God Of Crafting

Chapter 167: Protests escalates

"Kill the factory! Save the planet! Kill the factory! Save the planet!"

The chant rose up into the air from nearly a hundred throats, assisted by the many cardboards and banners bearing the same kind of sentences on them.

"We say no to reckless industrialization!" the leader of the crowd chanted into the microphone in his hand.

"NO!" the crowd screamed in response, not unlike how a group of soldiers would respond to their company call.

"We say no to the restoration of the industrial park we once forced to close!"

"No!"

The chants continued as the leader became more and more creative with whatever reasons he could come up with for organizing the protests.

Yet, no matter how loud the crowd got, the guards that protected the factory perimeter… didn't seem to be bothered in the slightest.

"Why are they not reacting?" Cassie muttered to herself as she sat down in her chair and observed the proceedings from the many cameras that gave her a better view of the event than anyone directly involved in it could ever ask for.

It had been over ten minutes since the protest started… yet not a single guard moved an inch to disperse it!

Instead, they all simply sat down in their positions or, alternatively, patrolled the perimeter, casually throwing glances toward the crowd as if only waiting for even one of them to breach the border between the government-owned street and the privately-owned property of the factory.

'In theory, it would be possible to sic the crowd on them, but…' Cassie bit down on her lip.

The people responsible for steering the crowd were merely paid off rather than being direct members of the clan. And while some might be either stupid or greedy enough to accept additional money to turn the whole event into a showcase of human brutality…

Doing so would needlessly complicate the entire situation.

'And with how multi-pronged this operation is…' Cassie thought before heaving a long, exhausted sigh. 'The last thing we need is for chaos to erupt.'

"Five minutes before the office arrives!" the report rang in the girl's ear, only making her gnash her teeth as she stared at the screens with impatience.

"Eleven minutes before the city lights will turn on!" another report soon followed, tracking the progress of one of the many variables Cassie could merely set in motion or use but couldn't actively control.

"Spice the protests up a bit, but don't go overboard," she threw a short and relatively simple order.

Normally, she would make sure to make it as precise as possible... But since it was the crowd leader's fault for the entire phase of the operation starting with a delay, she made sure her order was quite… vague.

'That's what you get for slacking off, you dumbskull,' she thought, observing with immense satisfaction how the face of the man, clearly displayed on one of her screens, turned blank.

'It seems he realized the true meaning of this order,' Cassie thought while a slightly wicked grin emerged on her lips.

Cassie wasn't soft on anyone, herself included. Or, to be more precise, it was because she was so hard on herself, whether in the realm of cultivation, studying, or plotting, that she found it extremely hard to be soft toward her own subordinates.

And that was all the more true when problems arose not because her underlings were underqualified for the task… but because they simply failed to put in the necessary effort to accomplish their goals!

The leader of the crowd was merely an example of this stance, now forced to take responsibility for the results of his own interpretation of spicing the crowd up.

"Kill the factory! Save the planet!"

"Don't let the immediate boon curse your long-standing future!"

"The rich are destroying the whole planet for their own benefit!"

"Kill the rich!"

"EAT THE RICH!"

"KILL THEM ALL!"

Bit by bit, the chants of the crowd grew more and more intense, soon reaching a level that even had Cassie raising her eyebrows.

"At this rate…" she muttered to herself… only for the camera tracking the movement of the government-issued limo to come dangerously near the staging area. "Wait, if they make an appearance now…!"

"EVERYONE!" the leader of the crowd, the lone clan member assigned to this task, screamed from the bottom of his lungs. And the moment the crowd's attention moved to him… "Calm your freaking tits!"

This shout—a curse?—was so ridiculous, so out of place and out of reason… that it caught everyone so off-guard, they actually calmed down!

'Oho?' Cassie raised one of her eyebrows, equally taken aback by her clansman's method as was the rest of the crowd, even though there was half of the city between Cassie and all of those unruly civilians who had nothing better to do in their lives than move around the city with the expressed desire to make everyone around hate them with a passion.

"It appears that we have some hostile agents in our passionate crowd!" the leader shouted right into his microphone, only by some miracle avoiding the sudden sonic boom of the feedback loop, where the sound from the speakers would grow loud enough to reach the microphone's input, only to get repeated even louder than before, and thus close the vicious cycle of noise growing all the way to the upper limits of what the speakers were capable of.

"Don't let those vile men and women, or whatever they identify as, hijack this protest and…"

"Right on time," Cassie sighed as the government car finally took the turn and appeared right on the street where the protest was taking place.

The sudden silence of the leader once again caught everyone off guard. And after a moment of confusion, the people in the crowd gradually started to look in the same direction as the leader, curious as to what made him cease speaking so rapidly.

On the other side of the street, the car quickly closed the distance, stopping only once the people themselves turned into an endlessly moving roadblock.

"The crowd is discussing whether to attack the car or not," a report came in right into Cassie's ear.

"If they fucking dare to…"

Before the girl could flare up, the doors of the car opened up, only for two men in suits to come out, not even bothering to hide the handguns weighing down their right hips.

Their suits were perfectly matched to their builds, with the little slack on their white shirts showcasing that they came here free of the burden of bulletproof vests, blatantly and arrogantly confident in their ability to deal with whatever stood in their way without the added padding for protection.

"We are from the Central Bureau of Spiritual and Occult Investigation," the man on the left reached into the inner pocket of his suit before pulling out and then flashing his government ID, a weapon even more fearsome than the handgun hanging off his hip.

As soon as he introduced himself, however…

"We were dispatched here to deal with a case, but right now…?"

The man's smile, perfectly recorded by Cassie's cameras, was enough to give the girl the creeps.

"Right now, it's you guys who stand in our way, and thus obstruct our ability to perform our duty."

The man then leaned back on the hood of his car before crossing his hands over his chest and putting a hint of a smirk into his already wide smile.

"Now, are you going to scram, or should we just throw you all in jail?"