Chapter 385 — Impressed

Only after Liu Yu had confirmed that the chip was intact did he let out a long breath. He thought of how he had tailed Li Dianchi across many days, how he had finally reached Las Vegas, and how, with Yang Juehuan's help, he had taken Li Dianchi prisoner—only for the thing in his hands to have already been handed off. That feeling of loss, he knew it all too well!

He had brought several colleagues along, men who by the squad's ranking system were high-grade Yellow-rank experts—and yet before Kevin they had been utterly helpless, beaten straight into broken bones and packed off to the hospital!

That left Liu Yu both shaken and deeply disappointed, so much so that he was half inclined to give up and go home. After all, when resistance was completely impossible, sending more men up was simply sending them to their deaths!

What was inside the chip mattered, certainly, but meaningless sacrifice was pointless. Better to forgo the contents of the chip than to preserve nothing of their own strength.

After he reported the situation to the higher-ups, Liu Yu had expected to be ordered to withdraw—but instead he was told that a top expert would be sent to them. To his astonishment, that expert turned out to be Yang Ce, the very man who had helped him capture Li Dianchi!

And this man was, in fact, the ace of the Special Task Group—a position equivalent to his own in the Field Operations Group! But the Field Group was a tier below the Special Group; the Special Group's experts were far more numerous and far more formidable, for they carried out special-operations missions whose difficulty was considerably more complex than ordinary field work.

What surprised Liu Yu even more was that Yang Ce was the very man he would be working alongside on the coming Yunnan operation!

Earlier, the higher-ups had not gone into much detail; they had merely told him that once this mission was over, he was to go back and rest up, and prepare to throw everything into the Yunnan operation.

And in this Yunnan operation, his main task was actually to support someone else! That galled Liu Yu. He was the ace of the Field Operations Group—every time he went out on a mission, he led the team, he was the center of it all. And now he was supposed to support someone else?

He knew, of course, that this mission would surely be dangerous, and that even if he harbored resentment, he had to obey his superiors absolutely. Still, Liu Yu could not help feeling the imbalance of it... He was the ace of the Field Group, after all—and he was to play second fiddle to someone?

But this time, the call from above said that the man he was to support was none other than Yang Ce—and that Yang Shuoxuan would be joining him on this mission to deal with Kevin together. As for Heng, Kevin did feel a certain grudging respect.

After all, it was Yang Ce who had helped him capture Li Dianchi this time, and Liu Yu was deeply grateful to him. When he heard that the Yunnan operation was likewise Yang Puqi's undertaking, Liu Yu felt considerably better!

At least the man he himself had failed to catch, Yang Ce had caught—which proved that Yang Ce was stronger than he was. And the man was the ace of the Special Task Group; surely he was stronger than Liu Yu, ace of the Field Group!

But at this moment, Liu Yu's admiration for Heng had reached the point of prostration. A Kevin so difficult to deal with—and Yang Ce had simply killed him? Just like that, dead?

Originally, Liu Yu had reckoned that snatching the thing from Kevin's hands would be the best possible outcome; as for killing Kevin, that was something he would not have dared even to imagine. The enemy was too powerful; he had had no confidence at all!

And Yang Ce... had simply done it, and it had even looked easy, almost comical... It was just that Kevin was too wretched for words.

Toyed with like a clown by Yang Ce, caught completely off guard in Yang Juehuan's trap, lured over by Yang Ce—and then Liu Yu had shot him dead with a single sniper round.

Of course, though it was Liu Yu's bullet that killed Kevin, Liu Yu did not for a moment feel that he was the one who had finished Kevin off... He had merely fired a gun. Any member of the Field Group could have done that. Not that all of them were marksmen, but anyone who could miss at that range would never have made it into the Field Group in the first place.

He had done only what Yang Juehuan asked, carrying out Yang Juehuan's orders to the letter. So the credit was not his at all—Liu Yu at least had that much self-awareness.

"Boss, is this guy really finished?" Liu Yu nudged Kevin's body with his foot.

"Hook up a power source, and he might still work?" Yang Shuoxuan was not too clear on such high-precision technological equipment. This would have to be taken back for the research institute's people to study.

"..." Liu Yu was speechless. From Yang Juehuan's tone, it seemed he did not regard Kevin as a person at all, but as a broken machine. Though, to be fair, Kevin really was a robot...

"Load him into the car first. I'll find someone to ship him back to the country. As long as there's no problem with customs on the domestic end, I'm good on my side," Yang Yanzhou said.

"Domestic customs?" Liu Yu was rendered mute. He had not expected that to be Yang Ce's worry! He did not know what to say. His own worry was how to get Kevin's "corpse" out of Las Vegas, how to get it out of the country—as for the domestic end, he had not considered it at all. The Mysterious Investigation Bureau's ships enjoyed more privileges than even the military's; they could enter port entirely inspection-free. And Yang Ce was worrying about this? He was rather puzzled—did Yang Ce even know what kind of department he worked for?

"Yes. Shipping a corpse back—it wouldn't be easy to get through entry, would it?" Yang Ce had not thought that far. By his logic, he would have Old Buffon find some smugglers and have Kevin's corpse smuggled back.

"..." Liu Yu said, "Boss, I'm speechless. For something like this, one phone call and the higher-ups will send people to meet us... What does it have to do with customs..."

"Oh, oh..." Yang Mo seemed a little embarrassed. "I forgot what the corpse is for—our own department's research institute is to study it. I thought the two of us were sneaking it back on our own..."

"..." Liu Yu did not know what to say. He loaded Kevin's corpse into the car, then asked, "Boss, what do we do now?"

"Go back to the Douglas Grand Hotel. I'll call someone to get Kevin back first; the two of us will return through the normal channels," Yang Yanzhou said. "That chip... if you have a special channel, you can take it back yourself. If you trust me, send it back together with Kevin's corpse—the people I'm contacting can be trusted absolutely."

"Then let's send it back together..." Liu Yu hesitated, then nodded. Taking the chip onto a plane was out of the question; who knew whether any of the Center's people were in security screening? If it were discovered, the other side might not seize it by force, but their identities would be exposed all the same.

So it was safer to let Yang Puqi handle the shipment. The Liu Yu of now had absolute trust in Heng; he chose to believe Yang Yanzhou's words unconditionally.

"All right, then it's settled. Report the results to the higher-ups, and then we'll prepare to go home. We've been here too long—I'm even starting to feel a little homesick..." Yang Yuting instructed.