Chapter 266: The World Trembles
"If these things had enough time to charge up fully, that energy output wouldn't fall short of Kurama's Tailed Beast Ball. Hundreds of oversized Tailed Beast Balls hitting simultaneously — who could survive that?"
Ryū said it, but his hands didn't pause and his eyes held no fear. These Void Beasts hadn't reached the threshold where he actually felt threatened.
The battlefield was entirely above a thousand meters. Nobody could let any of the Void Beasts descend — the Spiritual Core sat a thousand meters underground, directly below their position.
Task 3 required protecting the Core intact. Task 1 required casualties below one hundred million. Task 2 required killing all one thousand creatures. All three conditions had to be met simultaneously to claim the full reward. Missing any single task meant losing at least 30,000 Points — a number painful enough that no member of the group was willing to accept it.
Moonwalk carrying him through the air, Ryū crossed several hundred meters in a single motion and appeared directly in front of a Void Beast that had been looking for a gap in the defense.
He drove a kick into it with everything behind it. The resulting air displacement was staggering — a creature of unguessable tonnage got launched from two hundred meters altitude to at least twelve hundred, tumbling upward rather than down.
"These things keep trying to slip through. Do they think Observation Haki is decorative?" He glanced sideways. "Kaguya's come a long way. She's holding two of them simultaneously."
Kaguya was the closest to him. He could see her clearly — keeping two Void Beasts occupied on her own, fighting both simultaneously. The two she was containing were the weakest variants, but that was still impressive. She had none of Ryū's extraordinary sign-in luck, she'd been on relatively few group quests, and before joining the Chat Group she'd been an ordinary person from a contemporary-setting slice-of-life series.
To reach this level in under a year required exceptional ability across every dimension. A genuine prodigy, regardless of circumstances.
But she couldn't sustain holding two indefinitely. She'd burn out. Ryū moved.
He appeared behind one of the Void Beasts occupying Kaguya — directly behind it, in her blindspot.
In a multi-against-few situation, there was no shame in a backstab.
Armament Haki-coated fist drove into the back of the creature's skull with enough penetrating force that his entire forearm disappeared into the head. The pressure inside the cranium went berserk.
The brain, normally protected by that skull, became something that could generously be described as porridge. Less generously: the consistency of something far thinner.
The Void Beast didn't make a sound. It was dead before any response was possible.
Its massive body — Godzilla-scale, dropped from over a thousand meters — impacted the earth below with the consequence you'd expect. The ground was scraped flat in a wide circle. Vegetation within a thousand-meter radius was either pulverized or stripped away by the shockwave; there was nothing left in the impact zone.
With one opponent gone, Kaguya's pressure halved immediately. She bore down on the remaining one, and shortly crushed its skull too.
How long had they been fighting? Nobody had been counting. Wolffy and Tony Stark in their mechs probably had an internal clock; Yukari's processing ability was certainly tracking it. But Ryū and Kaguya had been far too busy.
Kaguya's eyes met his with brief, genuine gratitude before she turned back to engage the next Void Beast. No one had time to stop.
Ryū looked up at the blazing sun long enough to estimate.
"At least three hours. The combat footprint has kept expanding — both battlefields have merged into one. We're overlapping with the surrounding cities."
He could feel it clearly through Observation Haki. Buildings at the city edges were already shifting under the vibration — some of them teetering, some already down. The air currents generated by the fighting were hurricane-force through the urban areas, producing an atmosphere of complete apocalyptic unreality.
Every monitoring satellite in orbit had been locked onto this region for hours.
Foreign media had the live feeds running. The entire world was watching.
Times Square, New York City.
The enormous screens on the buildings — normally cycling through advertisements — had been carrying satellite feeds from across the Pacific for hours. A professional anchor stood in frame in front of them, still going.
"We don't know exactly what is happening in China across the Pacific Ocean, but as an American broadcast professional I can confirm to our viewers: everything you are seeing is genuine. These are live satellite feeds with a lag of no more than twenty seconds."
"We can observe these strange creatures — let us call them alien life forms for now — engaged in combat with a group of individuals. The atmospheric distortion prevents the satellite from capturing clear images of these individuals. However, what we can see is that among those fighting the alien life forms — there is a Buddha."
"Yes, you heard correctly. A Buddha. My grandmother is as American as they come, but she practiced Eastern Buddhism her entire life and raised me. I know what a Buddha looks like. I am not mistaken."
"In Eastern tradition, a Buddha is comparable to a divine entity. What is protecting humanity in that footage may be a deity — a deity from the East. I understand this is not scientific. But was the spiritual awakening scientific? We live in unprecedented times."
The anchor had apparently been talking for hours and showed no signs of slowing down. She delivered all of this with the energy of someone who had been given an adrenaline injection at the start of the shift.
The crowd that had gathered on the street was watching the screens.
And they were watching the golden Buddha.
The figure's scale wasn't quite as enormous as the alien creatures — but it was in the range of the Ultraman from the special-effects shows. Perhaps slightly shorter than a typical Ultraman, but with noticeably more mass.
Comparing a Buddha to Ultraman felt somewhat inappropriate. But the stunned crowd couldn't find a better frame of reference.
"Oh my God. Is that country actually being invaded by extraterrestrials?"
"We just went through the spiritual awakening announcement a few days ago — I still haven't processed that, I was still telling myself maybe it's a dream. Now alien invasion? And an Eastern deity? Is this a movie? Gods versus aliens?"
"As much as I don't want to admit it, this appears to be real."
"Is Earth going to be destroyed? Are we all going to die?"
"…Probably not? Those figures have already taken down fifteen or twenty of the alien creatures. You can see the bodies piling up on the ground."
"The problem is there are still at least nine hundred left. Can they hold?"
"Why isn't anyone sending military support? Can a handful of people really win this?"
"Military support? The creature that looks like a Buddha just hit the ground and it registered like a magnitude ten earthquake. Your military participates in something like that and it's just more casualties."
"I'm not Chinese, but I'm going to say a prayer for them."
"Is this going to reach us here in America?"
"…That probability is not small."
"We're finished."
"…"
The commentary flowed without interruption. No government anywhere on Earth was managing to suppress this information. There was nothing to suppress — every channel had the satellite feed, including children's programming. You couldn't switch away from it.
Even the early cultivators — the first wave of people who'd benefited from the spiritual awakening and built actual power — were watching in silence, unable to speak.
Especially the doujin protagonist himself, "Dr. Chen Fan."
His crashed system had stopped registering. He wasn't looking at it anymore.
He was staring at his monitor screen, unblinking, reading the data coming in from every satellite and sensor they had.
His expression had left the category of "surprised" and entered something closer to "unable to form a coherent sentence."
He swallowed once, quietly, and murmured to himself:
"Give them a day. They'll plow up the entire planet."
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