Chapter 4459 — Victorious Again
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
After all, an escort's duty is close protection, not brute force and head-on clashes, no matter the means employed. Whoever ultimately keeps the escort safe is a good escort; conversely, if you fight head-on and men die and the escort is lost, what is that?
Say it nicely and it is bravery; in truth, it is plain recklessness.
This was no life-and-death vendetta. An escort's task is close protection; all else is secondary.
On the scoreboard, the Qingtian Escort Agency gained a hundred points, bringing its total to an astonishing seven hundred and seventy, and the gap had not narrowed—it showed a tendency to widen further and further.
By contrast, the Wuma Escort Agency, which had initiated the challenge, was left with a pitiful sixty points after a hundred were deducted. Not only were they dead last among all the escort agencies, but they also faced the awkward prospect of being eliminated outright if they lost even one more match.
From a hard bone feared by every escort agency to one now visibly about to follow in the Wanli Escort Agency's footsteps—Wu Conglong's mood was truly gloomy unto death. Yet all of this was his own doing; who had told him to challenge the Qingtian Escort Agency of his own accord?
"Chief Escort, are we... are we still going to challenge the Qingtian Escort Agency?" asked the deputy who had earlier been ordered to make preparations, cautiously, from the side.
Crack! Wu Conglong slapped the deputy to the ground and roared in hysterical fury, "Challenge my arse! Have we not lost miserably enough? Do you really want to be eliminated?"
Though it was a fit of shame turned to rage, Wu Conglong had not lost his reason after all. His most important task now was to ensure he was not eliminated, not to hound the Qingtian Escort Agency.
Otherwise, if he lost another match and was truly eliminated, his Wuma Escort Agency would become weak trash just like the Wanli Escort Agency, never again able to win any decent large contract, and from then on able only to live by drinking the sea wind.
The cautionary example lay right before their eyes. For a time, those escort agencies that had been itching for a try, harboring the same idea as the Wuma Escort Agency—such as the Yongxing Escort Agency, comparable in strength to the Wuma Escort Agency, which had also meant to use the Qingtian Escort Agency as a stepping stone to leap to the heavens in one bound—now began to hesitate.
True, the Qingtian Escort Agency had not displayed truly overwhelming strength in this battle, far from enough to inspire dread and despair. But if other escort agencies were to take the field in their place, they could not guarantee they would perform any better than the Wuma Escort Agency—what if they met the same fate?
Seeing the heads of the various escort agencies sunk in hesitation and struggle, Wei Zhao smiled faintly. This effect was in fact just right: it let him take points easily without frightening the other agencies away and making them abandon all thought of leaping to the heavens in one bound. Otherwise, if they were so frightened that no agency dared to challenge them, that would be another kind of loss.
After all, the fifth round of the Escort Agency Championship only granted each agency two rights to challenge and two rights to be challenged. Whether to challenge and whether to use up all these opportunities was left entirely to each agency's own plans; the assembly made no compulsory rule.
As for the Qingtian Escort Agency, the two rights to challenge were of course held in its own hands to decide. But whether the remaining right to be challenged could be used depended entirely on whether other escort agencies would keep coming to challenge. If they were all frightened off, that right to be challenged would be pure decoration, naturally rendered void.