Chapter 154: Three Musclebound Brothers
Whatever Tatsumaki had done over in the mountain range, the shockwave from it was perceptible even on the other side of the ridge without Observation Haki.
Whitebeard watched the surface of his liquor bowl ripple and smiled. "Gurararara — something's happening out there."
He drained the bowl in one go — fifty-plus proof baijiu, straight down — and exhaled with satisfaction. He'd already worked through several large jugs. By any reasonable standard, his tolerance was alarming. His face had gone slightly pink. His eyes, when they caught the light, were completely clear.
He tagged Tatsumaki in the Group.
Edward Newgate: @Terrible Tornado — did you run into something? Felt something going on over there.
Terrible Tornado: Enemies, I suppose you could call them.
Terrible Tornado: Three Stand users.
Terrible Tornado: Three very muscular ones.
Crazy Diamond: Stand users?! What happened to them?!
Terrible Tornado: Compressed into the earth with a gravity field. In a few months they'll be nutrients for the local vegetation. A small contribution to the reforestation effort.
Crazy Diamond: Human fertilizer. Truly horrifying.
Kaguya-sama: Tornado-nee-san is truly horrifying!
RawrSoFierce: ...Looks like the wave has started. The scout Stand users were probably in the range of 25–35. Three down.
Terrible Tornado: Admin — eliminate them all?
RawrSoFierce: They attacked you. Don't leave any.
Terrible Tornado: LGTM!!
Eternally Seventeen: A cold-blooded kill order from the Admin.
RawrSoFierce: Wait — weren't you in summer hibernation?
Eternally Seventeen: It's already autumn in Gensōkyō!
RawrSoFierce: ??!
RawrSoFierce: That's nonsense. You went into summer hibernation a few days ago. How is it already autumn?! Youkai Sages really do have zero integrity.
Eternally Seventeen: ...Aha ha ha, those details aren't important, don't worry about it.
Kaguya-sama: Witness the awkward-but-polite smile of a certain Yukari-nee-san.
Eternally Seventeen: ...
"..."
Back out of the Group, Whitebeard chuckled. "Gurararara — Little Tornado can't sit still for a minute. One word from the Admin and she'll be hunting through the entire mountain range."
Kizaru, who had been spending the intervening time using laser beams to incinerate the mosquitoes drifting past him — the combination of Observation Haki and the Glint-Glint Fruit made him an extremely precise flying-insect exterminator — glanced over with an expression approaching wistfulness.
"Young people really do have so much energy. People our age are better suited to staying put. Ambush tactics. Why go anywhere when things come to you eventually~"
Ryū looked at him sidelong, mouth twitching.
He'd always considered himself one of the more comfortably inert members of the Chat Group, second only to Yukari. He hadn't anticipated Kizaru arriving and immediately claiming the top position.
In One Piece, Kizaru was notoriously easygoing — his combat performance in the field often looked like deliberate sandbagging. But this level of inertia felt like something new. Possibly the absence of professional obligations had fully unlocked it.
Which, actually, Ryū understood. This was, from a certain angle, a vacation. A peculiar one, yes. But a vacation.
He turned back to his laptop screen.
A large red text box had materialized in the center.
YOU DIED
"I don't believe I can't get past this section. Don't make me open a trainer."
Ten kilometers from the spatial passage, at the base of the mountain range —
Three white, heavily built men stopped walking. They stared at the pillar of dust rising several dozen meters into the sky in the middle distance, and felt the faint tremor still moving through the ground under their feet.
"...Landslide? Mudslide? What was that?"
One of them frowned toward the source, something uneasy settling in.
"Let's go around," another said carefully. "Something's off about that area."
The other two agreed immediately. In an unknown threat environment, avoiding the unclear danger was the correct call. They were Stand users, but they were also trained professionals. They knew when to move around a problem.
They turned.
A green flash cut across the sky above them. None of them looked up.
About a minute of walking later, a clear voice came from directly overhead.
"Found three more. Are you all traveling in groups of three? And all of you with the same bodybuilder physique — I'd think you were wrestlers."
All three Stand users snapped their gaze upward.
A small figure hovered above them.
Then something invisible and absolute came down on their bodies.
"GHHAAAA—"
"AAAHH—"
"..."
The sounds that came out of them made the surrounding forest go quiet.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Six.
None of them had deployed their Stands in time. The telekinetic pressure had arrived the moment they looked up, and looking up was already too late. Three Stand users, trained and prepared and thoroughly crushed before a single ability could be activated.
Tatsumaki regarded the result on the ground below her, expression unchanged. She'd seen worse. She'd caused worse.
"Six," she said.
The forest's scavengers would handle the rest.
She turned in midair, felt for the next signature, and flew.
The kill count climbed with the light.
Nine. Twelve. Fifteen.
Twenty-one. Twenty-four. Twenty-seven.
The sun had dropped behind the ridge by the time she paused over the last three.
These had been slightly more interesting. One of them had a Stand with instantaneous movement — blink-range teleportation.
Five meters.
A gravity field with ten-meter diameter beats that comfortably.
She flexed her wrist. Mildly sore.
"Twenty-seven." She looked at the result at her feet. "And the teleporter had a five-meter range. If it were five hundred — that might have been worth something."
She turned again.
"Next."
☆☆☆
-> 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