Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 179: Girl with Sandalwood Scent (11)

Dragon Raja 3

“Eva: You should call me ‘senior sister.’”

“Caesar: Senior sister, have mercy.”

“Eva: Tell me that again after you escape, and I’ll consider it. Now, hurry!”

“Can you take me to the changing room?” Caesar turned to Makoto.

“No problem! I know where the changing room is!” Makoto nodded vigorously. “That picture won’t make your girlfriend misunderstand, will it?”

“It probably will, but if I manage to escape, I’ll have time to explain. If I don’t, they’ll think I eloped with a Japanese schoolgirl and died tragically in an internet café!” Caesar laughed and gently patted Makoto’s head. “So, we have to escape!”

A red Ferrari 599 GTO raced through the night. Sakura floored the gas pedal, and the Ferrari shot through the traffic like a streak of red lightning. The speed limit was 100 kilometers per hour, but unless other drivers were paying special attention, they wouldn’t even catch a glimpse of the Ferrari’s taillights. They would only feel a gust of wind and hear a roar, more like a low-flying jet passing by.

Chisei glanced at his watch. At this rate, they were still about ten minutes away from Chizuru Town.

The radio crackled to life. “Boss, are you still in range?”

The Ferrari 599 GTO had only two seats, so Yasha and Crow were stuck in the Hummer behind. Normally, that vehicle could also speed along the highway, but with Sakura at the wheel of the Ferrari, only Caesar’s Bugatti Veyron or the Principal’s modified Maserati could possibly keep up. Within half a minute of getting on the highway, Sakura had left the Hummer a kilometer behind, almost out of radio range.

“Chizuru Town has lost power! A large-scale outage, even the mobile phone signal towers are down!” Crow yelled into the radio while driving.

“Damn! This is bad!” Chisei frowned deeply.

“No… it’s even worse! The bōsōzoku have already mobilized, and now we can’t reach them by phone to call them off.”

“Who ordered their deployment? I specifically said not to involve the bōsōzoku in this! They’ll just make a mess of everything!” Chisei raged.

“No idea. Neither Yasha, Sakura, nor I gave any orders, but they suddenly mobilized. They must have received some intel, but we can’t figure out who issued the command,” Crow paused for a moment. “Boss… things could actually get worse. Want to hear it?”

“Spit it out!”

“I looked up the background of these bōsōzoku. They belong to a gang called Aka-Zane. Most of their members are kids between 16 and 20 years old, and some of them are hybrids. They don’t have steady jobs—they mainly survive by stealing cars and robbing people. But these guys have money, enough to afford luxury cars. The worst part is that these brats are drugged up. They’re hooked on LSD, a hallucinogen. When they’re high on it, they’re practically insane… and some of them may have already killed people.”

“Can it get any worse than that?” Cold sweat dripped from Chisei’s forehead.

“They’re all armed. Even though their guns are just makeshift shotguns, they’re still deadly weapons. We’ve received intel that Aka-Zane recently bought 7,000 rounds of buckshot on the black market…”

The radio crackled and fell silent as the Ferrari sped out of range. Sakura pushed the pedal to the floor and accelerated further.

Chisei clenched the hilt of his sword. If Caesar’s team encountered those crazed, drugged-up bōsōzoku, and both sides were armed with lethal weapons… all he could rely on now was luck and Sakura’s speed.

The hallway was pitch-black, with only a few emergency lights casting faint glows. The blackout hadn’t stopped the bōsōzoku. These boys, armed with machetes and short-barreled shotguns, stormed into the internet café in groups of three to five, taking control of each corridor and dragging people out of the cubicles. Most of the patrons hadn’t come to Mambo Café to surf the web legitimately. Inside many of the cubicles were couples, with the men’s hands wandering all over the women. Initially, they thought the footsteps outside belonged to power company workers coming to fix the outage. When the bōsōzoku burst in, they jumped up in shock and started swearing, but the boys quickly silenced them by shoving gun barrels into their mouths. A little more force and a few bloodied teeth clattered to the floor.

Beautiful or not, the girls were yanked out by their hair. Their qipao were disheveled, revealing their pale, dazzling thighs. The boys pinned them down onto the tatami mats, their hands groping under the girls’ skirts. These teens, wielding the power of violence, were more ruthless than adults. Despite being close in age to the girls, they insulted them roughly, calling them “old hags” while molesting them.

Caesar and Makoto crawled along the floor, staying low. The beams of flashlights swept over their heads. “Don’t look ahead, Mr. Gattuso,” Makoto whispered, carefully holding her qipao slit closed.

Caesar thought to himself, I couldn’t see anything even if I tried—it’s pitch black here. We’re like a pair of rats, sneaking around in the dark, with the one behind sniffing the tail of the one in front.

Rustling sounds came from behind them. The little mouse scavenger team had quietly grown to three. As Caesar and Makoto crawled past one of the cubicle doors, it slid open silently, and someone inside crept out. The new little mouse grabbed onto Caesar’s tail.

Caesar stopped in his tracks, pulling out his Desert Eagle and pointing it behind him. A few seconds later, the third little mouse found himself staring down the cold barrel of the gun. The man raised his hands to his head, gasping for air but not daring to make a sound.

“Stop right there!” Caesar said coldly. This guy was probably trying to follow them and sneak out, but adding another person to the group would only increase their risk.

Help! Help! Wǎdáshíwǎ… uh… wǎdáshíwǎ…” The guy stammered, mixing up Japanese, English, and Chinese in his panic. He seemed to speak decent Japanese, but crashing into a gun barrel in the dark had scared him so much that his words tumbled out in a mess of languages.

Caesar’s expression changed drastically as he grabbed the guy by the collar and dragged him into a corner. “Damn it, why is it you?”

“I-I-I was just about to ask the same thing! I thought, who could be crawling with such style? Turns out it’s you, boss!” The man was clearly just as startled but still didn’t hold back from buttering Caesar up in the middle of the chaos.

It was Lu Mingfei. He had been following the Action Manual to find the safe haven and had ended up running into Caesar here. Under other circumstances, it might have been a happy reunion, with both surviving a near-death experience, but having hundreds of knives and guns swirling around them cast a melancholic shadow over their meeting.