Chapter 462 - Ignited Within The City
Chapter 462: Ignited Within The City
Dozens of robbers in clown and animal masks had robbed dozens of material warehouses from different industries in the eastern part of the city.
Those warehouses were basically one grade lower than Superstar’s warehouse, so they naturally could not offer a high salary to superhumans to hire them as security guards. The warehouses were easily broken into, and once the robbers took everything to their hearts’ content, they left freely.
Even though the warehouses did not contain the most valuable cultivation resources, when more than dozens of robberies were added together, the losses amounted to an astronomical figure.
The criminals had also targeted dozens of middle and higher level managers of industries and research centers at the western part of the city. These people were all support-class superhumans who only had high cultivation realms but lacked fighting power.
Not all superhumans could fight.
For example, Ning Shewo, the leading figure of the harvesting world, was a Heaven Realm superhuman based on the cultivation realm, but he mainly cultivated his branch meridians, harvesting skills, and studied natural history. Besides, he was old and weak now, so he could no longer fight highly intense battles.
There were also plenty of researchers and managers who worked using their heads. Their brains were incredibly developed due to the refinement of spirit energy, and correspondingly, their limbs were a tad weaker.
These people did not lack money, and they usually had a lot of cultivation resources stacked up in their homes.
Since they had all sorts of industries and forces of power behind them, usually, no one would dare to target them.
But for some reason, that night, many of the experts encountered fully-armed robbers breaking into their houses.
Of course, some of the researchers fought back desperately.
But the robbers were all fierce and malicious. If the targets showed the slightest sign of resistance, they lost their rationality and acted like they were maniacs. They even died together with the experts.
Within just a short hour, more than one hundred crimes happened in the city.
Meng Chao felt that Shen Yupeng had turned into a firefighter captain, and he himself was a firefighter following him around. They went all around the city like headless chickens.
But every single time, they were one step slower than the robbers and could only clean up the mess.
It was not that the robbers were really powerful or cunning.
In truth, most of the robbers were like Ning Lang. They were normal people who had eaten Deification Capsules and temporarily gained supernatural abilities.
No matter how meticulously they planned their crimes, they still left behind vast amounts of clues on the site, so it would be easy to locate them.
They were normal people and did not know just how terrifying supernatural abilities were. They did not know how to control their strength to deliver force at a stable pace, either.
Once the secret police or righteous superhumans discovered them, they usually panicked and acted in desperation, which usually resulted in losses to everyone that were ten times worse than the robbery itself.
Ning Lang was an example of that.
If Meng Chao had just opened up his warehouse and let Ning Lang rob him, he would have taken a small portion of the cultivation resources in the warehouse to fill up one measly truck.
But due to Meng Chao’s arrival, Ning Lang decisively (read: stupidly) chose to detonate a high-energy napalm bomb and destroy an entire warehouse’s worth of cultivation resources. The irredeemable losses were then instantly magnified by ten times.
If the judge used the measurement of punishment, he would definitely have to consider this and increase the severity of his punishment.
Of course, before he performed the robbery, he had already killed someone intentionally, so he might not care about it anymore.
Just like Ning Lang, many of the robbers intentionally detonated all the remaining cultivation resources in the material warehouse to throw off the pursuers’ attention while they fled.
Some people also threw smoke bombs and napalm bombs at large quantities in densely populated areas once they broke in and robbed houses, so all the citizens would be in a terrible fix.
Some people also took in even more Deification Capsules after they were surrounded by their pursuers. They instantly released the potential in their cells and turned into creatures even more terrifying than monsters. Before their organs withered and their bodies went up in flames, they engaged their pursuers in a terrifying and devastating battle in the downtown areas. Naturally, it caused a lot of innocents to be injured.
When Shen Yupeng saw the messy crime sites and the destroyed sites of capture, he was shocked and felt really anxious.
It has to be known that it was precisely because superhumans were monsters in human skin and could even be thought of as walking super cannonballs that they had to be careful when dealing with superhuman criminals.
Without absolute confidence, it would be better to give up on the chance to capture them. Also, before they captured the criminals, they had to not let the criminals detect even the slightest hint of danger.
Otherwise, the criminals would decide to do even worse things because they knew that they would definitely be captured, and the consequences would be dire.
This was why normal police were not allowed to handle superhuman criminals.
It was also why the police officers in the adjudicator court were known as secret police.
But there was a limited number of secret police officers, and they never thought that they would need to handle more than one hundred superhuman malicious cases simultaneously.
The righteous superhumans only had passion in them and lacked professional skills. They fought against the criminals like zombies and monsters, so they were basically making things worse even though they had kind intentions, and the losses kept on growing.
Of course, they did manage to capture some criminals.
But most of the criminals’ lives were drained within just a few minutes. Their cells withered away, and they died.
Only a handful were lucky enough to survive, but they were really weak and were at their deathbed. For the time being, it was really hard to make them talk and get any useful information from them.
With the help of face and fingerprint identification, they identified these people. All of them were normal people. There was not a single big fish worth any value among them. No one knew why these normal people saw eye to eye and chose the same night to take such a risk.
The long night was finally over.
