The not-spicy chili pepper couldn't outrun its fate after all, ending up a pitiful mess of 'one chunk here, one chunk there'.
Still, the real killer was gravity.
Li Pu would only admit he'd given the man a gentle, heaven-sent nudge at just the right moment.
Yet just as he was about to pay a visit—using an address supplied by 'a certain public-spirited citizen'—to the Vampire Council's New York office,
he heard a sudden string of booms not far off, followed by earsplitting explosions.
It was way louder than gunfire.
Someone was shelling, plain as day!
At the same time Li Pu sensed the noise was coming from Hells Kitchen.
Because he was up high with a clear view, he spotted the shells' points of impact—
the southwest corner of 47th Street, where a once-small freight dock now stood half-abandoned.
Onshore, a patch of old industrial buildings had mostly been torn down right after World War II and replaced with four- or five-storey walk-ups.
The only abandoned factory left had recently been bought by Li Pu and turned into a new home for him and his two sons.
So those explosions had been several garage-built cannons opening fire on Li Pu's brand-new house.
'Son of a—!'
He cursed, then vanished from the top of the Empire State Building.
With his sons' skills, the odds of real harm from that barrage were slim.
But Li Pu was still furious, still frantic.
Their strength had nothing to do with it.
Even that mild-tempered Ultra mother with her resurrection tricks teleports in when her boy's getting beaten, right?
Then she dishes out 'Mother Kicks' and 'Mother Punches'—multi-megaton 'howls' of payback.
Li Pu can't teleport and hasn't got megaton fists, but he's a super-protective dad.
What cosmic crime had his two not-yet-five-year-olds committed to deserve being shelled?
He swore he'd get them justice. Everyone knows justice lives in people's hearts… 'So I'll have to play gravedigger later, huh?'
A fat man named Gilmo stood on a rooftop a few hundred metres away, muttering.
Sometimes he felt his Master, the 'Heartless' Nando, strutted around like a barnyard turkey trying to run the whole farm.
Nando's ideas were simply incomprehensible, impossible to endorse.
But since Gilmo still dreamed of becoming a Vampire, he kept playing the loyal servant, working without complaint.
For years he'd handled chores like spotting suitable victims, disposing of drained corpses, keeping the house clean.
Firing artillery, though—that was a first.
'Who said anything about digging? Real warriors flatten the battlefield!'
Nando flicked his cloak with a grand gesture, striking what he thought was a killer pose.
Not that his two companions—the Vampire Nadja, who'd dated countless humans, and the self-styled 'handsome, devoted' Lopez—could even see it;
they were off with their men, setting up guns and blasting the factory from different angles.
The three Vampires plus Gilmo had lived out on Staten Island, the sticks.
Only the Council's summons had brought them to Manhattan.
The local top Vampire, Deacon Frost, had recently been found dangling from a Wall Street lamp-post, Sun-baked to death.
Short-handed, the Council had no choice but to call in the senior but dim-witted Nando trio.
The Council handed Deacon Frost's 'legacy' to these pure-bloods, letting them supervise Frost's surviving half-breed lackeys for now.
'Caliber is justice!'
Nando grinned.
'Back when I was a proud Turkic warrior, I saw with my own eyes the thunder of cannon tearing open the walls of Constantinople.'
We're in Manhattan now, and the whole point is to conquer it. A man who wants to conquer something has to bring out the big guns.
Gilmore swore to himself that the next time he had to find blood for his Master, he'd never look in Manhattan again.
The junkies on these streets are absolutely blasted out of their minds!
Nando's condition right now was clearly the result of drinking blood laced with too much of that junkie poison—he'd basically overdosed along with them.
Just moments ago Gilmore had received a text—since the old relic Nando didn't know how to use a phone, the council-issued communicator had to be entrusted to him—and the council's Elders were demanding to know what insanity had possessed Nando, daring to open fire in Hells Kitchen.
You had to remember, even if this was Hells Kitchen, Hells Kitchen wasn't far at all from the center of Manhattan.
'Master, the…the council wants you to come right away,' Gilmore stammered, his tongue tripping over itself in panic.
'The Elders are furious. They said we were only supposed to dig around a bit, to check out the new neighbors near Deacon's old stronghold.
See if they have any connection to that Daywalker.
They never expected you to roll out the artillery and shell the place.
You've made such a racket that they want you in front of the council, right now, immediately, to explain yourself.'
Hearing his servant, Nando looked completely unconcerned; he merely felt the council's 'youngsters' were pathetically timid.
'This is nothing.
They know the Impaler, the great progenitor of Vampires, Count Dracula himself is about to arrive in the New World, yet they won't even arrange a proper welcome.
I'm simply covering for their oversight. When that Lord hears we used cannons on Vampire hunters, he'll find it hilarious…'
Still, bluster was bluster, and Nando knew perfectly well what he'd done.
After a last show of bravado for his servant, the 'Merciless' Nando shot into the sky—if the council summoned and he refused, he was a dead man.
Yet, in a way, listening to his gut had just saved his life.
By leaving suddenly, he avoided the next-second arrival of someone whose Killing Intent was practically leaking out.
'So it was you Vampires who shelled my home and my family?'
Li Pu's voice sounded behind Gilmore, while a series of soft pffts replaced the boom of cannon fire.
The Vampires who had been manning the guns had their heads silently blown apart, crumbling to dust in an instant.
'Holy crab cakes!'
Gilmore spun around, jumped in fright, and nearly left the ground.
'You're not supposed to be here—you should still be in that warehouse…'
The idiot had confessed without even being pressed.
His words confirmed to Li Pu that the Vampires had indeed investigated the family and knew exactly what he looked like.
'Where's your Master? Have those blood-sucking beasts really gotten so low they let a blood-pet order their own kind around?'
The words stabbed straight through Gilmore's heart. Just as he tried to bluster like his Master Nando, Li Pu punched clean through his chest.
'A human born who persecutes his own kind for Vampires—no conscience at all.'
Li Pu watched Gilmore drop, lifeless from the hole in his chest, and passed final judgment.
Then he rose into the air and unloaded Vegeta's signature move on the two remaining cannon positions.
Silent Qi-balls shot from Li Pu's palms like precision-guided rounds; one hit turned a Vampire into something like furnace slag.
In a few blinks he finished them, darted back through the hole in the factory roof—and then shot out of the house even faster than he'd entered.
Because amid the blasted rubble of the warehouse he hadn't seen his two sons.
Even more incredible, even with his senses pushed to the limit, he still couldn't detect young Broly or young Koz's Qi.
'What have you done with my boys!' Li Pu was frantic.