In the end, Mild Pepper couldn’t escape his fate, meeting a gruesome end that left him scattered all over the pavement below.
Of course, the culprit behind the man’s death was gravity.
Liam would, at most, admit that he had merely offered a slight downward nudge at the right moment.
However, just as he was preparing to visit the Vampire Council’s local office in New York using the address provided by his “enthusiastic informant,” a series of loud, heavy thuds echoed from a distance, followed immediately by a deafening blast.
That noise was far louder than gunfire.
Someone was using artillery!
At the same time, Liam noticed that the sound seemed to be coming from Hell’s Kitchen.
Standing high atop the skyline gave him a clear view, and as he looked closer, he actually spotted the impact points and explosions— At the southwest corner of 47th Street lay a small, half-abandoned cargo dock.
On the shore was a small, aging industrial area.
Most of it had been torn down shortly after World War II and converted into four- and five-story old-fashioned apartment buildings.
The sole remaining abandoned factory floor had been bought by Liam not long ago, serving as the new home for him and his two sons.
The shelling and explosions just now were the work of someone using crude, hand-crafted cannons from some backyard workshop, raining heavy fire directly upon Liam’s new house.
“Son of a bitch!” An angry curse burst from his lips, and a split second later, his figure vanished from the top of the Empire State Building.
Given his two sons’ abilities, the odds of them being in real danger under an artillery strike of this caliber were slim.
Even so, Liam was furious and terrified.
A father’s panic had nothing to do with how strong his children were.
Even an Ultra-being like Ultraman Taro’s mother—who possessed a gentle temperament and miraculous revival powers—would instantly teleport to the scene to save her child when she saw him getting beaten up, wouldn’t she?
And then she would unleash tens of thousands of tons of heavy-handed discipline through “Mother Kicks” and “Mother Punches” on whoever dared bully her boy.
Liam couldn’t teleport, nor did he possess multi-thousand-ton punches, but he was a fiercely protective father.
What crime had two kids—whose combined age wasn’t even five years old—committed to deserve being shelled with heavy artillery?!
Liam swore he would get justice for his sons.
And as everyone knew, true justice was found deep inside a person’s chest.
…
“So I have to play excavator again later, huh?” A fat man named Guillermo stood on the rooftop of a building a few hundred meters away from Liam’s home, muttering under his breath.
Sometimes he truly felt that his master, “Nandor the Relentless,” was like a pacing turkey that constantly wanted to rule the entire farm.
Some of the ideas Nandor came up with were completely incomprehensible and impossible to agree with.
Yet, bound by his grand dream of eventually becoming a vampire himself, he had no choice but to play the dutiful servant, working tirelessly and without complaint.
Tasks like scouting suitable blood sources, disposing of drained corpses, and cleaning the house were chores he had been doing for years.
Firing heavy artillery, however, was a brand-new experience.
“Who said anything about digging?
True warriors level the entire battlefield!” Hearing Guillermo’s muttering, Nandor swept his cloak behind him with a grand gesture, striking what he believed to be a cool pose.
Not that the Relentless one’s two companions—Nadja, a female vampire who had dated countless human lovers, and Laszlo, who fancied himself “handsome and passionate”—could see it anyway.
Those two were currently leading their own subordinates in different locations, setting up artillery and pounding the factory floor.
The three vampires, along with Nandor’s servant Guillermo, originally resided in the “countryside” of Staten Island.
They had only come to Manhattan recently upon receiving a summons from the Vampire Council.
The former local vampire boss, Deacon Frost, had been confirmed dead a few days ago—strung up on a Wall Street lamppost and incinerated by the sun.
Short on personnel, the Council had no choice but to call upon the trio of Nandor, Nadja, and Laszlo, who were old enough in lineage despite being a bit dim-witted.
The Council tasked these three pureblood vampires with taking over Deacon Frost’s “legacy” and temporarily managing his surviving half-blood minions.
“Superior firepower is absolute truth!” Nandor laughed triumphantly.
