A week before the celebration.

[Miss, they've arrived to pick you up,] Ava informed Rina. The escort from Aron had arrived outside her mansion after going through all the security checks and inspections. They were there to bring her to the airport, then onward to Eden.

"Sure, let's go," she said and immediately stood from her office chair. She would be taking nothing with her except her phone and the glasses she was wearing. She wasn't even packing changes of clothes.

Coming out of her office, she found her secretary and the guard who had taken over for Terry already waiting for her; they would be going with her. "Let's get going," she said and walked past them. They nodded and started walking behind her.

"Miss, do you think it'll be fine to go with those people without any of our guards?" asked Alex, Rina's head of security.

"You don't have to worry about that, we'll be perfectly safe with them. Plus, I don't think a single private jet can accommodate all of them, and your people, too," Rina said. She knew she would be safer with ARES than with anyone else.

"Good evening," greeted a female driver who was responsible for driving the car that Rina would be taking with her secretary.

Rina returned the greeting and smiled at her as she boarded the car with Alex and her secretary before the doors were closed behind them.

"Very comfortable," she said, finding herself sinking into the seat and feeling like she was being massaged.

Wasting no time, the convoy left the mansion. Rina and her secretary were in the middle car, with two cars ahead and behind her. All of them drove professionally as they left the Rothschild's compound; it took more than ten minutes of driving before they reached the gate to leave the compound and passed the security checkpoint.

A new burner phone rang with a text at the same time the convoy left the compound. And with that text, certain gears were set into motion.

Ava attempted to pinpoint where the text was going, but failed. The only thing she knew was that the phone that had received the text was in the same state as them; it had been destroyed before she could find its exact location.

Despite failing, she still informed Rina about the message and that it might be about her, as no one in the compound that she had been monitoring fit the message. They were all still comfortably sitting at home, while Rina was the one who had left.

Rina, who believed she was perfectly safe in the hands of Aron's guards, just asked Ava to continue keeping an eye on the situation.

...

As the convoy headed down the road carrying its load of VVIPs, the cars all slowed down in unison, then turned right, catching Rina, Chloe, and Alex equally off guard. They knew the route they should be taking, and this wasn't it.

"Why'd we make an unplanned turn?" asked Alex, who was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car.

The female driver said nothing and just pointed at the tablet set into the dashboard. The moment Alex laid his eyes on the tablet, the screen changed into a 3D map of the surrounding area. To his surprise, it wasn't a Google or Apple app, but data that had been collected and was being rendered in real-time by the cars themselves. Alas, his surprise was soon overshadowed when the screen moved to about a kilometer in the direction of their planned route, and he saw a car with people inside it packing weapons no different from terrorists. They even had RPGs to the baggage place of the car!

"Looks like that message was really about me, after all," Rina said when she saw the display through the augmented reality lenses of her glasses.

"Turn around! We need to inform the family security about this so they can reach us in time," Alex said and immediately keyed his satellite radio to inform the family. Normally, it could reach the base station no matter the distance, but no matter how he tried, he received no response.

"They were prepared for you and jammed the radio," the driver told him after he had been trying to contact the security base for a while. She had let him try it first, not wanting to waste her energy on explaining things like she would have if she had stopped him before he made the attempt.

"Did they only jam our frequency?" he asked as the convoy made another turn to avoid another car that was similarly armed.

"Yes. It looks like this is being done by someone who knows your system inside and out," she answered, hinting at who the culprit might be.

While all of that was happening, the only ones panicking were Chloe and Alex, who was worried about Rina's safety. But while those two were afraid, the people with them were calm.

The convoy continued avoiding contact with ambushers until they were on the only road leading to the airport. It was a long, straight road with no intersections, meaning they couldn't take any more turns to avoid the cars that were chasing after them.

The chasers thought that they had finally cornered them and could deal with them, but alas, it was all planned by the ARES security detail. The moment the road they were on reached a sufficiently unpopulated area, three of the five cars in the convoy changed to the right lane: the one Rina was in and the two directly in front and behind her. As for the other two, they remained in the left lane and slowed down. They were left behind by the speeding, but still stable, cars that continued their journey.

Although they were now separated, everything happening behind them was displayed on the tablet set into the dashboard of the car.

..

Inside the remaining cars.

"We have five minutes to deal with them and clean up before this turns into a shitshow," said the team leader as he pulled down the back seat and removed one of the assault rifles stored in the hidden compartment. It looked like an AR-15, but the looks were all it had in common with that rifle. Everything else was different; in fact, it was a Gauss rifle. The other soldiers also picked up their weapons and linked them to the sunglasses they were wearing, then powered them up.

Once everyone was armed, the drivers slammed on the brakes, and the cars skidded for a bit before fully stopping. The doors sprang open, and the soldiers dismounted the car with guns raised.

"Who the fuck are" the lead chase car's driver began, but was interrupted by the sound of a blown tire as a Gauss round hit it from nearly a kilometer away.

The ARES members didn't stop firing, either. Even though the front car was spinning out of control due to having its tire taken out while the car was moving at full speed, their aim didn't falter, and they disabled the following cars as well. Then they sent a microexplosive round down range, triggering the rocket-propelled grenades to explode as the drivers were frantically occupied with attempting to avoid colliding with each other.

"Holy shit," Alex said as he watched the massacre taking place behind them. He was experiencing a few complicated emotions as he realized that they really were safer with these strangers than the family guard, just based on the tech in this car alone! That in itself would be a game changer for any security detail, but the efficiency with which the massacre was being executed was also incredibly impressive. The ARES detail said little to nothing at all; the soldiers had seemingly trained to the point they could act as one body and one mind.

Though some of the cars had managed to avoid destruction and a few armed people came out of them to try their luck with scattered return fire, mere survival was the most their luck could bring them.

Alas, their deaths could be chalked up to 'natural causes'. After all, anyone will naturally die if their head explodes.

All ten of the attackers' cars were soon taken out, with the people in them dying in different ways. It would surely present the FBI investigator with plenty of nightmares in the future, but the local police could count themselves lucky that a fight like this one was something the police wouldn't be trusted to handle.

The soldiers immediately boarded their cars again and headed to the pile of wreckage to do some 'cleaning'. They burned a few things, tore apart a few more things, and generally just contaminated the scene even further to make the investigation as complex as possible. Then they loaded back into their cars, put their gauss rifles back into their hidden compartments, and left in the opposite direction of Rina and the rest of the convoy.

"Where are they going?" asked Rina, who seemed calm, but was internally angry. She had seen worse.

[To find and capture the one behind the attack,] Ava said. She brought up the evidence she had collected and her interpretation of it. The most damning piece of evidence was the communication records from the cell towers, showing where the person the attackers were communicating with was. ARES also had that information, and the rearguard team had been directed to capture him or her.

Alex, hearing that, knew that the Rothschild security force was nowhere near that level of efficiency. ARES seemed to have handled the attack while simultaneously figuring out who was pulling the strings. Then, they had disrupted the evidence and even began another operation to apprehend the mastermind and interrogate them on who was ultimately responsible for attacking them in such a heavily armed manner.