77: Chapter 77 A Shot at the Feast at Hongmen, Resurrected and Slapped in the Face

Musk shrugged and turned to Edward,

"Ed, did you notice? Everyone sitting here tonight is one of theirs. Not a single outsider."

"This shows they never intended to negotiate with us from the very beginning."

The smile on the face of the man wearing the Army ring froze for an instant, but he was quickly pulled back to his seat by the person next to him.

The scattered private conversations in the banquet hall gradually quieted down.

Then, the three people at the main table began to move.

Diana Hopkins, sitting in the center of the main table, was the first to stand up.

Tonight, she wore a minimalist black silk satin gown. The bruise on the side of her neck, left by Commander Bibi's glove, had been concealed with makeup until no trace remained.

Holding an untouched glass of champagne in her hand, her gaze swept over the rim of the glass toward Musk and Edward.

Sitting to Diana's left, Sterling Remington—the true controller behind General Dynamics, a sixty-one-year-old gray-haired man with an almost exaggeratedly thin build—stood up as well.

He wore a dark gray custom suit without a tie, the top button of his white shirt left open. His entire being exuded a calm, detached indifference cast from generations of arms profits.

Sterling did not speak as he stood straight,

but his narrow, long eyes—which had been staring down Secretaries of Defense in Pentagon procurement meetings since his youth—never left the direction of Musk and Edward.

To Diana's right was Augustus Knox, the controller behind Raytheon Technologies. Fifty-five years old, he was heavily built with a short, thick neck and a forehead so broad it occupied nearly the entire upper half of his face.

When he stood up, the legs of his chair made a heavy, muffled scraping sound against the marble floor.

Augustus propped both hands on the table and leaned his upper body forward. He first looked at the way Diana and Sterling held their respective glasses,

and then turned to the two men standing in the center of the hall. His voice was deep and powerful, as if announcing a military procurement decision that had already passed all approval processes.

"Welcome, gentlemen."

"Tonight's banquet is hosted jointly by the three of us. The commander of the Joint Base lent us this hall."

"Not because he thinks we get along, but because our three legal departments turned this matter into a formal coordination procedure of the Department of Defense within twenty-four hours."

"So tonight is not a private party; it is a formal meeting at the defense supply chain level."

"Since everyone is here, let's get straight to the point." Diana set her champagne glass on the table and slowly took two steps forward, stopping about ten feet away from Musk.

Her voice was not loud, but every single word pressed into all the background noise in the hall like nails:

"Do it yourselves and keep some dignity."

"We guarantee we won't touch anyone else in the Warren or Musk families."

"The secrets of Hoover Dam, alien technology, and that eyeball—it ends here. Absolutely no proliferation."

Augustus immediately followed up, his heavy, completely cold eyes staring levelly at Musk and Edward.

It wasn't a threat, but rather the declaration of a situation he assumed they hadn't fully realized yet:

"You might think that after running through several states and pulling in a few allies, you are dealing with the Deep State. You are not."

"You are merely running, and the Deep State is going to crush you to death."

"What our three families are doing now is offering you a way out that even the Deep State itself wouldn't provide."

Sterling lowered his eyes, his tone cold but steady, as if reading a clause he had long memorized:

"Hand over the eyeball."

"If the Deep State were to take action themselves, the scene wouldn't be like this. You should still remember Walsh's end."

"Hand over the eyeball and preserve your families."

"If you don't... when they arrive, it won't just be an issue for the two of you, but the lives of everyone in your entire clans."

Edward remained silent for a moment after the three finished speaking, then raised his eyes, his voice calm to an almost counter-intuitive degree:

"Working for the Deep State? What a coincidence, we are working for the Deep State too."

Musk pulled his right hand out of his pocket and tugged his cuffs upward,

watching the expressions on the faces of the three tycoons in front of him crack for a brief instant, shifting from cold judgment to a sudden, frozen stiffness.

He smiled,

his tone even lighter than when he had teased the man with the Army ring at the banquet earlier, but every single word pierced precisely into the ears of the three:

"Who would have thought! Hopkins, Remington, Knox—your three families actually belong to Longevity Faction."

"From 1947 to this day, from Hoover Dam to the B-2 bomber, you have been acting as thugs for those old monsters of Longevity Faction."

At that moment, the composure on Diana's face froze for an instant.

It was extremely brief, but it definitely froze.

It was not fear, but the blankness of her entire system of anticipation completely falling flat in that single second.

She had previously assumed that Zhang Long represented the unified will of the Deep State, and that every level of power under the Federal Pipeline Maintenance Department adopted a consistent stance of annihilation toward all investigators of the Hoover Dam.

Yet now, Musk and Edward stood before her, saying they were also working for another faction of officials within the exact same Deep State.

The knuckles of Sterling Remington's fingers gripping the rim of his whiskey glass turned slightly outward—a micro-movement of habitual tensing, quickly and forcibly disguised.

Augustus Knox removed his palms from the tabletop, slowly shifting his center of gravity backward, the heavy expression on his face deepening further.

When Diana spoke again, her tone was still cold, but there was a layer of probing and extremely subtle tension in her phrasing that hadn't been there before:

"The Tech Faction. The faction marching toward outer space... they came to you."

