Gunfire Every Day

At first, the gunshots, so faint compared to the noise at the venue, failed to draw anyone’s attention. Even those who heard them assumed the organizers were setting off fireworks or something.

It was not until people in the crowd started collapsing after being shot, and those nearby screamed warnings, that the entire venue instantly descended into chaos.

The audience inside the venue fled frantically toward the exits or searched around for cover. The casualties caused by the stampede in the panicked crowd even outnumbered those directly hit by gunfire.

Kraft and Fatty Liao were unharmed. Being relatively small, they had not been exposed to the gunfire, and with Alice, a robot, beside them, even the chaotic crowd had failed to hurt them.

"Fxxk! Since when did places outside Hell’s Kitchen become this dangerous?!"

The three of them scrambled and rolled behind a flower bed. Gunfire continued outside. Those who could escape had basically fled already, while most of those still at the scene were trapped because they had been too close to the front and could not squeeze their way out.

"Being too close to the front doesn’t always pay off."

Now that he was temporarily safe, Kraft still had the mood to joke.

"Hey! Kraft! Don’t you have some invention that can deal with this situation?"

As Fatty Liao asked, he tried his best to hide his mass of flesh behind the flower bed.

"Damn it! When I get back this time, I’m definitely starting a diet!"

"Want me to sponsor you with a weight-loss package?"

Kraft had already contacted Haro through his Bluetooth earpiece. From the information it had sent back, he knew there was only one shooter: an old white man staying at a nearby hotel. From Kraft’s current position, unless his luck was unbelievably bad, there was basically no chance of getting hit. That was why he had the leisure to chat nonsense with Fatty Liao.

"Did he start shooting because the noise was keeping him awake?"

After Kraft explained the situation, Fatty Liao finally let out a sigh of relief, then grumbled indignantly.

"The music festival had been advertised for so long. He should’ve known about it already! Why did he still stay nearby?"

Kraft rolled his eyes. "The nearby hotels are meant for people attending the music festival. That old man obviously planned this in advance, okay? Pulling a gun over noisy neighbors… you really dare to imagine anything."

"Um… Big brother?"

At that moment, Alice’s timid voice sounded beside him.

"What is it?"

"Can’t you help them?"

Alice pointed at the wounded people lying in the distance and wailing in pain, her face full of pity.

"There is a way… but it would cause too much of a commotion." Kraft frowned. "I don’t want the FBI coming after me."

Given how Kraft viewed people of other races, there was no way he would expose himself for their lives.

"B-but they look so pitiful…"

Faced with Alice’s pleading little face, Kraft immediately felt a headache coming on.

Even if Kraft had firmly refused Alice’s request, she would not have said anything more. But Kraft now truly treated her as his daughter—scratch that, little sister—so naturally, he could not simply ignore her wish.

"Let me think of something first."

Kraft helplessly reassured Alice, then began considering what equipment he had that could resolve the situation without anyone noticing.

If all he wanted was to deal with the shooter, Kraft had far too many options. Even sending Alice straight at him would easily solve the problem.

But if he wanted to deal with the problem without anyone else noticing, Kraft could currently think of only one method: the engineering creation in his bag—the Gnome Mind Control Hat.

He had originally prepared it for Hulk, who was currently nowhere to be found. That guy looked like he was not particularly intelligent, so a mind-control hat should be able to keep him firmly in check.

But there was another problem. The Gnome Mind Control Hat’s range was not that large. Kraft was too far away to control the shooter at all.

"Come closer and block their line of sight for me."

Kraft considered the equipment in his bag and on his body, quickly finalized his plan, and beckoned to Fatty Liao and Alice.

He did not need to worry about cameras. Haro had long since taken control of all of them. There were just other people on the left side. Although they were currently lying on the ground and not looking this way, and the sky was dark enough that they could not see clearly, Kraft was accustomed to acting cautiously.

Fatty Liao and Alice followed Kraft’s instructions, moving to his left and completely blocking him from view. Fortunately, Kraft was the smallest of the three, so hiding him was not difficult.

Then the two of them watched as Kraft took a ridiculous-looking hat from his backpack and put it on. The hat looked like an iron pot with a black-and-white spiral disc attached to the top. Once Kraft put the strange hat on his head, the disc began rotating slowly.

After staring at the disc’s eerie movement for a while, Fatty Liao started to feel dizzy.

"What kind of weird crap is this now?"

He rubbed his eyes, which had started seeing double, looked away, and muttered.

But Kraft had no time to explain. He pulled out another metal device shaped like a stopwatch, pried open its protective casing, and pressed the button inside.

Then Fatty Liao watched Kraft vanish right before his eyes. Before he could cry out in surprise, a fierce gust suddenly howled past him, and cold air mixed with a little dirt and sand flew into his wide-open mouth.

"Ptooey! Ptooey! Ptooey!"

Fatty Liao hurriedly spat out the sand in his mouth, momentarily forgetting to scream.

Kraft had no idea Fatty Liao had nearly sabotaged him like a pig teammate. As he activated the Gnome Invisibility Device, he also activated the Gnome Rocket Boots on his feet. Since the invisibility device lasted less than twenty seconds, he had to hurry.

And because he did not have enough time to detour around the area, Kraft worried that he might accidentally get hit by a stray bullet, so he activated the Gnome Protective Belt at his waist as well.

I fxxking love Gnome Tech!

Hidden from sight and surrounded by the force field generated by the Gnome Protective Belt, Kraft raced across the venue and rushed beneath the hotel building. Before the invisibility device wore off, he found a concealed spot and hid there.

The hotel was in chaos as well. Shouts of anger and crying could be heard from time to time, while the most dangerous sound of all—the gunfire—never stopped.

Fortunately, the floor where the shooter was located was not very high. From where Kraft stood now, the man was already within the Gnome Mind Control Hat’s range.

Kraft raised his head and fixed his gaze on the murderer, whose head was half-exposed through the window. Then he flipped the switch on the mind control hat. As the black-and-white disc on his forehead began spinning rapidly, Kraft felt as though his consciousness had been dragged out of his body by a vortex, then fired like a cannonball at the shooter by the window.

"Mm… So this is what controlling a human feels like?"

When Kraft came back to his senses, the scene before him had shifted to the shooter’s perspective. It was not much different from the animal tests he had done before, except that the sense of resistance was far stronger when controlling a human than an animal.

Since the Gnome Mind Control Hat’s control time also lasted only a dozen or so seconds, Kraft had no time to waste. He directly raised the gun in the man’s hand and aimed it at himself.

"Rat-a-tat-tat…"

The instant Kraft pulled the trigger, his consciousness returned to his own body. He rubbed his chin. Although he could not feel anything except sight and hearing while controlling someone else, shooting at himself was still not a pleasant feeling.

After dealing with the killer, Kraft opened the back cover of the invisibility device and replaced the emerald inside that served as its power source. Then he picked up a rock by his feet, rubbed some gunpowder out of it and stuffed it into his shoes. Before anyone else could react, he used the same method as before to slip back to Alice and Fatty Liao.

"Since I don’t have a robot maid, this invisibility device will do just fine!"

The moment he returned, Kraft saw Fatty Liao’s chubby face practically screaming "LSP."

"Get lost!"

This music festival shooting was based on a real incident. It took place in Las Vegas, and the killer was an old white man. At the time, he fired a machine gun for more than five minutes, killing around fifty people and injuring over a hundred. In the end, the killer shot himself in the hotel.