“Back when I was a great Ottoman warrior, I personally witnessed the awe-inspiring sight of cannons breaching the walls of Constantinople.
Now that we have come to Manhattan to conquer it, how can a man hope to conquer anything without big guns?” Guillermo swore to himself that the next time he sought blood for his master, he definitely wouldn’t look in Manhattan.
The street addicts here were doing way too many drugs!
Nandor’s current state was clearly the result of drinking the blood of an addict with an insanely high drug concentration, getting himself high in the process.
Just moments ago, Guillermo had received a text message—since an ancient dinosaur like Nandor didn’t know how to use a cell phone, the communication device issued by the Council was entrusted to Guillermo—and the Council elders were furiously demanding to know what kind of madness Nandor was pulling.
How dare he fire artillery in Hell’s Kitchen?!
Even if this was Hell’s Kitchen, it wasn’t that far from the heart of Manhattan!
“Master…
the Council wants you to come over right away,” Guillermo stammered, his anxiety making his tongue twist.
“The elders are extremely angry.
They said we were only supposed to ‘dig into’ the background of the new residents living near Boss Deacon’s old base to see if they had any connection to that ‘Daywalker.’ They didn’t expect you to roll out cannons and start shelling the place!
After making such a massive scene, they want you to go to the Council immediately to explain yourself in person.” Listening to his servant, Nandor acted as if he couldn’t care less, merely feeling that the “juniors” on the Council were far too timid.
“This is nothing!
They know full well that the Impaler, the great vampire progenitor Count Dracula himself, is about to arrive in the New World, yet they haven’t bothered to prepare a grand welcome ceremony.
I am clearly making up for their shortcomings!
When Lord Dracula learns that we shelled vampire hunters with cannons, he will surely find it delightful…” Despite his brave talk, however, Nandor possessed a basic sense of self-preservation.
After putting on a show to save face in front of his servant, Nandor’s figure took to the sky—if the Council issued a direct summons and he failed to appear, he would be a dead man.
Still, his cowardly retreat proved to be a stroke of pure luck.
Nandor’s sudden departure allowed him to narrowly avoid the person who materialized on the rooftop a second later, dripping with overwhelming murderous intent.
“So you vampires are the ones shelling my home and my family?” Liam’s voice sounded directly behind Guillermo.
At the exact same time, a series of muffled *pop-pop-pop* sounds echoed around them, and the booming of the artillery instantly vanished.
The vampires who had been operating the cannons a moment ago had their heads quietly blown to pieces by energy blasts, turning into piles of ash in the blink of an eye.
“Holy shit!” Guillermo spun around, practically leaping out of his skin at the sight.
“You…
you shouldn’t be here!
Aren’t you supposed to be inside that factory…” The idiot had confessed without even being asked.
His words confirmed to Liam that the vampires had indeed conducted a thorough investigation into his family—they even knew what he looked like.
“Where is your master?
Are you bloodsucking beasts actually willing to let a human familiar order around your own kind now?” The words stung Guillermo deeply.
But just as Guillermo tried to pull a face-saving routine like his master Nandor, Liam punched straight through his chest.
“Born human, yet acting as a lapdog to help vampires persecute your own kind…
heartless bastard.” Liam looked down at Guillermo, who collapsed dead onto the ground with a gaping hole in his torso, passing final judgment.
Immediately after, his body launched into the air.
Aiming at the remaining two artillery positions during their firing pause, he executed Vegeta’s signature move.
A barrage of silent energy blasts rained down from Liam’s palms like precision-guided missiles.
A single hit was all it took to reduce a vampire into a pile of furnace ash.
In a matter of seconds, he wiped out the attackers.
He then plummeted straight through the large hole in the factory roof into his new home, and then…
he rushed back out even faster than he had entered.
Inside the wrecked factory, he hadn’t seen his two sons.
What frightened him even more was that even when he expanded his sensing to the limit, he couldn’t detect the ki of either little Broly or little Kurze.
“Where the fuck did you take my sons?!” Liam panicked for real.