From Bullets To Billions

Chapter 606: The Art of Attrition

Now was the absolute most important time for the elite Rangers to act. Before the Gilt Rats and the Black Hounds had launched their massive attack, Vivian had made the grim reality of gang warfare perfectly clear to them in the tactical briefing room.

They were deliberately heading into a brutal siege where they were going up against overwhelmingly massive numbers. And the Syndicate coalition they were fighting didn’t exactly consist of the weakest street thugs; they were hardened, paid killers.

Even if the Bloodline group miraculously did win the immediate fight, what was the actual strategic point if every single one of their members got beaten half to death in the process? Even if they weren’t outright killed in the hallways, dozens of them would be bedridden in the hospital for weeks or months before they could ever hold a weapon and fight again.

This crippling vulnerability would give the perfect, bloody chance for any rival gang in the city to comfortably swoop in, take over their hard-earned territory, and steal their lucrative underground businesses while they were recovering. This cold reality was exactly why large syndicate groups vehemently avoided engaging in all-out gang wars in the first place, unless it was absolutely necessary.

So, tactically, who could safely cause the most catastrophic damage to the regular, frontline members of the Gilt Rats without taking heavy casualties? The definitive answer to that was the super-powered Rangers.

By brilliantly spreading the invading enemy out onto separate, locked-down floors, the Rangers could safely go crazy, systematically defeating as many grunts as they physically could in isolated pockets.

But there would inevitably be a hard time limit. Eventually, Ramon would realize the stall, move in himself, and unleash the heavy hitters equipped with the dangerous exoskeletons. So the ticking time limit for the Rangers to take on as many people as possible was now. And they were doing an incredibly good job.

With their superhuman abilities, the Rangers were practically untouchable.

Jay was a blur of non-stop motion as he continuously struck down people in the corridors. He was expertly ducking, weaving, and diving under wild hits. Despite having a highly resilient power, he strictly disciplined himself to dodge every single incoming strike. He did this because he absolutely didn’t want to get into the lazy, lethal habit of just passively absorbing hits. For him, he thought it was a terrible tactical flaw; relying purely on durability meant he wouldn’t actually improve his raw fighting technique. But thanks to his grueling stamina training under Max, he was able to keep his breath steady, fighting and fighting without ever slowing down.

On another floor, Wolf was brilliantly making lethal use of the office equipment around him. He aggressively kicked a heavy, rolling office chair directly into the shins of a charging vanguard, causing five heavily armed men to violently tumble over each other in a tangled, groaning mess. He completely ignored the fallen grunts, leaving them for the regular Bloodline members to safely mop up, while he narrowed his predatory focus strictly on those enemies that looked a little more skillful or heavily armed. Using his tactical head, he had figured that in the long run, aggressively taking out the more troublesome squad captains first, and then helping out with the disorganized grunts later, would be vastly easier for everyone.

Down in the massive showroom, Na was treating the invasion like a brutal game of bowling. He was violently picking up grown men and physically throwing the screaming people at anyone that came his way, and it was working as a vastly more valid, devastating strategy than just simply punching them one by one. Because hurling a two-hundred-pound human projectile would allow him to crush three or four more people at the exact same time. And there were plenty of massive, heavy display objects in the showroom to violently throw people into if need be.

However, there was one Ranger that was getting hit quite a bit, taking severe physical punishment, and that was Darno.

’Damn it... damn it, I’m so much weaker than I was before!’ Darno thought, spitting a wad of blood onto the carpet as he stood his ground.

He was taking heavy hits from all sides. As other thugs aggressively punched him directly in the face, they were actually shattering their own knuckles on his jaw. There were those that were violently kicking him on the shin with steel-toed boots, only to immediately collapse, screaming in agonizing pain from breaking their own legs. One thug had even swung a solid wooden baseball bat as hard as he could at Darno’s ribs, and the thick bat had ended up violently snapping right in half on impact. All of this incredible, passive defense was entirely due to the impossibly dense, superhuman bones he possessed in his body.

The massive, agonizing issue was twofold. For one, because of the strict, supernatural nature of his Vow, he absolutely couldn’t dodge a single incoming attack. He was magically bound to stand his ground and take them all head-on. And his specific Vow didn’t exactly improve any other physical aspects for him, like speed or offensive power. So all he could do was stubbornly fight exactly as he usually did, trading blunt blows while passively absorbing horrifying hits.

But the physical pain of the impacts he was going through was still very, very real. Which turned the sprawling fight for Darno into a rather brutal, agonizing war of attrition that was slowly wearing him down.

Outside in the ruined courtyard, the Gilt Rats leadership had absolutely no idea of the massacre that was actively going on inside—that their frontline men were getting systematically torn apart in the corridors and the battle of attrition was actively being lost.

However, the clock had struck zero. Due to Skull entering the building and it now officially being longer than his promised fifteen minutes, Ramon had finally made the cold decision.

"Come on. The ghost has failed us. We’re all going in," Ramon stated coldly, adjusting the pristine cuffs of his suit.

As he stepped forward over the rubble, he and Darius finally moved toward the shattered glass doors of the lobby, flanked heavily by the towering, dead-eyed ’lab coats’ who were fully strapped into their massive, hydraulic military-grade exoskeletons.