Chapter 265: Extinction-Level Power, Every Single One
Eternally Seventeen: Ara ara… just holding this many is all that's needed? I've counted — we're keeping approximately 542 on this side. So the remaining 458 are going to Admin-sama~
Eternally Seventeen: I have to say, these so-called Void Beasts are extraordinarily tough. Thick skin, dense muscle, and bones like iron.
Senbei Is So Tasty: …Accurate. The weakest among them are comparable to Doflamingo, as stated, but a significant number are considerably above that. Some of them feel like they're on par with me.
Edward Newgate: @Senbei Is So Tasty — gurararara, Sengoku, you've been in the Chat Group for less than half a month. Whatever Points you've accumulated through sign-ins haven't done much for you yet.
Edward Newgate: Try not to get pummeled by these Void Beasts out there! Gurararara!
Admiral Kizaru: Oh? Whitebeard's mouth really is prophetic — right after he said that, a specimen with power not below a regular Admiral caught the Fleet Admiral in the stomach with one claw.
Admiral Kizaru: Though Sengoku-san is a Zoan-type user, so his physical resilience is well above most Devil Fruit users. The claw just made him cough~
Senbei Is So Tasty: That insufferable Whitebeard! When this old man's strength is properly built up, we settle this in the Arena!
Edward Newgate: Gurararara — you'll be chasing that for a lifetime.
Maidang: Um… can you all really chat while fighting?
RawrSoFierce: First, I'm not an uncle. Second, chatting during combat is basic. You'll get used to it.
Crazy Diamond: Even from dozens of kilometers away I can watch the battle with the naked eye. It looks extremely intense over there.
Eternally Seventeen: …Why are you so far away? You're the healer.
Crazy Diamond: Yukari-senpai, easy for you to say! If I were any closer, a stray shockwave from your fight would take me out! From what I can see, even the incidental splashback looks like it hits harder than a missile.
Crazy Diamond: If I were any closer I'd probably be dead in ten seconds.
My True Form Is Cola: Painfully accurate. When divine beings fight, mortals get crushed.
Kaguya-sama: Mm… surely it's not quite that dramatic?
Crazy Diamond:crouching in a corner, shaking
"…"
Josuke was, indeed, shaking. Everyone else was coordinating with the local authorities, frantically evacuating cities across the region — entire provinces on the move toward neighboring ones. He was the only healer left in position.
And given the combat tier of Ryū's group, leaving the province wasn't even a safe guarantee. The splashback from people fighting at that level could reach across enormous distances.
Because this was, in every meaningful sense, a group of extinction-level combatants.
The weakest current participant was Kaguya Shinomiya — and even at her level, she was a walking nuclear warhead. Doflamingo in the original story had the destructive potential to obliterate a nation, albeit one roughly the size of an average prefecture-level city. A technique capable of leveling a city was, by any reasonable definition, a weapon of mass destruction.
"The city beneath me has already cleared several hundred thousand people with police and military assistance, but there are still over two million remaining. This is the closest population center to the fighting. Even from tens of kilometers away the wind coming off the battle is something you can feel."
Josuke stood on a rooftop, watching the distant sky, his expression serious. "The battle area has expanded a lot already. The combat radius on Admin-sama's side alone looks like it covers an entire city's footprint. And that's only been going on for fifteen minutes."
If the combat zone reached this city while two million people were still inside it, that was a serious problem.
Some roads were gridlocked from panic. The authorities were forcibly clearing paths. The evacuation was moving fast — but not fast enough for the numbers involved.
Another thirty minutes at most before the battle reaches here. No idea how many can be moved in thirty minutes. Even with clear roads, with this many people… some won't make it.
The same concern was running through every Chat Group member spread across the other nearby cities. But this was the limit of what they could do. Protect as many as possible, move as many as possible, accept what couldn't be changed.
The combined population of the several cities in the immediate area was somewhere between ten and twenty million people — one of them was a tier-one city, and resident population plus transients pushed the numbers into genuinely staggering territory.
Eriri, as a member of this doujin world herself, had her eyes on the fighting. Her expression had taken on a gravity she didn't usually wear, a thread of tension visible in her normally clear eyes.
"At this rate the damage footprint is going to cover an entire province. I just looked it up — this province has a permanent resident population of 72.3 million. Add transients and it almost matches an entire country like Japan."
Whatever country this was, it wasn't Japan, it wasn't a place she'd grown up in. But she was here, and that meant she was going to save whoever she could reach.
Even without the quest directive, she'd be doing exactly this.
But she could feel the limits pressing in. The evacuation speed was impressive — and still nowhere near sufficient for the density of people involved. And then there were the ones who refused to leave, the stubborn ones, the unafraid-of-dying category—
Eriri had written those off. She wasn't going to force people to want to live.
She exhaled slowly, feeling the wind hit her face, and murmured, "The ground is vibrating. And the vibration is getting stronger. The fighting has escalated."
She was right.
The full battle had only now truly started. The void in the sky hadn't closed, but all one thousand Void Beasts had cleared the fissure — they were out.
"Gurararara! So many ganging up on old Whitebeard — quite dishonorable! But not one of you void creatures can draw a single drop of blood from me!"
Whitebeard wasn't particularly concerned whether they understood him. The grin on his face was genuine; the coldness in his eyes was also genuine.
His left hand caught a Void Beast mid-charge, seizing one of the horn-like protrusions on its skull. The creature's body was mountain-sized — but it couldn't out-strength Whitebeard.
"Gurararara — stop trying to gore people with those horns, little thing!"
The muscles in his left arm locked into full tension, veins standing out in cords across his forearm. His palm gathered a faint white luminescence — the Tremor-Tremor Fruit activating.
A cracking sound started at the horn.
Crack. Crack-crack. Crack.
The density of cracks building in rapid succession produced something inexplicable: the Void Beast that Whitebeard had by the horn — a creature of grotesque and terrifying mass — developed a spreading network of fracture lines across its enormous skull.
The white glow in Whitebeard's palm intensified. The Void Beast, apparently capable of perceiving its own mortality, went into frantic struggling motion — and pain from its cracking head only amplified the panic.
The struggling accomplished nothing.
The head detonated.
Black fluid sprayed outward — and Whitebeard knocked it aside with a quick vibration tremor, clearing the air around him.
He looked down at the falling body with a slight frown. "These things have extraordinary resilience. Though I notice I wasn't the first one to finish one — Admin took one down half a minute ahead of me!"
He was right. The first confirmed kill hadn't been Whitebeard.
It had been Ryū.
His Decompose-Decompose Fruit was, against high-defense opponents, essentially a perfect counter. Physical defense meant nothing against it. Even a light contact from one finger would leave a cylindrical void two to three meters across and two to three meters deep — the affected area simply ceasing to exist in any material sense.
That was Ryū's ability at its most fundamental: true damage, bypassing any physical resilience entirely.
"There are a lot of them. Almost got hit twice already. Taking a clean shot from one of these things would not be pleasant."
Ryū had just avoided a black energy bolt. The projectile traveled on and slammed into a mountain behind him — the detonation tore the mountainside open with seismic violence, rock layers peeling away in sequence, boulders launching like artillery shells in every direction.
A hole had been punched through the mountain's midsection. The peak above it tilted, unstable, threatening to collapse at any moment.
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