My Milf Conqueror System novel Chapter 243

Chapter 243: The Dark Room

[Jake’s POV]

The sudden plunge into total darkness stripped the attacking triad soldiers of their only advantage: numbers.

The lights didn’t flicker. They didn’t dim. They died.

One second the broken neon from across the street was leaking red and blue through the cracks in the steel shutters. The next, it was gone. Absolute black. The kind of black that presses on your eyes.

Through the green phosphor glow of my night vision goggles, the ground floor of the Golden Koi looked like a chaotic, frozen tableau.

The Iron Fists and Jade Tigers who had been preparing to rush the shattered front doors were suddenly blind. I watched them through the NVGs as they stumbled over the debris of the barricades. A boot caught on a sandbag. A shoulder slammed into a mahogany table. They shouted confused orders in Cantonese, voices sharp and high with adrenaline, bouncing off the walls and making it impossible to tell where anyone was.

Flashlight beams began to cut through the dust-choked air. Ten. Twenty. Erratic and uncoordinated. White circles jerking across the ceiling, across the floor, across each other’s terrified faces. In NVG they looked like small suns burning in the green.

The dust from the explosion still hung in the air. It caught the light and turned every beam into a solid column.

"Hold your fire," I ordered over the radio. My voice came out calm. Deliberate. I made it that way on purpose. "Let them push inside. Wait until they hit the base of the stairs."

I crouched behind the heavy wooden banister on the second-floor landing. The wood was cold under my forearm. Old. It smelled like varnish and gun oil. Ethan was positioned on the opposite stairwell. In NVG I could see the faint outline of his rifle resting on the railing. The barrel wasn’t shaking. Good.

The Golden Koi soldiers were spread out along the balcony. Twenty men. No night vision. But they didn’t need it. They knew this parlor. They knew how many steps it was from the front door to the center of the room. They knew where the pillars were. Where the cover was.

We had home-field advantage and they didn’t even know it yet.

"They’re moving in," Ethan whispered over the comms. Barely audible.

A group of about twenty men pushed through the ruined front entrance. They had to step over the wreckage of the delivery truck. Metal groaned under their boots. They used the beams of their flashlights to navigate the overturned mahjong tables. Slow. Weapons raised. Sweeping the empty ground floor in jerky, terrified arcs.

"Where did they go?" one of the attackers yelled. His voice cracked. Young. His flashlight beam swept up and caught the edge of the balcony for half a second. It illuminated Ethan’s boot before jerking away.

They kept coming.

They reached the center of the room. Directly below the open balcony.

And they did the dumbest thing they could do. They clustered tightly together. Shoulder to shoulder. Back to back. Relying on each other for cover in the dark. Like that would help.

From above it looked like a perfect target. A kill box.

My finger rested on the trigger of the USP. The metal was cold.

"Now," I said.

I leaned over the banister. The wood creaked under my weight. I acquired the targets through the NVGs. Three flashlights. Three men holding them up high like beacons.

Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.

The suppressed shots were barely audible over the shouting below. The three men dropped. The flashlights fell with them. One rolled across the floor in a circle before dying. Plunging the group back into total darkness.

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