Chapter 232: Crushing Everything in Its Path
Honestly, he had no idea why these three were trying to kill him. From what he could piece together of their conversation — something about Rainbow Stones, something about a mission, something about a "Sacred Ground" he didn't understand at all.
Wait — he understood the Rainbow Stones part. Those were native to his world. Each one granted its bearer a unique ability.
Two motives, then. The Rainbow Stones. And his life.
I don't remember pissing off three random strangers badly enough for high-tech ambush weapons. Cough — this is just bullying a kid at this point.
Maidang drew a slow breath. Something in his chest screamed in response — possibly a broken rib working its way toward a lung. The Rainbow Stone embedded in his wrist gave off a faint glow.
He braced himself to fight through whatever was left in him.
Then his eyes went wide.
The two strangers standing roughly ten metres in front of him — the ones who'd ambushed him — had their heads simply come apart. All at once. Red and white matter sprayed outward.
The two men, who a moment ago had carried themselves with confident menace, dropped to the ground like something had pulled every ounce of tension out of their bodies at once. Neither had any idea what had killed them.
Neither, in fact, fully registered that they were dead.
It was the kind of death where attention was elsewhere and a sniper round arrived from somewhere distant, faster than the report of the shot that fired it. Did you know you were dead in that scenario? Unless this world had some functioning concept of an afterlife observer, the answer was generally no.
Maidang stared at the two slumped bodies with an expression that hadn't fully caught up to events.
The scene was viscerally disgusting — for a twelve-year-old, the sensory impact was significant — but he didn't have the bandwidth to process the horror right now. His mind was occupied with a more basic problem.
Why did their heads just explode?
The third attacker — the one who'd hit him with the high-tech weapon, stationed roughly ten metres behind him — was experiencing the same cognitive overload. This was the one who'd used Sacred Ground hardware to level most of the street and put Maidang into critical condition with a single strike. Given the scale of the blast, there had almost certainly been civilian casualties — a hundred to three hundred people, conservatively, on a street that hadn't been empty.
He stared at his two teammates' remains with the same blank disbelief Maidang was experiencing.
"Impossible. They're — they're just dead? This is a joke. Our team was top-five among the veteran Reincarnators across the entire Sacred Ground roster! Both of them were close-combat specialists — I'm the one who's weak in melee, that's the only reason I bought the hardware. And now they're—"
His wariness spiked to maximum.
The smell of smoke and ozone in the air didn't help. He was now certain: there was a hostile presence nearby, identity unknown. Sacred Ground's intel package on the Star Hero world had been notably thin compared to what was available on One Piece, Naruto, or JoJo. The only confirmed facts: Maidang was the protagonist. Earth in this setting had been colonised by an alien invasion. Rainbow Stones existed and granted abilities.
That was it. Three data points.
So who was attacking them? Locals? Their own side?
This had been billed as a two-team joint operation. The other team was supposedly over a hundred kilometres away. Crossing that distance instantaneously wasn't plausible for anyone he knew of, and friendly fire between teams made no sense regardless — there was nothing to gain from it.
This is bad. The main target's off the table today, and pushing my luck trying to finish him could get me killed too. Only move available right now is leaving.
He didn't hesitate. He abandoned the kill order on Maidang, abandoned the Rainbow Stone extraction, shouldered his gear, and ran.
Fastest he'd ever moved in his life. Running for his life will do that.
He'd taken maybe two strides when he found himself airborne.
Then he found himself on the ground again.
His field of vision included something that looked, distressingly, like half a body. Lower half only. The trousers looked oddly familiar — he'd bought a pair just like that last month. Wait.
Those are my trousers.
That's me.
He tried to stand. Nothing below his waist responded.
His mind went cold first. Then the pain arrived — tearing, total, the kind that erased every other thought. He couldn't move. He screamed.
"AAAAHH! My legs — my legs— AAAAAHH!!"
The scream went on, mixed with involuntary gasping, fluid running from his face that he had no capacity to register or care about. The pain reaching down to the marrow was beyond anything he could process rationally.
Blood had already turned the rubble beneath him entirely red. The dripping sound was its own kind of horror.
Without intervention he wasn't going to last the hour. Possibly not five minutes, given the rate of blood loss.
Ryū wasn't planning to wait and find out. Ten days was the window for this quest, and he intended to clear every Reincarnator causing problems in this world well within that limit. A failed quest meant no penalty beyond the obvious — but it also meant losing every Point reward attached to it, and he wasn't leaving any of the three rewards on the table.
He pointed a finger at the half-bodied Reincarnator's head.
A snap.
A nearly invisible spiral of compressed air shot out at several times the speed of sound.
It hit the man's skull. The skull offered roughly the resistance of wet paper. The spiral bored through bone and tissue and scrambled what was inside into something with less structural integrity than wet paste — visually, not unlike a watermelon hit with a sledgehammer.
For a young audience this would have been the kind of image that left permanent scarring. For Ryū, it registered as a completed task.
"So Task 3's crisis really did come down to Reincarnators. I'd half-expected something else entirely."
He looked at the body and shook his head slightly.
"As far as the Chat Group's concerned, these Reincarnators are basically a recurring tumour. If we could just smash whatever generates them at the source, this kind of thing would stop happening."
He recovered the Watch.
He didn't bother questioning the corpse for the other team's location — his Observation Haki had already located them. Its current range was, by any reasonable measure, absurd. A full administrative city, covered without strain. Multi-directional development meant his effective radius now sat somewhere past a hundred kilometres in diameter — and within that radius, if he wanted to track a single rat moving through a sewer line, that was well within his capability.
[Task 3: The new member "Maidang" of the Star Hero world is facing a major crisis. Assist the new member in escaping this crisis.
Task Complete! Click → [LINK] to claim your reward!
Task 1 and Task 2 remain incomplete. Admin "RawrSoFierce" and member "Kaguya-sama," keep going!]
The notification fired the moment the last member of this team went down.
Kaguya's got the location now. Should be straightforward from here — at her current level she's comparable to Doflamingo back in the One Piece world. A single team of veteran Reincarnators is well within margin. Failure odds are close to zero.
He shifted his attention to the boy in front of him.
Twelve, maybe thirteen. Young. But the body-conditioning was visibly above baseline — he'd taken a blast that should have killed outright and come out of it critically injured rather than dead.
His life wasn't actually in danger anymore. Not with Ryū standing here.
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