145: Chapter 145 The Heir Dies, the Final Trump Card Fails

Jasper tumbled off the inflatable float, falling clumsily into the shallow end. The champagne glass flew from his hand, shattering into pieces against the edge of the pool.

He scrambled up from the water, his exquisite custom shirt soaked and clinging to his body, hair dripping. The composure and lethargy he had displayed earlier were completely replaced by fear and disarray. He stammered out: "Go... go to the basement! Take me there immediately!"

The supermodels screamed as they climbed out of the pool, their bare feet slapping against the terrazzo floor as they crowded around him, their voices rising in succession: "Take us with you!", "Please!", "We don't want to die!"

Just as Jasper was about to nod, the security guard suddenly stepped forward, grabbed his arm, leaned into his ear, and whispered a strategy.

"Young Master Jasper, in a moment of crisis, every second counts."

"Why not leave these women here as a honey trap?"

"Use them to delay the attackers' momentum; that will better guarantee your escape."

Jasper froze for a second, then turned to look at the young women, soaked to the bone with their makeup smeared, still reaching out to him in supplication. He then looked at the security guard's face, at that expression so calm it bordered on cold-blooded. Jasper slowly nodded.

He ordered his attendants to block all the supermodels outside, instructing them to open fire immediately if anyone dared to follow.

The women's pleas instantly turned into screams and curses. They pounded their hands against the chests of the security guards blocking their path. Some crouched on the slippery terrazzo floor, wailing, while others pointed at Jasper's retreating back, hurling the most vicious insults in a mix of languages, paying him back for his sweet words from moments before.

But the chaos in the pool area did not last long.

Suddenly, a sharp whistling sound came from overhead, and several M203 grenade rounds arched from the direction of the main manor house, smashing into the pool area.

The first landed on the west side of the pool, striking the edge of the shower and changing room partition, exploding with a roar; the entire row of floor-to-ceiling glass shattered into a dense cloud of shards. The second landed squarely in the shallow end where the inflatable float had been, blasting a wave of water laced with metal shrapnel three meters into the air.

Jasper, the security guard who offered the advice, all the Crane family attendants who had been screaming just moments ago, the models scattering in flight, and everyone else around the pool... in that same second, were blasted into fragments of flesh and bone.

The time that followed belonged to gunfire and artillery.

The Crane Manor's armed personnel had barely managed to resist the first wave of the assault at the manor's perimeter, but these Jewish financial plutocrats, who had spent their lives fighting battles in Wall Street offices using leverage and interest rate hedging tools, were ultimately no match for The Five Great Families—old-money aristocrats who had been leading troops into battle since the War of Independence.

The fire suppression only lasted a few minutes before the manor's defenses were completely crushed. The battle turned into a one-sided steamrolling; The Five Great Families' joint armed teams cleared the buildings one by one in tactical formation, and the Crane family's private security were either killed on the spot or pinned to the ground and subdued.

Moreover, aside from their martial spirit being less abundant than that of the old-money aristocrats, loyalty was also an unbridgeable chasm. Things bought with money were all cheap goods.

In less than a quarter of an hour, those who were still resisting were cleared out one by one. The remaining Crane family armed personnel began to lay down their weapons and raise their hands in droves.

Some knelt on the lawn, placing their guns on their heads, shouting their positions and clearance levels, begging the other side to guarantee their personal safety.

Even more, when The Five Great Families' joint armed forces had just advanced to the flank of the main manor house, some actively approached them, shouting: "I'm willing to lead the way!", "I'm willing to take you to Solomon's hiding place!", "I also know the entire structure of the manor's underground facilities!"

Rockefeller III and Samuel Astor walked side-by-side into the courtyard, proceeding along the main manor corridor located between the bombed-out east and west wings, the ground covered in broken glass and shell casings. Isabelle DuPont and Jacob Rothschild followed closely behind, with William Vanderbilt V trailing at the end, his military boots crunching on the ground mixed with gravel and bone fragments.

When Rockefeller III's leather shoe stepped onto the debris of the shattered marble floor tiles, it emitted a crisp, uniform crunch. After that step landed, all sound in the entire courtyard vanished in the same instant.

The captives kneeling on the ground who hadn't been tied up stopped trembling; the soldiers in The Five Great Families' armed teams, who were in the middle of crating newly confiscated weapons, froze in their movements; even the overturned fireball beside a struck vehicle still emitting thick smoke in the distance seemed as if someone had silently pressed pause with a remote control.

Rockefeller III scanned the entire courtyard, then fixed his gaze on the captive who had just volunteered to lead the way: the deputy security commander of the manor, an Irish-descended veteran security guard in his fifties who had been a sergeant, nicknamed Finn, who had worked for the Crane family for nearly twenty years. He was currently kneeling on the ground, his face covered in blood, hands raised above his head, with the muzzle of a gun still radiating residual heat a few feet behind him.

"Do you know where Solomon is hiding?" Rockefeller III asked.

Finn nodded his head like a chicken pecking at rice, moved his knees forward two steps on the broken bricks on the ground, his tone extremely obsequious and rapid: "I know the entrance to the basement and the layout of the internal passages, and I also know the direction of the emergency escape tunnel exits built by the Crane family in the early years." "I am willing to clear the path for you, sir, only asking for a guarantee of my personal safety."

Rockefeller III only replied with one sentence: "You go first."

The way The Five Great Families treated captives was never to let them walk in front while they followed behind; instead, a fully armed joint assault team pressed their gun barrels against the back of Finn's head, hauled him up from the ground, tied his hands behind his back, tightened the bindings on his wrists, and shoved him to the end of the manor corridor, to the entrance of that hidden door. If there were any changes on the way, he would be killed within milliseconds.

Rockefeller III, Samuel, and the others did not follow inside. The few heads of the families stood leisurely in the courtyard, which was still full of shrapnel, waiting for the scout team to map out the basement route before taking the true elite armed forces inside.

The manor basement. This was not a cramped cellar like those in ordinary mansions, stuffed with a few bottles of red wine and a row of filing cabinets.

The entrance led down from a hidden door on the side of the main study; after passing through two pried-open alloy explosion-proof doors, one entered a vast underground space created by leveling the bedrock and reinforcing it with concrete. Every corridor was two stories high, and the suspended cold-light lamps illuminated the keyboard terminals embedded in the walls and the historical archival cabinets in a grayish-white hue.

On both sides of the corridor were research cubicles one after another. In the center of the research lab at the very end, Solomon Crane stood in front of a metal pedestal about waist-high.

The surface of the pedestal was covered with fine, dense engravings, each line pulsing with a faint, breath-like light. Above the pedestal, a wisp of irregularly shaped black mist was suspended.

This black mist was constantly changing, sometimes twisting into the silhouette of Solomon himself, sometimes gathering into a miniature skyscraper, and sometimes stretching out into the shape of a graceful woman.

But all these forms were merely rough outlines, like an unfinished sketch; the skeleton was there, but the details were all blank.

"What a pity."

"Just one last step away..."

"This 'Nano-Carapace' only needs that final shape-fixing process to be complete."

"You didn't come early, you didn't come late, but you just had to come today!"