Chapter 153: Tatsumaki — Triple Kill
"This is — this is a Stand attack!!"
The captain's voice — shock tangled with pain — sent birds scattering from every branch within earshot. His two teammates went pale.
They'd worked together for years. They knew exactly how strong his Stand was.
Power A. That wasn't a small thing.
And he was on his knees.
The girl in front of them couldn't be older than thirteen or fourteen on the surface. Stand strength generally scaled with the user's fighting spirit — which meant young users and elderly users both tended toward weak Stands, the kind with no stat above C or D.
Everything about this situation violated what they understood to be true.
She didn't just have Stand ability. She had something devastating enough to put a Power-A Stand user on the ground without apparent effort.
Both teammates stepped forward, Stands emerging from their bodies.
"Who are you?!" one of them demanded, sweat beading on his forehead. "Why are you attacking us? You want to make enemies of all three of us, kid?"
He had selectively forgotten that his captain had shot at her first.
The other said nothing, keeping his full attention on Tatsumaki. He'd seen the attack come from nowhere. Invisible-type Stand — had to be. High concealment. If he could just find where it was positioned—
"Hey. Stop attacking our captain right now. One against three, there's no way you win. Keep pushing and you're going to die here."
The darker-skinned one raised his weapon and aimed at her.
Stands weren't omnipotent. Firearms supplemented what the Stand couldn't reach — especially for Stands with limited range. A gun in the hand made any Stand user more dangerous.
"...Excuse me?" Tatsumaki's expression shifted. The dismissiveness crystallized into something sharper. "Did you just call me — kid? I heard it. You said kid, didn't you. You, some nameless extra whose name I don't even know, are calling me a kid? I am twenty-eight years old. I am possibly older than your sister."
She said this while completely ignoring the two Stands. And the gun.
She was twenty-eight and she had been called a kid by a person she considered significantly beneath her in every relevant sense. The offense was genuine.
She extended one small, pale hand.
The ground exploded.
Not with fire. Not with sound. The earth simply began to shake — deeply, continuously — as if something enormous had reached through the soil and started pulling the world apart. Leaves that had been clinging to bare autumn branches came loose in showers. Thin-trunked trees tilted, then toppled, roots and all. The surface cracked open in every direction, fissures racing outward — each one twenty or thirty centimeters wide at minimum, the largest stretching over a meter across, and still growing.
The weight crushing the captain's shoulders vanished.
He fell anyway — legs too damaged, ground too unstable. His forehead hit a rock. The skin split. Blood ran down his face.
He didn't register it.
He was staring at the landscape around him.
Within a radius of several hundred meters, there was no undamaged ground left. It looked like the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake.
And the green-haired girl drifted upward on an invisible current, rising to around fifteen meters above the ruined earth, and looked down at them.
"She's not a Stand user." The captain's voice came out hollow. "No Stand ability has ever done this. This isn't a Stand. This is a natural disaster. This is worse than a natural disaster."
He had never been afraid of anything in his professional life.
He was afraid now.
"Shoot her!" he shouted, scrambling for his weapon. "Range is too short for the Stands — use guns! The whole area's blown anyway, position doesn't matter anymore. Kill her! If she doesn't die, we do!"
He didn't hesitate. He aimed and opened fire.
Bang bang bang — bang bang bang—
Three guns, three magazines, nearly simultaneous. Bullets filled the space between them and Tatsumaki in a solid volume. The noise sent every living creature within range into full retreat.
The magazines ran dry.
Tatsumaki was untouched.
Every single bullet hung in the air one meter from her, motionless — the same as the Stand's bullet before them. The kinetic energy simply ceased to exist at the edge of an invisible sphere.
She had never, in her entire life, allowed an enemy to close within five meters of her. Every opponent she had ever faced had died before they could. A bullet was not going to change that. An intercontinental ballistic missile would not change that.
One by one, the bullets dropped from the air and hit the ruined earth below.
Each one landing like a pin in each of their chests.
"This can't be real," one of the Stand users whispered. "How is a person this strong? This isn't human anymore. No human being should be able to do this. This is completely — this is not scientific—"
He swallowed.
Then he noticed the crack beside him. Six meters wide. The distant sound of running water far below.
Underground river.
Jump, and there was a chance. Stay, and there wasn't.
All three of them reached the same conclusion at the same moment. They exchanged a single glance and leaped.
Tatsumaki watched them go. She blinked.
Then shook her head.
"Naive."
Her half-open hand closed.
Every fissure in the earth sealed shut simultaneously. In under a second. The ground simply came back together.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Triple kill.
☆☆☆
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