Practically all the citizens knew that more than one hundred malicious crimes had happened in Dragon City.
The losses were basically the same as from a large-scale monster invasion.
But the effects from the crimes were far from just this.
A human’s greatest fear was always the fear toward the unknown.
Regardless of whether it was zombies, monsters, or invasions from the undead, Dragon Citizens could predict them. They were also used to them.
The disgusting and ugly monsters were “them”, and humans could tell they were “them” based on their appearance alone. It was also natural for “them” to attack “us”. All “we” needed to do was just to counterattack. That would be enough.
But no matter how fierce and lunatic the robbers were, they were still just normal people. Logically speaking, they were one of “us”. This sort of killing among fellow humans puzzled Dragon Citizens. It made them worried, and they were filled with a feeling that something bad was going to happen.
From a more practical standpoint, monster invasions did indeed cause great damage to the city, but as long as they could kill the monsters, their flesh and other materials could cover the losses. Sometimes, the benefits would even be greater.
But the losses created by the robbers were just losses. Even if they captured all of the robbers and executed them so that they could extract oil from their bones, it would not even cover 1% of the losses.
Besides, the number of criminals they captured was far from one-third of all the robbers. Many of the criminals removed their masks and changed their clothes afterward to escape into the crowd, and the government would have to use a lot of manpower and resources to find and capture them.
In fact, if they brought the cultivation resources they snatched and fled into the lairs to mix around with the lost people who had been lurking there for decades, then, unless the government got rid of all the lairs that contained more than one million people, it would be practically impossible to capture them.
“This is an unprecedented, serial criminal case. It’s definitely the abnormal beasts’ new, savage attack against Dragon City. Their goal isn’t just to snatch cultivation resources, but also to throw Dragon City’s societal order into chaos and cause humans to not trust each other. They want to make human civilization return to decades ago, when we lived in a lawless, bloody era that operated on the law of the jungle!”
Meng Chao did not sleep the entire night. At six in the morning, he met up with Lu Siya, who looked just as disheveled, and Ye Xiaoxing.
Even though they had not found any traces of abnormal beasts masterminding the crimes, this did not mean that the abnormal beast research department could sleep without worry.
To prevent abnormal beasts from attacking Dragon City during the disaster or doing something like Noble Descent Hotel again and attacking them from another direction while they were busy on another warfront, the abnormal beast research department placed all of the investigators with fighting power outward and defended the important facilities and tactical strongholds.
And there were actually a few ignorant thieves who went straight for the abnormal beast research department.
Unfortunately, before the investigators could capture them, these robbers showed cunning that was far greater than that of the monsters and ran off into densely populated residential areas or downtown areas. They intended to use innocent citizens as hostages.
The investigators had to use ten times the intelligence and energy they used while capturing abnormal beasts to finally capture these people.
Ye Xiaoxing, captain of Group 9, sensed the presence of abnormal beasts hidden in these serial crimes.
His thoughts were the same as Meng Chao’s.
Hundreds of malicious crimes had happened in one night, and practically all the criminals were normal people who ate Deification Capsules or low-grade superhumans who took large quantities of Deification Capsules. This was definitely not a coincidence.
In the One Hundred Ways to Destroy Dragon City, Meng Chao had long since mentioned that compared to powerful external attacks, the cost-performance ratio of causing Dragon City to implode and make the city get destroyed due to internal chaos was much better.
It was then no wonder why the abnormal beasts had lurked for such a long time after the Noble Descent Hotel ambush and did not do anything for half a year.
It seemed like they wanted to use this operation to do what they did not manage to do last time. They set up a huge ticking time bomb in Dragon City, and it finally detonated the night before.
Unfortunately, the abnormal beast research department did not have many clues related to the cases themselves.
Before they had concrete proof, the authority over the cases remained in the adjudicator court’s hands, and Ye Xiaoxing as well as Lu Siya could not do anything to continue the investigation.
But Meng Chao was the first to get in contact with the Deification Capsules.
Among the series of robberies the previous night, the losses Superstar’s material warehouse suffered were also the greatest.
He was not an official investigator of the abnormal beast research department, so he was considered a victim and informant of the case.
Besides, his relationship with Shen Yupeng was pretty good, so he could go and ask for information.
Ye Xiaoxing’s thoughts about this was that a lot of areas were involved in these cases. The effects were also rather bad, so the abnormal beast research department and the adjudicator court would definitely not be able to handle the cases alone.
At that time, they would definitely mobilize resources from everywhere and both parties would work together to investigate it.
Now, he and Lu Siya would continue the investigations based on the clues given by the White Spirit, Earthquake, and the Demonic Abyss Eye. Meanwhile, since Meng Chao was not part of the research department, it would be better if he checked what the adjudicator court intended to do through Shen Yupeng.
Meng Chao knew that the relationship between the adjudicator court and the research department was complicated. There were plenty of times when they had small conflicts between them while they fought for cases. Having them work together was like trying to force two complicated and sophisticated machines together. Making them work in unison was not something that could be accomplished in one go.
It would be better to use Meng Chao and Shen Yupeng’s relationship to first form a knot between the two law enforcement organizations.