DING!

The ChronoSystem lit up with a thread of new notifications, but Leon didn’t pay attention to them at first.

Instead, he just stared at Earl Joe’s lifeless head in a daze.

Till his very last moment, the Earl never truly realized what happened and it showed in his eyes. The only thing reflecting in his open eyes were pleasure and the wondrous feeling of ejaculating.

His eyes were forever frozen like that.

’I did it,’ Leon thought in a daze. ’Just like that...’

Despite the fact that he was currently staring at the corpse of their prime assassination target, he couldn’t help but feel incredulous.

Everything happened so fast that he was struggling to accept the fact that Operation Killing Joe came to an end in such a swift and decisive manner.

’It was so simple’. He thought.

But then in hindsight, Leon realized that it was not simple at all.

Contrasted against the difficulty of killing Dhruv Laden back in the wasteland in the West where he had to use all his weapons to fight an extremely intense battle, including all his D Rank constructs just to win, all he needed to kill Joe was a single T-7 Naga Vibro-Blade.

The Vibro-Blade made the kill so easy because it was a D Rank construct, but still when compared side by side, the difference in difficulty of killing both D Rank Ascended was like night and day, but then Leon looked at the big picture.

Unlike when he fought against Dhruv Laden, jumping into it and doing it without much preparation and ending up killing the infamous terrorist with raw power, it was the exact opposite in this case.

At face value, of the 2, killing Dhruv Laden may seem like the harder one as Leon needed to go all out in battle just to kill him, even having to survive a nuke at the end.

But that’s the thing, all he needed to kill Dhruv Laden was battle. No matter how intense the battle was, it was still just battle.

But for Earl Joe, it was quite different.

Operation Killing Joe did not span a single day nor did it last just a few dozen minutes of combat, Operation Killing Joe spanned more than a week of planning and preparation and resource pooling.

Operation Killing Joe required Leon to work with 5 other members of his team in tandem, it required the team to do things that they’ve never done before.

It required every single member of the team to pull their weight.

From infiltrating Omnicore territory, to the amount of money that they’ve spent, to the sheer amount of improvisation they’ve had to do just to evade detection by the Omnicore Eye and keep the operation on track, they did so much leading to this moment.

All of these steps were hard and any tiny mistake in anyone of them would have jeopardized the mission, not just meaning the failure of the operation, but it would have also meant that their lives would be in danger.

Unlike when Leon fought against Dhruv Laden and his escape was assured with the Zerphyr-7 if things went south, this time, it was different.

Afterall, they were deep within Omnicore territory.

In hindsight, Leon realized that killing Joe was not simple at all; rather it was extremely hard. That single strike with the T-7 Naga Vibro-Blade was the culmination of all the preparations that they already made before now.

That single strike was connected to the perfume that Brick gave Anabella, the Earl’s mistress sometime earlier- a perfume worth a whopping 10 million Neo Credits!

That single strike was not luck nor was it easy, it only looked easy because it was the result of a perfect assassination plan.

Operation Killing Joe was a clean assassination job.

It was perfect.

In the end, the Great Earl Joe died so easily and unceremoniously because of a woman’s perfume.

’Fear women...’ the thought briefly crossed Leon’s mind, making him shudder slightly in fear.

The moment Daren tied Anabella up, preventing her from screaming in terror to alert others, he left her and pounced on the dead body of the Earl while Umar checked outside, making sure that they were not already compromised.

They were not.

As for what Daren was doing?

In medical science, there’s a phenomenon where parts of a body remain alive or metabolically active for minutes to hours after "clinical death".

Long ago, researchers found that even after clinical death when the heart stops, some cells continue to function, and gene transcription continues for hours or even days.

This is referred to as the post-mortem interval between somatic and molecular death.

While somatic death (death of the whole organism) occurs immediately, cellular death is a gradual process where individual cells die at different times.

Brain cells can survive for a few minutes to up to 20 minutes, heart and liver can survive up to 15 hours, skin can remain viable for up to 24 hours, while white blood cells can endure for up to three days.

All these statistics were gotten from research and experiment with mundane people, Geneforms.

For Ascended, this phenomenon is even stronger.

This is why even after his clinical death, Joe’s heart continued beating, weak and soft. But it was still beating!

And this is why Daren wasted no time after restraining Anabella.

He rushed towards the headless corpse and with his dagger, he stabbed it into the naked chest of the Earl, carving a large circular hole around it before dipping his hand inside and pulling out the Earl’s heart!

BA-DUMP! BA-DUMP!

The heart was still beating!

Seeing this, Anabella fainted but no one gave 2 cents about her.

Daren stared at the beating heart in his grasp, feeling thrilled. This is extremely important for the success of the operation because after days of careful surveillance and information gathering, the team realized a new piece of information that became a new variable in their planning.

Leon’s careful surveillance for days made him realize a few of Joe’s trump cards.

Joe is such a paranoid and petty man that despite how safe and powerful he was, he always expected the worst and he’d taken so many countermeasures against enemy assassination.

If for some reason his trump cards failed and he died, he still had a plan in place for such a scenario simply because he never wanted to let his enemy escape to reap the fruit of his labor after killing him.

This is why he secretly installed an implant in his heart.

The implant is connected to all security servers of Neo Solace, including the Omnicore Eye.

And its function is simple and straightforward. The moment for some reason Joe’s heart stopped beating, signaling his death, the implant would send out an unstoppable emergency alert to the entirety of Neo Solace’s security network.

This was Joe’s last ’f*ck you!’ even in death to his assassin.

Talia and Tyla already checked the implant out remotely, and both already stated their lack of confidence in disabling it with their NetRunner powers.

This is why the team had to look for an alternative... this.

Because the moment Daren brought out the still subtly beating heart, Umar having confirmed that they were clear left the door and walked towards him with a box that he already pulled out at some point.

The box is transparent and filled with greenish fluids and tiny vein-like tendrils that intertwined like a neural network.

The Lt. Colonel opened the box and Daren put the heart inside, and instantly, the vein-like tendrils moved and lashed on to the heart like real veins and arteries, filling it with vitality and sustenance again.

And then...

BADUMP! BADUMP!

Earl Joe’s dying heart started beating properly again!

The moment this happened, having been watching the whole assassination live through Leon’s access node, Talia immediately went to work.

The dead Earl being beside her teammates meant that they now had access to all his fingerprints, his irises, and all biometric signatures of his body.

What this meant was that they now had access to Earl Joe’s bank accounts!

Operation Killing Joe was not just about killing Joe anymore. The moment Leon saw the atrocities that the Earl committed daily, the operation morphed from just killing Joe to robbing Joe.

{"Dark Node Active."}

{"Commencing High-Speed Hacking..."}

Talia and Tyla flexed their powers remotely, hacking into the numerous bank accounts that were tied to Earl Joe.

With all his biometric signatures now with them, it was easy.

This was the final step of Operation Killing Joe.

...

And as all this happened, Leon finally focused on the thread of ChronoSystem notifications that were floating in front of him.