Chapter 156: Battle Stations!
Days passed. The air stayed clean and cool, the sky overcast but pleasant. Not a single Stand user had appeared since the initial sweep.
Unusually quiet. Unusually still — the kind of stillness that, to someone who didn't know better, might look like the other side had given up.
But with the surveillance equipment Wolffy had sent over, Ryū knew better.
The calm was pre-storm. In and around the small nation where the spatial passage sat, somewhere between one and two hundred thousand troops had already assembled. More were coming by sea — fleet assets that had probably reached the nearby military harbor by now, or were close.
The reason he hadn't moved earlier, beyond general inertia, was this: let them concentrate themselves. One decisive engagement instead of a dozen dispersed ones.
That time had arrived.
He closed the game, set the laptop aside, and stood.
He stepped through the spatial passage from the Qin's Moon side into the JoJo fan world. The transition felt like nothing — a tunnel, a step, the light changed.
"So we're going all in." Ryū looked up at Whitebeard. "You're serious about taking the naval units?"
Whitebeard lifted his bisento and laughed, crescent mustache bobbing. "Gurararara — my Devil Fruit hasn't feared seawater in a long time. And this world's ocean probably has no effect on me at all. The sea is my home territory, Admin. Leave the naval theater to this old man. Not one ship gets through."
"Hey, I'm a Marine Admiral too — why do you get the sea battle all to yourself?"
Kizaru looked mildly put-upon.
Whitebeard glanced at him. "You're a Glint-Glint man. Light works everywhere. Go wherever you're most useful — if you want to follow, I don't mind."
Kizaru shook his head and shrugged. "I'll take their logistics instead. My speed is better suited for that anyway."
Tatsumaki, drifting above them, spoke in her usual flat tone. "Air cover and incoming missiles, then. If anything gets launched toward the passage, I'll intercept."
"Which leaves the land force for me." Ryū paused. "That's eight to a hundred and twenty thousand people, isn't it. Everyone's conscience is completely fine with this distribution?"
He'd walked into the largest assignment by default.
Though realistically — he didn't need to eliminate everyone. Routing the front lines would cause the rest to collapse. Half was probably enough. And not all of a hundred and twenty thousand would be attacking; a significant portion would be holding logistics and rear positions.
Call it under a hundred thousand active.
"Fine. Land is mine. Whitebeard takes naval. Kizaru handles their supply lines. Tatsumaki watches the sky and keeps missiles out of the passage." He rolled his neck and wrists. "Maximum deterrent impact. We want them scared enough that the second Quest becomes possible."
"Understood."
"Clear."
"Fine."
Tatsumaki flew upward until she leveled off at over a thousand meters. She pushed the clouds aside with a casual gesture — a sweep of one hand, and the sky cleared.
Below: a clear field of view in every direction.
She glanced toward the coast. A shape moving at extraordinary speed, already far ahead.
Whitebeard's using Moonwalk. A Yonko using Navy Six Powers. That's a weird combination.
She couldn't track his exact velocity from here — too fast for visual. She had to use her psychokinesis as a sensor.
Kizaru had already vanished. A flash of gold, gone.
Whether his speed is actually the speed of light — I genuinely don't know. And I'm not going to argue about anime physics. The Admin said not to take fictional power systems too literally, and he's right. Just know that Kizaru is fast. That's enough.
Her gaze drifted down to the figure still walking at a completely ordinary pace along the road below.
The Admin is... strolling.
Not a trace of tension. Not even hurrying. Is this what it looks like to reach that level? When I can walk into a battle this size that calmly, maybe I'll be near the top of the Group's power ranking too.
She caught herself spiraling into speculation and stopped.
She'd done the same thing with King once — built him into something terrifying in her head, then found out he was just a man. She had a habit of over-imagining things.
What she didn't know was that Ryū was walking slowly for a specific reason: he'd already calculated that at this pace, he would intercept the advancing land force somewhere in the middle distance. There was no reason to rush.
The Quest window was half a year. This battle was not going to last half a year.
Out on the open ocean —
A fleet assembled from a dozen nations moved toward the small nation's coastline. The ships were spread wide, but there were enough of them that from altitude, they would have looked like a shoal of fish — dense, purposeful, covering the surface.
On the bridge of one vessel, a broad-shouldered man with a commander's bearing and a substantial beer gut stared out through the armored glass at the sea ahead.
"How long until we reach port?"
The technician at the instrument panel ran the calculation. "The country relies heavily on maritime trade — multiple civilian ports in addition to the military harbor, all of them large. We can distribute across them. At current speed, thirty to forty minutes. Possibly twenty to thirty if we push."
A pause. "That said — there's an interference pattern expanding from their territory. We've been losing contact with their harbor intermittently. Connection drops after a few minutes every time. We can't resolve it."
The commander frowned.
Twenty to thirty minutes was acceptable. The interference was not.
In modern warfare, losing your communications infrastructure was —
"No matter what, once we reach port we can—"
The alarm cut him off. High-pitched, insistent, filling the bridge.
He pressed a hand over one ear. "What is that?! Who authorized the alarm?"
A young officer's voice came out unsteady: "General — sir — look. Ahead. There's — there's someone out there. There's a — a giant. Walking on the water."
A giant. Walking on the water. He'd heard stranger things today, apparently.
He looked.
His pupils contracted.
Six meters. Maybe more. Easily visible from this distance, which meant the scale was real — not a trick of the light.
And the figure was walking across the surface of the ocean as if the water were solid ground.
"What in the—"
☆☆☆
-> 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