"Yes."

Musk crossed his arms over his chest and took a step forward. His tone was perfectly natural and confident, his voice not loud but resolute.

In these few exchanges, both sides had completed a silent piece of intelligence gathering.

Diana now knew that someone from the Tech Faction had contacted Musk.

Musk now knew that Longevity Faction had sought out the three major military-industrial giants.

The realization that both camps were simultaneously being pushed onto the same track by their respective invisible hands caused the air in the entire banquet hall to suddenly drop several degrees.

Diana did not argue further.

She took half a step back and lightly raised her left hand in an extremely brief signaling gesture.

On the four walls of the banquet hall, the dark panels that were originally thought to be decorative popped open from the inside at the same time.

Emerging from behind each panel were not bartenders or waiters, but the joint private elites of the three families, fully equipped with tactical exoskeletons,

wearing dark gray matte combat suits and modular night-vision helmets, each with a directional indicator light mounted on their shoulder, uniformly dispatched in real-time by a battlefield command array embedded in the hall's central control.

Within seconds,

the circular space of the banquet hall was already packed with a dense surrounding arc of three hundred men.

At the banquet tables, those celebrities and elites who had been drinking red wine and whispering about others being country bumpkins now all stood up from their seats.

Some retreated toward the walls to clear a firing lane,

while others simply clutched stacks of documents and jogged out of the hall, their faces filled with the panic and desire to disassociate themselves, as if to say, "We were just here having tea."

A few tablecloths were knocked askew, and three red wine bottles fell and shattered on the marble floor. The dark red liquid flowed along the cracks of the patterned stone to the metal floor frame barely five feet away from Edward and Musk.

Diana did not look at them again.

She turned and walked back toward the main table, saying casually into her napkin:

"Execute them."

The three-hundred-man encirclement closed inward.

The shooters in the very front row simultaneously lowered their muzzles to aim at the heads of the two men,

and then, in the exact same second, Musk and Edward turned together and ran hard toward the tall window in the west wing of the banquet hall that led to the outer corridor.

There was not a shred of hesitation in their running steps; their synergy was as if they had rehearsed it countless times beforehand.

At the same instant they dashed forward a few steps, the guns in the front row of the three hundred men fired.

The bullets struck the outer back of both of their heads, near the center of their skulls.

Edward pitched forward, hitting the marble floor at an extremely unnatural angle, face down. The bullet hole in his head entered from the back and exited through his forehead, blood slowly spreading outward along the contour of his cheek.

Musk stumbled forward a step or two, his head slamming heavily against the corner of a fallen silverware cart. The bullet hole on the side of his forehead was equally clear, blood turning dark as it seeped from his golden-brown hairline, no longer spreading.

Then, the banquet hall went quiet for a few seconds.

The armed squad members who had closed in maintained their aiming postures, confirming that the two fallen men were no longer moving.

Diana stood before the main table, saying nothing.

Sterling Remington picked up the whiskey he had just set down and drained it again, his hand slightly stiffer than before.

Augustus stared coldly at the two corpses on the ground, pressing his knuckles on the tabletop until they turned white.

Those at the banquet tables who still had the courage to peek out were all glad they hadn't been dragged into this line of fire where guns did the talking.

Then, everyone in the entire banquet hall—

every general, every elite shooter, and every lobbying lawyer who hadn't even had time to wipe the cold sweat from their forehead—

all simultaneously witnessed the same logic-defying change.

The two men lying on the ground moved.

It was not a twitch, nor was it a terminal reflex.

It was Musk propping his arms on the ground, slowly pushing his upper body up from the shattered pieces of the overturned cart,

and then Edward also calmly rolled over, pressing a palm against the blood-soaked marble floor, and sat upright.

Under the unblinking gazes of everyone present, the bullet holes in the backs of their heads shrank on their own,

fragmented bones automatically reset, soft tissue healed from the inside out along the trajectory of the bullets, and the cracks on the inner walls of their skulls caused by the bullet impacts closed up one by one.

The blood that had still been seeping out was pushed back into the blood vessels along the edges of the repair, until finally, only an extremely faint, flesh-colored new scar remained on the surface of their scalps,

and then even the scars vanished completely, as if the bullets had never struck them there.

At that exact moment, the muzzles of the three hundred guns pulled back half an inch in unison—not by command, but by sheer instinct.

They were still holding their weapons, but their fingers had already slipped halfway off the triggers, their expressions shifting drastically.

Musk sat on the ground for a fraction of a second longer, then pushed himself up using the frame of the overturned cart. He brushed off the dust and glass shards clinging to his jacket and looked at the extraordinarily quiet faces of the entire room.

The expressions on the faces of those elite shooters who had been aiming their guns at him just moments ago had switched from predatory to a sort of blank terror after having their understanding of reality completely shattered.

He looked in Diana's direction and suddenly laughed.

He wasn't mocking; he genuinely found it somewhat amusing—

not because the opponent was weak, but because he had just truly died once and stood right back up.

"It seems those Immortalist bosses behind you didn't provide you with any alien technology support."

He tilted his head, a trace of utterly undisguised exhilaration in his tone after being pulled back from the gates of hell by the liquid zero.