Ludo didn't for one second doubt the power of the gun, as the miraculous features of his armour had already told him that it was definitely the real deal as well.
But seeing was better than believing…
"Yup, you're dead if this thing hits you."
His armour could defend anything up to a .50 calibre round, but he knew for sure that if a bullet fired by the Gauss pistol hit him, it would penetrate the armour.
Its impact would still be significantly slowed, so the damage wouldn't be too detrimental, but blood would still be shed.
"Thank god I don't have to worry about these things being widespread…"
If Earth had this type of capability, he wouldn't feel safe anywhere on the planet. The good thing was that he owned the only one on Earth, so he'd better not lose it.
He didn't dare to fire any more shots off, as he only had 19 left now and stock as limited for the time being.
The Pistol was loaded back into the case it came in, which also happened to double up as a charging dock for it, so that was neat.
Though he'd have to cook up some way to connect it to Earth's method of transferring power, but that was a problem for when he was running low on charge.
He loaded it onto his passenger seat, before heading back over to the still open black box, and dragged that over too.
Whatever it was made of, it was sturdy, and he couldn't just leave it there for someone to find in the future.
Ludo had a feeling that it might come in handy at some point, possibly when he started selling products on the trading hubs as well, rather than being a buyer all his life…
He closed the lid before picking it up and loading it onto his truck bed. Then covered it with tarp that he usually kept on standby to cover the bed when it rained.
Now that he was satisfied and everything went well within expectation, he left the area.
A deal that would change his life now had to be made…
Ding!
At that moment, a message came through to his smartphone, making his heart drop for a second.
That phone would only make a sound if Blue had notified him, and it would only notify him if something extremely important had occurred.
It was only now that he noticed he'd left the phone in the truck, and had been notifying him even before the package had even been delivered.
However, after reading through the message, he chuckled and raised an eyebrow.
"How cute."
***
"Subject has returned back at his office. A total of 6 hours 20 minutes had passed since he departed. Looks like he went to run some errands and pick something up. He also seems to have a new laptop with him, might potentially contain the source code to the product."
A man wearing casual clothes and a slightly tilted down baseball cap spoke into a recording device.
Across the street from him, a truck had pulled up with its hazard lights on and a plain looking man started unloading things from it and moved them into the office building adjacent.
Ludo was right to fear that he might be targeted after making the numerous technology executives aware of the deal he was offering. Though, the 'targeting' didn't quite come in the violent format he was wary of.
His act of showing just how much information he could dig up and release in a short time with Jerald Krane was enough to dim any of their desires to do anything out of order against Ludo.
But one man seemed to be quite bold, and hired a private investigator to look into every detail about Ludo that could possibly be found.
That was where Mike came in. He was cold called in the middle of the night and offered a mouth watering amount of money to investigate a guy he'd never heard of, and he only had to do it for less than 20 hours? He'd be stupid to turn that down.
But with the tight time period that he had, he had to be quick.
Ludo's background and history were all normal. He had no prior convictions, nor did he have any close friends or colleagues. In fact, anything he could find in that short time was spotless.
This, in itself, was suspicious to him.
This was the kind of thing a slightly lonely guy going about his day to day life in society had, but he was already given a general rundown by his employer, and Ludo was anything but normal.
Which led him to believe that his background was most likely fabricated, or covered up.
And with little time to work with, he did the only thing he could.
He went and saw the guy in person.
Covertly, of course.
At first, he just camped outside of his office and watched him type away at his laptop every now and then.
It was mind numbingly boring work, but he was paid handsomely for it, so he maintained a high level of concentration regardless.
The only interesting bit was when he suddenly got up and left in a hurry, with anxiety and excitement written all over his face.
He did as any good investigator would, and followed closely behind him to see wherever he would be going.
That lasted for an hour until he realised that Ludo left the road and started driving into the wilderness, and he was left with no choice but to give up on tailing him from there.
Choosing to go any further past that would just make it plainly obvious that he was being followed, and he was explicitly warned several times by his employer not to expose himself.
It wasn't all bad though, he just headed back to the Blue Star technology office and started to be much more bold with his actions now that the sole person occupying it was out.
Though, any attempt at trying to find a way in was thwarted, and forcing his way in was out of the equation.
Instead, he took as many pictures as he could, peering through the windows at the nearly empty office and photographing anything even remotely interesting.
But there was nothing he could do any further, so he retreated to his car on the other side of the road and started writing up a report while waiting for Ludo to return.
Which led to the current situation.
He was curious to see what Ludo was transporting into the office, but without getting any closer he could only make some speculations, and after waiting another 5 minutes after Ludo moved his truck to an actual parking space, he noticed that he still hadn't returned.
"Back to writing the report it is, I guess…"
The deadline was getting close anyway, and his employer was already nagging him to give up what he already had.
Knock! Knock!
However, he was startled by the sudden knocking on the driver side window of his car.
When he looked at the source, his face fell. He expressionlessly rolled the window down, maintaining a poker face.
"Hi Mike, tell Rowan Mavik I said hi."
Ludo spoke with a smile and crossed over the street, heading back into his office.