Chapter 268: The Importance of a Healer
Many satellites had been destroyed in the crossfire, but enough survived to keep feeding live footage to the rest of the world. That was why the people of the Saekano doujin world could continue watching.
What they couldn't understand was why the fight was still going.
The satellite imagery told a clear story: over two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers had been reduced to a landscape of complete devastation, not a single intact structure visible anywhere in the zone. More than a dozen cities had taken severe direct impacts; another dozen had experienced moderate to light effects from the peripheral shockwaves and wind.
Light-to-moderate, in this context, meant: outside the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-square-kilometer direct engagement area, cities further out were experiencing ground tremors and storm-force winds from the displacement effects. That was the definition of a minor impact.
"Several days now. The fighting has never stopped for even a minute. Are these beings actually alive? They might as well be perpetual motion machines. And the total affected area has reached the size of a large province."
A senior official in one of the watching countries stared at his display screens with an expression that had passed from shock into something closer to numb resignation. The past several days had delivered more individually astonishing things than he had experienced in his entire career, and his capacity for being surprised had been effectively exhausted.
If the affected population hadn't been evacuated in time, the casualty figures would have exceeded a hundred million. A hundred million deaths — no nation in history had survived anything approaching that level of destruction. The Third World War, by comparison, would have been less catastrophic.
He shook his head.
"When this ends, I cannot imagine what the cost will be. Two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers. My entire country is ninety thousand square kilometers. We couldn't survive this."
"And why are there both Eastern divine figures and a Western dragon? It looks like the gods of both hemispheres came together to fight off an extraterrestrial invasion."
His brain, operating on severely reduced sleep and several days of continuous shock, wasn't keeping up very well.
Online, the theories were multiplying at a pace that matched the chaos. The entire internet had fallen into a mixture of fear and feverish speculation. The general mood across the planet registered somewhere between widespread unrest and contained panic.
The Chat Group members' opinions on what the watching world made of them were approximately zero.
The combat zone had spread to two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers, yes. But without their intervention, the entire planet would have been leveled. Measured against that alternative, the current damage was the smaller option.
You couldn't catch a wolf without risking the child.
Ryū's expression had taken on a weight to it.
Eleven members had been in active combat. Now there were seven.
Kaguya, Sengoku, Wolffy, and Tony Stark had all exceeded their operational limits against sustained high-intensity fighting at this level. They'd been rotated to the rear to recover. The remaining seven were containing five hundred or so Void Beasts.
Five hundred because they'd killed over four hundred in the past several days.
The blood of so many enormous creatures had soaked into the earth across the devastated combat zone. Blood from beings of vast vitality — arguably the most potent fertilizer in the world's history. Ground that had been stripped to bare soil by shockwaves, where nothing should have grown for years, was already producing dense patches of weeds. The weeds had absorbed the blood and done something unusual, though not quite as dramatic as achieving sapience — something had changed in them that the ordinary rules didn't account for.
"Five hundred and four remaining. Starting to feel a bit tired. The strongest specimen we've encountered — roughly comparable to Kizaru's current level — has already been taken down by combined effort. What's left is mostly calibrated around Doflamingo, Katakuri, and the ordinary Admiral tier."
Were five hundred and four a lot?
Yes.
Fifty-four of them, given sufficient time and no interference, could destroy human civilization. These five hundred and four, working unimpeded, could do it faster.
The current combat zone represented the smallest footprint the group could achieve while actively constraining the battle — without deliberate containment, the damage would have covered an entire nation.
Roughly fifteen kilometers from the main engagement zone, Josuke Higashikata was working.
Crazy Diamond's restoration ability was running continuously on Sengoku, Kaguya, Wolffy, and Tony Stark — healing flesh wounds, repairing the mechs. The ability didn't distinguish between living tissue and constructed machinery. As long as the components were present and accounted for, Crazy Diamond could restore a mech to functional condition as well as a body.
Broken ribs, pulverized forearms, puncture wounds — three minutes of contact, and a badly injured Sengoku was restored to baseline as if nothing had happened. The rate was somewhat slower than the canonical version of the ability — the physical resilience of Chat Group members was extreme enough that there was more to work with — but it was still extraordinary.
Josuke had been in the Chat Group long enough to have invested Points into his ability. Crazy Diamond's precision stat — originally its weakest attribute in canon — had been upgraded to maximum. The mech restoration work that should have been impossible given the complexity of the machinery was being done accurately.
Wolffy's mech looked factory-new.
Kaguya sat resting against a section of collapsed wall, working on her breathing, watching the distant battle. Her expression was somewhere between tired and rueful.
"After several days and nights, I've only killed eighteen of them. I feel like I've been deadweight."
Wolffy, resting nearby, took a sip from a water bottle that had come from somewhere and shook his head. "Kaguya-little-sister, you've done extremely well. Did you not hear Admin-sama say so directly? Out of the eleven of us in combat, you're the only one from an everyday contemporary series. Less than a year, and you've reached this level — no one here has done that more impressively."
Kaguya blinked. She looked up at the sky for a moment, then smiled faintly. "Thank you, Wolffy-san. I do feel considerably better now."
Tony Stark accepted a water bottle from Wolffy, opened it, took a drink, and offered his contribution.
"Uncle Tony's count is also eighteen, so if you call that deadweight, I'm in the same category. Children shouldn't overthink these things — we showed up and we contributed, and that's what matters."
"We should rest about fifteen more minutes, then head back and relieve some of the pressure on Admin-sama's group. Earlier, one of those things gave me a comminuted fracture across my entire right hand. If Josuke weren't here, I'd be looking at amputation when I got home."
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