Bella was completely exasperated. The Darkhold carried too many dangers and hidden problems, and with her ascension to godhood taking priority, she had already decided not to go after the vampires. And what happened? These people came rushing over on their own, determined to fight her to the death!
"Go on, tell me. You lot don't even qualify as cannon fodder. Who told you to ambush me?" Bella personally conducted the interrogation inside a car wash controlled by Hammerhead.
Hammerhead had taken action himself, using his skull—already rebuilt with adamantium—to smash two of the three vampires to death and cripple the last one. The vampire brought back as a prisoner was the badly injured survivor. Powerful regeneration did not help much when every bone in his body had been pulverized.
The interrogation was simple. These young vampires were all idiotic American youths who knew nothing. Much like the person Bella had been before transmigrating, they thought vampires were handsome and cool, so they joined up.
After pinning his limbs down with wooden stakes, Bella quickly obtained a name: Deacon Frost.
Apparently he was the leader of a younger faction among the vampires. He had taken a liking to Bella's potential, along with the resources and connections in her hands, and wanted to bite her to death and turn her into a vampire.
"Do I usually look too weak? Trash like this actually dares to ambush me?" Bella was deeply annoyed. Did her low-profile policy need some adjustment? In game terms, this was like several ordinary people without even a class level trying to ambush a high-level mage who was also a demigod. It was simply too absurd. She asked Hammerhead, who stood beside her, what he thought.
Hammerhead answered in his muffled, heavy voice, "We can kill every one of these pieces of trash!"
Aside from the name Deacon Frost, the badly injured vampire knew very little. Bella could not be bothered digging for deeper intelligence. The source of the problem was definitely still that old progenitor prophecy. A bunch of vampires were plotting to bite Bella to death and turn her into one of them.
Her constitution simply attracted vampires far too easily.
Bella returned to headquarters and quickly summoned 006, who was vacationing in Europe. She literally summoned him, opening a portal and dragging him through. She wanted his opinion.
She needed to know how much force she had on hand, and more importantly, how many bioengineered humanoids she could currently mobilize.
"A little over thirty thousand."
006's answer startled Bella. We have that many troops?
006 held himself back again and again before finally deciding it was safest to keep his mouth shut.
There was no denying that Bella was beautiful. Her combat ability, magic, and all the other things 006 did not understand were also very impressive. But! 006 had always thought Bella lacked business ability. Put another way, her commercial instincts were terrible. From the Lucky Rabbit's Foot in the beginning to the bioengineered-humanoid project later, not a single project that Bella personally participated in and personally decided on had ever made money!
Back then she had confidently declared that the bioengineered humanoids would become a new source of profit for the company. In reality, governments around the world simply refused to buy them. Ordinary manpower was cheap—why would anyone pay so much for Weyland's bioengineered humanoids?
After all these years, hardly any had been sold. They had simply piled up in warehouses.
"Perfect! Start implanting combat skills into the bioengineered humanoids immediately. I want to see my army within three days!"
006 had been summoned straight out of Europe and had absolutely no idea what had happened. "Um... so... where is our enemy?"
Bella gritted her teeth, her face dark. "Wall Street!"
Weyland-Yutani was not a publicly traded company. Although organizations like the rifle association, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and several major international conglomerates all held shares, and even Stark Industries owned 1.1 percent of Weyland, the company had still never gone public.
There were too many secret projects inside the company to make a public listing convenient. Without going public, however, the amount of liquid capital available to them was limited. Bella did not normally care about money, but even she felt some pain over the spacecraft's funding hole of more than three billion dollars.
The expenses were simply too great. Even her mines in Vanaheim could not sustain this forever. What could she do? Before, they could only grit their teeth and bear the cost. Now there was another option. If they were bad at making money, then they could just rob someone! The wealth the vampires had accumulated over a thousand years was all available for the taking!
On the third underground floor of the Continental Hotel in New York, densely packed ranks of bioengineered humanoids all stood in standby mode.
The bioengineered humanoids were not clones, nor were they robots in the conventional sense. They were artificial humanoids produced through biotechnology and possessed a limited capacity for metabolism.
"Mentor, everything is ready," a Brotherhood scientist reported.
Bella wore her hair short, looking exceptionally dashing. She nodded lightly. "How many days can these bioengineered humanoids survive?"
"About a month."
"That's enough. Implant the knowledge they need to operate weapons."
006 asked in a low voice, "You're sure the location of those people's hideout is correct?"
Bella patted the Cauldron of the Cosmos beside her. "Relax. I've observed them several times already. Kill all those vampires and take their money to make up for our losses! Consider it their contribution to humanity!"
Before John Wick encountered the Continental Hotel, he had been nothing more than an insurance salesman, and one at the very bottom of the ladder. But he was like Guan Yu studying the Spring and Autumn Annals from childhood and dreaming of becoming a cultured man, only to discover as an adult that his martial ability was absurdly high. John Wick never made much of himself in insurance sales either. Instead, the Continental Hotel unlocked the potential hidden inside his body, and he discovered that he had no particular talents except one—he could fight!
Give him a battered book or a pencil and he could kill someone with it. He had elevated killing into an art form.
His astonishing combat instincts, calm mind, and reactions just a little faster than those of ordinary people allowed him to thrive in the assassin business.
The Brotherhood's Animus project had already advanced to version 2.15. It could now copy the combat experience of Assassins and directly implant it into ordinary people with no blood relationship to them.
Skills were skills. The real question was who was using them.
Relying on his natural talent, John Wick surpassed every one of his colleagues and rose rapidly within the Continental Hotel. If he had not been so laid-back by nature and somewhat different from the Brotherhood in terms of ideals, they would already have tried to recruit him.
John Wick did not have grand ambitions. A wife, children, and a warm home were enough for him!
Tonight, however, he received a new mission from the Continental Hotel. The pay was extraordinarily generous, and the assignment mentioned a word he knew extremely well yet could hardly believe: vampires! Large numbers of vampires were hidden throughout New York City, and the Continental Hotel intended to wipe them out!
The location John Wick had been assigned to attack was even more unbelievable: Wall Street!
Were there vampires on Wall Street? Ask any New Yorker—or any American—and they would answer with complete certainty, "Yes!" But the "vampires" ordinary people meant seemed entirely different from the vampires the Continental Hotel had solemnly warned him about.
John Wick carefully checked his firearms. As an outstanding assassin, he held a high rank within the Continental Hotel. Tonight, he was responsible for raiding a well-known insurance company on Wall Street.
The Continental Hotel believed the vampires were hiding beneath the insurance company.
For that reason, the Hotel had assigned him one hundred and fifty bioengineered humanoid soldiers.