Chapter 360: The End, and the Spoils
As time went on, Kaguya and Thor — the two chat-group members who'd stepped out to rest — had long since rejoined the fight.
Voices didn't carry into or out of the mirror-space from the outside, but a private message in the Dimensional Chat Group, or a quick @-mention, was more than enough to reach the Ancient One.
That was how the whole operation had been running: nine or ten fighters in the mirror-space at any given time, with whichever member was closest to running out of stamina rotating out for a few hours' rest before rotating back in.
Under that system, the pace of clearing Void Beasts had climbed to its peak.
Out in the Naruto world, the sun rose and set, day following night in its usual rhythm.
Inside the mirror-space, though, there was no such thing as sunrise or sunset — the illusory sun overhead hung fixed in place, forever stuck at high noon.
That alone made it nearly impossible to track how much time had actually passed. Add to that the Ancient One's control over the flow of time inside the mirror-space via the Time Stone, and —
— for every half hour that passed in the Naruto world, over a dozen hours passed inside the mirror-space.
The Time Stone's power wasn't unlimited, of course, especially not for something as demanding as altering the time-flow of an entire massive mirror-space. The Ancient One could only shift the flow rate once every twenty-four hours.
Which meant that for every twenty-four hours that passed in the Naruto world, thirty-five and a half hours passed inside the mirror-space — since she could only trigger the shift once a day, and each use bought roughly twelve hours inside for every half hour spent outside.
It wasn't that the Time Stone itself was lacking. It was that the Ancient One had to keep fighting at the same time, and simply couldn't devote her full focus to managing it.
In short: having only just joined the group a short while ago, she hadn't yet mastered the art of doing several things at once. Once she did, she'd likely be able to wield the Time Stone with far more finesse in the thick of battle.
By the time a full seven or eight days had passed in the Naruto world — 192 hours — the fighting inside the mirror-space was finally winding down toward its end.
Left alone, without violent interference, a dimensional rift like this one would gradually seal itself shut on its own — much like a wound on a person's body. So long as no one kept picking at it, it would slowly scab over and heal, eventually closing completely.
That was exactly what had happened here. The rift had now shrunk down to barely a hundred meters across — barely enough room for a single Void Beast to squeeze even one claw through.
Which meant no more Void Beasts could crawl out of it at all.
All that remained was to finish off the last thirty or forty stragglers, and this fight — however many days it had actually taken — would finally, gloriously, be over.
Exactly how many Void Beasts had been killed in total was something only a handful of people had bothered keeping track of; most hadn't given it a second thought. Either way, once the fighting ended, everyone would know their own tally soon enough.
One hour... two hours... five hours... eight hours...
Ten hours later, the very last Void Beast met its end — blasted apart by an energy wave Tohru breathed straight out of her mouth.
At that same moment, out in the Naruto world, the dimensional rift finally sealed shut completely and vanished.
With the crisis over, the Ancient One let out a long, heavy breath. She'd spent this entire time holding the mirror-space together, worrying constantly that it might shatter apart at any moment.
Now, at last, she could finally allow herself to relax, if only a little.
Maintaining the mirror-space nonstop, managing the Time Stone on top of that, and running herself ragged on support duty besides — it had all been exhausting beyond words.
If the Ancient One hadn't poured everything she had into holding it together, the mirror-space would very likely have collapsed long before the fight ever reached this point.
With the battle over, the mirror-space fell into total silence — quiet enough that a dropped pin would have been audible.
The air still hung thick with that distinctive coppery reek — the smell of Void Beast blood.
As far as the eye could see, the ground was blanketed with corpses, rolling out in ridge after ridge like some vast mountain range.
Except these weren't mountains of earth, or stone, or snow. They were mountains of flesh.
Looking out over the endless piles of Void Beast corpses, Ryū found himself thinking that if you laid them all out flat across the Naruto world, they might cover a full fifth of the Land of Fire.
Unless, of course, you stacked them — piled them up layer by layer into something like a pyramid.
Even then, the footprint would still be staggering. Though, to be fair, the Land of Fire had plenty of open space to spare for something like this.
The real question was how the people of the Naruto world would react if they actually saw the pile.
Terror? Shock? Panic?
Or maybe understanding? Excitement? Awe?
No one could say for sure.
In the end, Ryū decided to have the Ancient One find some large stretch of open land within the Land of Fire — an untouched patch of old-growth forest, maybe — and simply dump the corpses there. The intact ones, at least. The mangled, half-destroyed remains could just be scattered wherever was convenient.
With the fighting done, it was time for everyone to settle up their kills for the round.
Not that any of them needed to do the counting themselves — the Dimensional Chat Group handled all of that automatically.
All it took was silently thinking the phrase "recover corpses," and the system would tally up exactly how many Void Beasts each person had killed.
It could even sort out which corpses were more intact and which were more mangled, then calculate exactly how many Points each one was worth.
[Ding! Admin "RawrSoFierce" has slain 203 Void Beasts — 103 of the corpses recovered largely intact, with the remaining 100 mangled or reduced to a fine paste.
203 corpses successfully recovered. Reward: 155,000 Points awarded to Admin "RawrSoFierce."
Please click the link on the right → [link] to claim your recovery reward!]
Ryū's expression went slightly blank. His nerves had grown plenty steady by now, but even so, the numbers in front of him still managed to catch him off guard.
Two hundred and three kills. He hadn't expected the total to land anywhere near that high — hadn't imagined he'd taken down quite that many.
And out of those, a hundred and three corpses had come out largely intact — which on its own meant 103,000 Points, just from that portion alone.
Add in the rest of the mangled, half-destroyed corpses, and the total reward came out to a staggering 155,000 Points.
A hundred and fifty-five thousand Points, all at once. He hadn't seen that coming at all.
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