this big, it’s in 8 days.”

“I see… that makes sense. But you know that our side will lose a lot of people even if the potential hero interference is B rankers, right?”

“Of course. While we cant explain to you the entirety of our plan, know that the heavy losses is part of our objectives.”

“Er… you know that there’s a chance that I’m one of those loses right?”

“HAHAHAHA! Then do your best to not get caught!”

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