Chapter 2152: Not a Particularly Powerful Painting Woman
The enforcement team responsible for patrolling the luxury residential area was of a higher rank than the ordinary law enforcement teams maintaining daily order in the city. They were true war machines cultivated and trained by the government, operating with seamless coordination while maintaining a high state of alert, swiftly removing both the people pulled from the lake and the bodies.
As they left, the players from the Tian Clan also instinctively followed, likely intending to stop them, but they refrained from acting until the enforcement team had exited the range of the defensive barrier.
Yang Chong watched this scene with a cold sneer and ordered his men to board the aircraft.
With so many people, using a teleportation portal was no longer convenient. The enforcement team did have portals with larger capacity, but no one brought them out at this moment—they wanted to publicly take the people out of the Tian Clan's territory right in front of the citizens!
The flying instruments transmitted the captured footage from all angles to the surrounding operators and the message collection terminal. In an environment of rapid information dissemination, countless people saw the images of the "survivors" being rescued by the enforcement team. Several of the "survivors" were immediately identified—they were registered missing persons with families and friends who had filed reports multiple times.
Such a scene, combined with the constant testimonies of the "survivors," almost solidified the charges of kidnapping and human trafficking against the Tian Clan.
The players on the Tian Clan's side could only watch helplessly as the enforcement team took the people away. No matter how bold they were, they dared not start a war with the enforcement team under nationwide surveillance. If they made a move, both the enforcement team and the player organizations would have a ready-made excuse.
Zone 008 had strict laws, and the people living here outwardly abided by them. But there was one exception: when the law was difficult to enforce against the masses. If the Tian Clan intervened in the enforcement team's operation and a fight broke out that was hard to contain, it would be perfectly normal for a few Tian Clan members to die. At that point, they might not even be able to pin a crime on anyone.
"Just kill them all—dead men tell no tales," a player silently approached the buzz-cut player leading the group. "Yang Chong has a grudge against our Tian Clan; he'll definitely seize this opportunity to make a big deal out of it."
The buzz-cut player didn't comment on this but instead asked, "Why wasn't it cleaned up in advance?"
The person behind him paused for a moment before replying, "The people sent to check didn't verify the body count properly and didn't realize some were missing. Besides, those people were locked up at the eldest young master's residence, so it wasn't convenient for us to come and go. Moreover..."
Moreover, before this, no one had anticipated that things might come to this point. With just some vague reports, the city government would never arrange for a search of the Tian Clan's residences. Where those people were locked up didn't matter.
"I don't know how they escaped and hid under the lake."
Even before the surveillance began, the Tian Clan had arranged for people to guard the area, screening every villa on the ground, the lakeshore, and the lake itself.
"If you don't know, then investigate." The buzz-cut player turned and strode away, saying, "First check our own people, then check if there are any underground passages. Anyone with issues or who can't be confirmed immediately will be moved to Haiyun Technology for unified detention. The rest will reinforce the defensive barrier, activate the space jamming device, and seal off the teleportation portals. From now on, the entire villa area will be in complete lockdown!"
"Yes!" The accompanying players responded in unison before dispersing in all directions.
Leaving aside the Tian Clan's arrangements, the enforcement team brought both the people and the bodies back to the city government. On the way, Yang Chong asked the survivors exactly how they had escaped. A group of them chattered incoherently—they had been locked in the basement for quite some time, spending their days in a daze. If the Tian Clan hadn't regularly injected them with evolution agents to strengthen their bodies, they might not have lasted this long, so their speech was somewhat disjointed.
However, Yang Chong quickly pieced together the story from their accounts.
The one who saved them was a young woman who had also been captured and thrown in with them. She seemed to be a player. After being tossed into the basement by two Tian Clan players, she rallied the others to escape. The basement door had been specially reinforced—not only was it difficult to break open, but it could also block detection. Since breaking out from the inside was impossible, they waited for an opportunity.
That night, some players came and took a few people away, including that player. After she left, she didn't return to the basement. The next morning, she used a keycard to open the basement door, led them to the adjacent surveillance room, gave each of them a disposable underwater breathing device, and then slipped through a tunnel under the surveillance room to hide beneath the lake.
No one knew how that underground passage had been created. When they went down through the lake's water filtration system pipes, they discovered several corpses floating inside. The bodies were of people they had seen before. Seeing that those who had once shared the same cell were numbered and preserved even after death, these individuals desperately swam toward the surface—the player had also told them about the situation outside.
"She didn't come out with you?" Yang Chong had already counted the people.
"She probably left using a ticket," someone said. "She's not a particularly powerful player."
Because she wasn't particularly powerful, she could only use this method to sneakily rescue people.
"I hope she's safe," the young people who had escaped said in unison.
Yang Chong nodded slightly and, upon arriving at the city hall, first let these people take a hot shower and change clothes.
"Can we see our families first?" a few asked.
There was naturally no objection to that, and he immediately had colleagues arrange for them to meet their families.
Soon, the main entrance of the city hall was enveloped in sobbing. These people, rescued and reunited with their families in full view of the entire city, seemed to be a response to all those who had followed their plight with goodwill.
Not long after, these individuals, whose skin had turned pale from soaking in the lake, returned to the city hall to wash up. One girl declined the help of a female staff member, carried her change of clothes into a private room, and closed the door. After taking off her coat, she gently shook it, and the paper painting woman fluttered to the ground.
The girl, her eyes red, thanked her, then said, "The players in the city government are much stronger than those in the Tian Clan. Don't let them find you, or you won't be able to leave. I'll hide you in my mom's bag later, and you can follow her out."
The painting woman nodded and turned back into a piece of paper, landing on the clean clothes.
The girl quickly rinsed off, put on her new clothes, rolled up the painting woman, and hid her in her sleeve before walking out. Seeing her mother waiting outside, she acted spoiled and said she wanted to eat her mother's cooking.
The middle-aged woman, having regained her daughter, naturally wouldn't refuse such a small request. She immediately prepared to go home and cook, paying no attention to the crowd packed inside and outside the city hall's reception area, demanding a search of the Tian Clan to find their loved ones.
Not far from the city hall, the woman, in her haste, wasn't paying attention and collided head-on with someone. She quickly apologized and hurried away. Amid the crowd heading toward the city hall, this mother's figure moving in the opposite direction was particularly conspicuous.
Xu Huo stopped in his tracks. Suddenly, his shoulder was tapped. When he turned around, the painting woman's communicator was shoved right in front of his face: "What's for lunch?"