263 Stretching Muscles
Just by looking at it, Ian could immediately tell who held the power in this human transit warehouse. He did beat up the Beast Empire members who were there. However, he deliberately gave the man in charge of the warehouse a slack time, so that the man had the opportunity to contact the main warehouse to send help.
“What do you want?!” asked the man who had a scar line running down the side of his face. He looked scared as he pressed his back against the wall.
Ian smiled wickedly. “How does it feel when you want to run away, but all the windows are covered by wooden planks? Isn’t it funny, that you closed the windows yourself?”
“Are you Jita Kyoei?! What do you want here? We don’t keep anything here!” the man exclaimed.
Ian glanced at the man’s hand which was holding a cell phone whose screen was still on. It seemed that the man had finished contacting his superiors to report what was going on at the transit warehouse.
“We want to burn this house down – with you and all your men in it,” Ian answered the question.
Hearing the answer, the man felt like he was going to pee his pants. He quickly shook his head. “No! You can’t do it. Look, our members are on their way here. It’s a lot of them, much more than your men. If you don’t leave soon, you will die here.”
Instead of feeling threatened, Ian was satisfied to hear the news. He wasn’t afraid at all of how many men would come to retaliate against them. Ian didn’t need to think twice as to whether his men were able to resist the oncoming wave of attacks or not. The more people who come, the better. That was a sign that the main warehouse would be empty.
**
.....
“We will send a team there. Hang on!” Juan said with the phone to his ear.
As soon as he lowered the cell phone and was about to contact his subordinate, suddenly the cell phone rang again.
Juan looked at his cellphone screen with a frown when he saw the name of his subordinate who was in charge of the second transit warehouse. His uneasy feeling was confirmed when he answered the call.
“Boss! Our warehouse is under attack!” The man exclaimed with a huge commotion in the background.
Juan’s grip on the phone tightened instantly. If he didn’t hold himself back phone might break right away.
“Boss! They’re going to burn this place down! We can’t fight them! Boss! Can you hear me? Hello?! Hello?!” The man shouted again because his boss didn’t answer.
Juan clenched his jaw at hearing his subordinates sound so panicked like a criminal about to have dead punishment. He was annoyed at the fact that he had such a weak man.
“Shut up!” Juan snapped.
Then he tried to control his breathing before speaking again, “I’ll send someone there. Protect the place. Don’t act like a baby, damn it!”
Juan hung up the phone while holding his head which immediately felt throbbing. He took a deep breath and let it out long. Then he looked back at his cellphone screen and looked for Zac’s contact, a man who had the same level as RD. He was in charge of all the men.
“Zac,” Juan said as soon as the call was answered by the man with dark skin and hair in a crown row style braid.
“Yes? Did something happen, Juan?” Zac asked directly. He could clearly hear Juan’s unusual tone of voice.
Juan nodded. “Our two transit warehouses were attacked by Jita Kyoei. Send relief teams to each place. Arrange so that there are enough men left here,”
“All right. I’ll send help now.” Zac answered right away.
Juan put his phone back on the table. If only yesterday he had not thought about pulling the men from headquarters to the main warehouse, perhaps they would be short of people by now. It turned out that his hunch was right, but it was Derric who took all problems too lightly.
The two transit warehouses were assets belonging to the Beast Empire. They had bought them, not rent them. If Jita Kyoei were to burn down the houses, then the Beast Empire would suffer a considerable loss.
Even though they had made a lot of money from this Human Trafficking business, the Beast Empire’s finances were not as good as they looked from the outside.
Their large profits were also undermined by expenses that were no less large. After the Beast Empire was able to run independently, Dragger decided to stop their financial support for the group.
Not just stopping financial support, Dragger also asked Beast Empire to pay dues or in other terms, join them to bribe the police so they didn’t interfere with their business. Since the business carried out by the Beast Empire was a serious crime, they had to pay a hefty fee to the police.
In fact, therein was the ingenuity of Pablo Diablo. It was as if he was investing in the Beast Empire. That boy had indeed helped the Beast Empire in growing their business. However, after the Beast Empire became independent, they were trapped forever as Dragger’s servants.
In addition to having to pay dues to the police and also pay all members’ salaries, because Dragger was a special customer of Beast Empire, Beast Empire must give Dragger a special price.
The women-hire fee charged to Dragger was seventy percent lower than the other customers. Even Dragger didn’t have to pay any side fees, as Beast Empire usually charged all of their customers.
Those two things were enough to burden the Beast Empire. But there was one more thing that made Beast Empire have to work even harder. That thing was a group called the Black Hole which was the snake head of all these networks.
Just like all the groups that belong to The Deadly Square and Dragger, Beast Empire also had to pay a fee to this powerful giant group.
**
A pair of binoculars perched in front of a pair of light brown eyes with curly eyelashes. From the binoculars, Emma could see a swarm of motorbikes and cars coming out of the high gates of the Beast Empire’s main warehouse.
“They’re out,” Emma said to Rachel who was standing beside her.
Then Rachel pressed the button on her mouth cover, then shared the information with Kathy as well as Ian and Troy who were at the transit warehouses.
On the other hand,
Kathy and her two assistants seemed busy in front of their computers.
“I got the access!” exclaimed Daisy, a bespectacled girl who was one of Kathy’s assistants.
“Good!” Kathy said, rubbing her hands together.
The Black Swan IT team was even happier when they discovered the fact that Beast Empire’s main warehouse used the services of a ‘Smart Home’ system that was connected to all CCTV cameras, security systems, and several speakers located in various corners of the hallways.
It looked like Derric was using it to monitor all the prisoners and the condition of the base online. It seemed that the Beast Empire had quite a stingy leader and a crisis of trust towards its own men.
Derric Hubbert was seen trying to take advantage of the advanced technology of this century. He used it to reduce his business costs in terms of adding members as guards. While on the other hand, Juan Xavier was a very wary person. It was difficult for him to trust his own subordinates.
The main warehouse, which looked like a prison, had plenty of room to store prisoners. Therefore, if they had to use the traditional way of supervising everything, of course they would need a lot of men to do it.
Actually, in the main warehouse, there was indeed a special room to monitor all CCTV, which was guarded by two men in turns. But Juan, who was always worried, thought that he couldn’t trust the guards one hundred percent just like that.
Juan Xavier would feel more at ease if he could keep an eye on what was going on in the main warehouse that contained almost all of the Beast Empire’s possessions, which he and Derric had fought for with their lives. The treasures were not money or gold, but prisoners and important documents.
However, who would have thought that it turned out that there was a group that had members with impressive hacking abilities? The group ended up using the facilities that the Beast Empire was using as a launch pad for their mission.
The security system that Derric and Juan thought would make their business run smoothly, turned into a boomerang for the destruction of their own group.
“I’m in,” said Rena, Kathy’s other assistant.
Kathy nodded. “We have to stay still. For now, we can only watch so they don’t notice that their Smart Home system is being bugged.”
“In that case, I’ll search the document room while I wait,” Daisy said.
Kathy nodded casually as she took a sip of her seven-shot Iced Americano. “Don’t forget to enjoy your coffee, girls. Don’t let yourself fail to enjoy the next party, for feeling sleepy,”
Daisy chuckled. “Even without coffee, I’m ready to watch their panic.”
**
Troy looked out the window covered by the wooden planks. He smiled as he watched how many reinforcements the Beast Empire had sent.
The small group that Troy led was only twenty members, including Frank Duk. But those twenty-one men were enough to make the Beast Empire threatened that it decided to send an additional sixty members there.
“Ready to stretch your muscles again?” Troy looked back at his friends who were waiting in a relaxed manner.