Chapter 353: Kill-Stealing
Whitebeard's charged strike stirred the air across several hundred meters in an instant.
Violent winds churned like a hurricane, clothes snapping in the gale, countless chunks of debris flung out in every direction.
The colossal crescent-shaped slash tore effortlessly through the billowing dust ahead, a streak of white light over a thousand meters long spanning the entire horizon.
The shrill shriek it left in its wake alone would have been enough to burst an ordinary person's eardrums.
Not that anyone present here qualified as ordinary, of course.
Even Kaguya, comparatively the weakest one there, barely registered the violent hurricane winds or the piercing shriek — none of it affected her in the slightest.
At most her clothes and hair got tousled by the wind. Nothing more serious than that.
As for the flying debris, each piece packing bullet-level force — none of it so much as scratched her skin.
Kaguya, a taijutsu specialist through and through, might not match Ryū in raw physical toughness, but she still ranked among the chat group's handful of top-tier physiques.
If anything, Kaguya was the truest taijutsu specialist in the group — no Dragon Ball ki, no Devil Fruit, none of Gensokyo's or the Marvel world's magic to lean on.
Kaguya pulled her gaze away from Ryū without a trace, her bright, red-eyed stare following the massive slash as it tore across the sky and struck home against a Void Beast's body.
The unlucky Void Beast had barely finished climbing out of the rift before catching Whitebeard's strike full-on.
Void Beasts had strong defense, strong stamina, strong offense — but speed just wasn't their strong suit.
So it never stood a chance of dodging Whitebeard's blow.
The slash tore straight through its hide, exposing the eerie blue flesh underneath, blue blood spraying out like sudden rain from a clear sky.
No telling whether the meat was even edible. If it was, though, a single Void Beast, mountain-sized as it was, would probably feed Konoha for quite a while.
And that one strike from Whitebeard was what officially kicked off the battle.
Ryū vanished from where he stood in an instant, reappearing directly above another Void Beast's head.
He held his right hand open, a deep-blue ki blast forming above his palm, glowing with a light bright enough to sting the eyes.
The blast swelled rapidly from the size of a billiard ball to that of a bowling ball, and Ryū shoved it forward.
The blast, packed with terrifying destructive power, shot forward in that instant like a battering ram.
The deep-blue light stung the Void Beast's eyes, and it was exactly that sting that alerted it to Ryū's presence.
The incoming blast triggered an overwhelming sense of danger in it.
But by the time it tried to dodge or block, the blast was already right on top of it.
To the Void Beast, a bowling-ball-sized blast probably looked about the way a human might view a needle... thinner than one used for embroidery, at that.
And yet, the instant that deep-blue blast struck the Void Beast's ugly cheek, it erupted in an absolutely terrifying explosion of energy.
The shockwave from the roaring blast was loud enough to make even Ryū wince slightly.
The Void Beast's monstrous jaws spat out a mouthful of eerie blue blood.
Dozens of massive fangs went flying, its enormous body toppling to one side amid a furious, pained roar.
A full half of the Void Beast's face was simply gone.
Even its thick neck had been blasted open, a gaping wound exposing pale bone underneath.
Ryū's brow knitted, and he couldn't help muttering to himself, "Still not dead from that? Tough as nails, this thing. Keeping the corpse reasonably intact is going to be a challenge at this rate."
He didn't let up his assault, though, pressing the advantage while the Void Beast was still reeling.
Ryū's next attack landed on the Void Beast again, aimed once more at its ugly, oversized head.
This batch of Void Beasts really was considerably stronger than the last.
If it had been the old batch, Ryū figured he could've single-handedly taken down a thousand of them by himself, easy.
Just as he moved to finish this one off for good, an abrupt sense of danger surged up in him.
His ever-active Observation Haki sounded the alarm.
A beam of black energy was closing in fast from behind, no telling since when.
A colossal black beam, over a hundred meters across, carrying power that seemed capable of obliterating anything in its path.
Just as Ryū moved to dodge, he abruptly froze in place.
A massive gap-passage had opened right behind him, swallowing the hundred-meter black beam whole.
Then, another passage opened directly above the head of the very Void Beast Ryū had already crippled earlier.
Yukari had redirected the black beam straight into it, slamming it mercilessly into the half-ruined Void Beast's skull.
What little remained of its head simply ceased to exist under the blow — making it the very first Void Beast taken down today.
"Yara yara, Admin-sama doesn't mind if I snag a kill for myself, does he?"
Yukari had appeared right beside him at some point, barely a meter away, standing effortlessly on thin air, her ornate parasol still held aloft in one hand.
Ryū glanced at her and, with a resigned little poke to her smooth, pale cheek, said with a soft laugh while she blinked in surprise, "You're mine either way, so it's no big deal if you snag a kill off me. However I look at it, I'm not the one coming out behind."
At that, Yukari rolled her eyes. "Why do I suddenly feel like your personal property? And flirting in the middle of a battle like this — doesn't that feel a little off-brand for the two of us?"
Fair enough — finding the spare bandwidth to flirt in the middle of all this...
Only chat group members could pull off something like that.
Everyone here had, after all, mastered the art of splitting their attention — even mid-banter, Ryū and the others could stay fully locked into the fight.
With that Void Beast already dealt with by Yukari, Ryū simply moved on to his next target.
Only a dozen-odd Void Beasts had made it out of the rift so far.
Which gave Ryū and the others a golden opportunity, sparing them from getting swarmed by hundreds or thousands at once.
Under these conditions, the Void Beasts were reduced to little more than "fragile" meat targets.
Sure, these Void Beasts were considerably stronger than last time's — but Ryū and the others had grown considerably stronger too!
☆☆☆
-> 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