Chapter 267: Over a Hundred Kills
Chen Fan genuinely couldn't make sense of it.
Why did beings this powerful exist on Earth? Why had he found no trace of them in his previous life?
They had appeared from nowhere. And the creatures they were fighting — every one of them comparable in scale to the giants from the special effects shows, some larger by a significant margin. At that size, rolling through a city for a few minutes would kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Maybe his earlier guess had been right all along. He hadn't reincarnated into his original world. He'd ended up in a parallel version of it — one similar enough to fool him for a decade, but fundamentally different in ways that mattered.
And his system was still producing error codes. It had been grinding out corrupted data for three or four hours without stopping, which had given him a headache.
If this really is a parallel world, then everything I remembered from my previous life — all that foreknowledge — is useless. Even the system itself has crashed. Has there ever been a reincarnator worse off than me?
He was unaware that there was in fact strong competition for that title. The most illustrative example was Blackbeard Teach, who had barely gotten through his reincarnation and started feeling pleased with himself before Whitebeard killed him. By that standard, Chen Fan had lived for ten full years post-reincarnation, which was nine years ahead of Blackbeard on the survival metric. He was doing fine.
These people are just too powerful. Even at my peak, I probably couldn't beat the weakest one among them. A stray shockwave from their fight would finish me. Unbelievable.
That word — unbelievable — had been in his internal vocabulary at a very high frequency for the past several hours. Everything on those screens kept hammering against his accumulated worldview until it felt like everything he'd built across two lifetimes was collapsing.
The most puzzling question: how had any of them gotten this strong?
The spiritual awakening had only been underway for ten years. Ten years was enough to reach this?
He, hailed as the premier genius of the awakening era, had also been training for ten years.
And he couldn't even compare to one of their fingers?
He was still staring at the screen when something caught his attention.
A severed claw — an enormous one — was growing larger in the live satellite feed. Larger, then larger still. Then the feed shook violently and cut to black.
Chen Fan's mouth opened slightly.
"That was… a creature's claw being knocked into outer space. From Earth's surface. That's — is that something a person can do?"
It wasn't, technically speaking, done by a person.
It was done by a dragon who had been alive for tens of thousands of years.
Tohru — in her natural western dragon form, roughly comparable in scale to Sengoku's Daibutsu transformation — had been fighting since the beginning. In her home series she had participated in a war against the gods of another world and survived a holy sword through what was approximately her lower back before escaping to present-day Japan. A being capable of fighting divine entities didn't lose much sleep over Doflamingo-tier Void Beasts. Whitebeard might not have a clean win against her.
Her grotesque jaws had just clamped down on the neck of a Void Beast calibrated at Admiral-level, and dragon magic had detonated through the bite point, tearing the neck apart with the force of the impact. The kill count from her talons and jaws had broken double digits.
But the numbers were brutally slow against a thousand targets. Hours had gone by, and the physically lighter members of the group were accumulating damage.
Kaguya, who could manage two opponents at her limit. Sengoku, barely two weeks in the Chat Group. Wolffy and Tony Stark, piloting their mechs in live combat for the first time.
Sengoku wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He'd been caught by three high-tier specimens simultaneously — one had bitten into his arm, one into his ribs, one had been attempting to gore him with its horn. If Ryū hadn't intervened in time, Sengoku's Zoan resilience might have kept him alive, but the injuries would have been severe.
"Even with Armament Haki, Iron Body, and my Devil Fruit at full — they bit through. Almost reached bone."
He applied Life Return to stop the bleeding and let the wounds begin closing. A Zoan fruit user's endurance and recovery rate were, in a word, absurd. A few seconds of rest, a little stamina returned. He estimated he had another seven or eight Void Beasts worth of fighting left before he genuinely needed treatment.
Good thing Admin arrived when he did. As for Borsalino — the man's ability is genuinely extraordinary. He's clearly put serious Points into upgrades and Arena training.
Sengoku found himself uncertain whether he could last an hour against Kizaru at this point, let alone against Whitebeard, who was operating like someone with a permanently active cheat.
Whitebeard's pattern was simple: any Void Beast his bisento caught at a vital point, or any that his Tremor-Tremor Fruit punch connected with cleanly, was either dead or grievously wounded. Keeping pace with him was a project for someone with considerably more Points investment than Sengoku had two weeks to accumulate.
Night arrived without anyone noticing the exact moment of transition. Darkness didn't change much for either side — Observation Haki didn't care about lighting conditions, and the Void Beasts came from a place where light didn't exist. They were more comfortable in the dark than in daylight.
The battle had, if anything, become more spectacular under night conditions. Combat sparks, magical detonations, energy bursts — all of it blazed in colors that the daytime sky would have softened. The same destruction looked different when every flash was a light source.
Ryū took stock.
Half a day elapsed. Eight hundred and eighty-four remaining.
"Average of ten kills per person, half a day — at this rate it might genuinely be ten days and ten nights."
He'd done longer. The Chat Group Arena session he'd spent grinding for over a month, continuous, no rest — that had been far more demanding than this. Ten days and nights of combat registered as a manageable inconvenience.
He punched a Void Beast that had gotten close, sending it spinning away, and rolled his aching shoulder.
"Every satellite from every country up there is getting footage of all of this." He glanced at the sky. "All of it's going to Eriri's world's general population."
He had no particular objection to being recorded. Eriri was elsewhere maintaining civilian order, nowhere near here — her face wasn't going to appear in the footage, and her quiet life would be undisturbed. How she'd explain the absence to her parents when this concluded was her problem to solve, and she'd have to concoct something reasonably convincing.
A gap the size of a fist opened beside him, and Yukari's voice came through.
"Admin-sama, how many is your count? I'm at twenty myself~"
The twitch at the corner of Ryū's mouth was involuntary. Only this gap youkai would open a dimensional chat window in the middle of a battle.
He dodged a black energy bolt and shook his head with reluctant amusement. "Eighteen so far. Happy now?"
"Ara~ Admin-sama and Yukari-senpai flirting even in the middle of a battle — truly worthy of the group's two strongest fighters. How admi— ow! A gap?! Yukari-senpai, what was that for?!"
Kizaru, nearby, had been cut off mid-sentence by a gap opening beside his head and delivering a sharp knock to his skull. Nobody was sure how Yukari had managed to hit someone who could turn into light, but she had.
In fairness, Kizaru's natural-type Devil Fruit was extremely well-suited to this battlefield. The Void Beasts' physical strikes were functionally meaningless against someone who could simply choose not to be solid. Even attacks of city-shaking force, Kizaru could ignore — he didn't bother dodging them. Only the energy bolts from the creatures' mouths gave him any genuine concern.
One of those bolts, diameter somewhere around fifteen meters, had come within range earlier. It had traveled onward to open ground several kilometers away.
Where it had produced a sizable mushroom cloud.
Impressive botany. Very efficient growing conditions.
The combat zone had long since stopped being contained near the initial engagement point. The city centers of nearby urban areas were experiencing serious effects. One energy bolt had detonated inside a city's boundaries.
Whether that produced casualties was, at this moment, unknown.
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