Chapter 186: Kizaru Makes His Move
"Wh — what are those things? Why are skeletons falling from the sky? They look exactly like undead skeleton soldiers from an isekai anime — and it's the middle of the day, so why are they moving around freely? Wait. I'm dreaming. I have to be dreaming. This kind of thing is impossible."
A heavyset young man swallowed hard, eyes locked on the undead skeleton soldier not ten metres from where he stood.
He'd watched it fall. Seen it drop straight out of the formation in the sky and hit the ground.
One arm was broken. Several ribs shattered. Its skull had cracked on impact. But in the centre of its forehead, a small flame burned — green, cold, steady. And because of that flame, the skeleton had gotten back up. Unsteadily, lurching, barely holding itself together — but up. Its one functional arm ended in a hand gripping a long, worn bone-knife.
Then it looked at him.
This — this thing — it can't be real, right?
The worst part wasn't that one skeleton. It was the sheer number of them. Countless. Falling like rain. Many shattered their skull-flames on impact and lay still, but half of them were getting up — and more were still pouring out of the formation above.
The young man's legs had gone weak. He was trembling just standing there.
I don't think this is a dream.
He tried to make his body turn and run.
The moment he did —
His upper body exploded.
A spray of red. His lower half collapsed to the cement, blood spreading across the ground beneath him.
A skeleton crawled up from the remains. It had been the one that fell on him.
Something about fresh blood seemed to draw the others. Within moments, two or three dozen skeleton soldiers were converging on the corpse, frenzied. The one that had made the kill was already feeding.
How they ate without throats or stomachs or intestines was beyond comprehension. The sight was simply wrong — deeply, viscerally wrong. The body disappeared into something unrecognisable, worse than anything that could be adequately described.
The clatter of teeth. The sound of bone grinding against flesh.
And the flames on their foreheads — were they getting slightly larger after feeding? It was hard to be certain. But one thing was not hard to be certain about:
The Undead Legion was treating the human population as a food source.
Every living thing — people, cats, dogs, whatever moved.
The city had descended into chaos the instant the undead made landfall. The killing had begun immediately. In the first few minutes alone, the death toll had climbed past a thousand — possibly two or three thousand. Unarmed civilians against creatures that didn't care about sunlight and wouldn't stop moving until their skull-flame went out.
"Help — help!! There's a skeleton chasing me! It just killed two people! It split a door in half with one slash!!"
"Why is that one so large? What creature does that skeleton belong to? It's nothing like a human — it looks like a giant tiger skeleton!"
"There's one over there that's at least two storeys tall, don't run that way!!"
"Why is this happening? What are these things?!"
"AAAA my foot — it bit through my foot — stop, stop eating me — someone help me — don't run, somebody help — aaaaGHH—"
"Listen! If you destroy the skull and put out the flame they die! That's how to kill them!"
"How do you know that?!"
"That's how it works in anime!"
"Get out of here!!"
"…"
On the roof of a high-rise building near the city centre, a pair of eyes behind deep amber lenses surveyed the situation in silence. Their owner checked the time on his watch, then looked back up at the stream of skeleton soldiers still falling from the formation above.
Kizaru muttered to himself: "In the One Piece world right now I'd probably be in the middle of my afternoon nap~ Ah well — the total reward is 11,000 Points, so overtime seems reasonable."
He watched the falling undead for a moment, analysing.
"The ones that land headfirst and break their skull-flames are dead before they hit the ground — they don't get back up. So that flame is the core. Equivalent to a heart, or a brain. Extinguish the flame, and even an undead dies."
He wasn't looking at the ones already on the ground. Ground-level was other people's problem.
The targets he wanted were the ones still in the air.
The ones raining down by the thousands.
"Quite the numbers. How frightening~"
He raised one hand.
"Yasakani no Magatama."
A blinding gold light erupted from his body — the kind that made the eyes hurt to look at directly, like staring into the sun. It washed over half the city in an instant, swamping the formation's eerie green glow entirely.
Orbs of golden light the size of basketballs began firing in rapid succession.
Fwoom. Fwoom. Fwoom. Fwoom—
Wave after wave of golden bolts screamed through the sky and tore into the descending undead. Detonation after detonation — not like a handful of explosions, but like thousands of high-yield grenades going off at once, a continuous rolling thunder that swallowed every other sound in the city.
These weren't simply light beams. These were lasers. Each one that found its mark didn't just kill — it reduced its target to powder and ash instantly, no exceptions. And a single detonation didn't take only one skeleton: the blast radius caught ten, fifteen, sometimes dozens at once when the formation was dense enough.
The visual effect was oddly mundane given the scale — like watching a windshield wiper clear away raindrops.
The golden light was impossible to miss. The entire city could see it. Anyone who couldn't was either huddled inside with their eyes shut or had vision problems.
"Was that — tracer fire?! How does tracer fire explode?!"
A civilian on a nearby street stared up, blinking furiously, trying to clear spots from his vision. The burst of light from a few hundred metres away had nearly overwhelmed his eyes. The continuous explosions had his ears ringing.
"Is this really an alien invasion? Skeletons that stand back up after they fall — what else could that be? That kind of life form doesn't exist on Earth. This is insane—"
He was standing on his apartment balcony, close enough to street level that he had an unobstructed view of what was happening below. People being killed. Screams. The images were the kind that didn't leave you.
The human-sized skeletons were frightening enough.
The others were something else entirely.
Because some of the skeletons were not human-sized. Some of them were ten, fifteen metres tall — the kind of thing you only saw in museum displays or fantasy game concept art, now walking through the streets, and the steel-reinforced concrete of the city's buildings was crumbling against them like paper.
It looked exactly like an undead army from a Western fantasy game.
It looked exactly like that.
Except that those were virtual. And this was happening in front of everyone's eyes.
"This is very bad…"
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you