From Bullets To Billions novel Chapter 601

Chapter 601: The Open Invitation

Skull continued his relentless ascent up the cold, concrete staircase of the Fortis building. He was moving tirelessly, taking the steps two at a time without his breathing ever hitching. Logically, he assumed that the commander—the one orchestrating all of this meticulous, defensive strategy outside—would be secured safely right at the absolute top of the tower.

Getting rid of him by cleanly severing the head of the snake, he might just be able to put a complete stop to all of this chaotic bloodshed in a matter of minutes. But as he seamlessly reached each consecutive floor landing, he was carefully looking at the engraved brass plaques mounted by the heavy fire doors. He was actively wondering if he would spot something else—like a server hub or a tactical armory—as he made his way up the stairs.

He didn’t actually think the head boss, or the specific person that was giving tactical orders to the frontline squads, would be sitting comfortably in a penthouse suite right at the top. They would most likely be entrenched in a reinforced security room of sorts, somewhere in the middle levels where the structural integrity of the building was strongest.

’Why did this damn building have to have so many floors?’ Skull thought, his eyes tracking a security camera as he passed another landing. ’I strictly gave Ramon fifteen minutes. I can’t afford to waste my time painstakingly checking each floor and every single office suite one by one. I guess then, strategically, it only makes sense to just keep climbing and go directly for the head then.’

As he was making his swift way up the quiet stairs, however, he found something incredibly strange. He stopped on the sixth-floor landing, his leather boots silent on the concrete.

’Shouldn’t there be armed people stationed defensively on the staircase?’ Skull analyzed, his eyes narrowing behind his bone-white mask. ’If they purposely disabled the main elevators, they would have absolutely expected us to take the stairs, right? It’s the only vertical path left. They couldn’t have possibly thought, with our overwhelming numbers outside, that we would have never eventually made it inside the lobby, right?’

The strange, silent situation was highly unnerving. The complete lack of resistance was almost exactly as if there was a polite, open invitation deliberately asking him to head deeper inside.

And when he finally reached a particular, higher floor landing, he saw exactly why the silence was so deafening. The main staircase leading further up had been completely, physically blocked off.

There was a , towering pile of heavy office furniture stacked haphazardly from floor to ceiling. Desks, filing cabinets, and metal chairs were wedged tightly together, creating an impenetrable barricade on the steps. If there was a large group of syndicate thugs with him, or perhaps some superhuman powerhouse like Jett or a heavily augmented exoskeleton user among them, they could have easily and violently moved the heavy debris away and got through rather quickly.

But for himself, being just one lean person relying on speed and technique, attempting to manually dismantle that heavy steel barricade would have been an incredibly loud, exhausting pain that would waste his fifteen minutes.

That’s when Skull slowly turned his head away from the barricade, looked towards the adjacent heavy fire door, and read the silver plaque mounted by its side.

"Media Room. I guess this is exactly where they make their corporate adverts, flyers, and promotional stuff,"Skull thought, calculating his route. "If the main stairs are choked here... maybe there’s a working service elevator or another emergency staircase located on the complete opposite side of the building that I can use to bypass this."

He placed his gloved hand flat against the cold metal of the door, readying his muscles. He fully imagined that they had tactically set it up so that the exact moment he pushed through the door and entered the unfamiliar room, there would be a heavily armed squad of people waiting in ambush, completely ready to face him in a crossfire.

When he violently pushed the heavy door open and entered the sprawling media room, Skull could immediately see several armored members of the Bloodline group taking cover. They were crouched aggressively by the editing stalls and behind other reinforced areas, their weapons drawn. He was right about the ambush.

’So, this is their grand strategy. They deliberately blocked the stairs to funnel us. They set up the office floors in specific, fortified sections, forcefully herding people to go exactly where they want to fight. They are perfectly controlling the flow of the situation. I have to admit... whoever is running this defense is significantly better than I originally thought,’ Skull analyzed.

He instantly dropped into a lethal fighting stance, preparing to slip under the incoming gunfire.

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