Chapter 234: A Reincarnator Who's In Over Their Head
The concrete underfoot fractured into chunks, a crater twenty to thirty centimetres across opening in an instant. The dust hadn't finished rising before the airflow swept it away — a barely-visible figure already moving down the street.
Pedestrians felt a sudden gust and lost their footing, some stumbling, some going down outright.
This was Kaguya holding back. If she'd let herself break the sound barrier outright, nothing in her path would have stayed unharmed — even the controlled application of Shave generated enough displaced air to shatter nearby glass. Shattered glass meant shrapnel, and shrapnel meant pedestrians getting hurt.
The scenery streamed past like exposed light trails. Her Observation Haki spread to its current maximum, covering several kilometres in radius, and within moments had flagged over a dozen "anomalous" events in progress. After running the mental filtering, she narrowed it to two locations with high probability of being active Reincarnator activity.
She was heading east — the closer of the two.
The Admin's already cleared his side and pulled the new member out of danger. Mine's the only one left. First time running a quest alongside him directly — can't be the one who drags this out.
She pushed her speed up, edging toward the sound barrier without quite crossing it.
Then she simply stopped — appearing at a street corner as though she'd always been standing there, ignoring the bewildered or outright shocked expressions of nearby pedestrians, and walked toward her target.
Her sudden appearance looked, to anyone watching, like a stage trick — a person materialising out of nothing. The reaction made sense.
The world around her — architecture, fashion, everything — was completely unlike her own. None of it registered as relevant. Completing the Chat Group's quest was the only priority that mattered right now.
About two hundred metres ahead, a veteran Reincarnator pulled a bloodied longsword free from a corpse.
He surveyed the scattered bodies around him with a sour expression, spat on the ground, and muttered, "Made too much noise. Drew the local law enforcement in, and now we've had a whole skirmish with them."
"This world's enforcement doesn't seem to get along with the general population anyway, from what I can tell. But provoking them still complicates the mission. This is a future-tech setting — too many unknowns. No telling what else is lurking."
Beside him stood a heavyset man carrying twin blades — another veteran Reincarnator, his teammate on this run. His expression was, if anything, worse.
"I've heard plenty of teams get wiped out by a world's official enforcement apparatus. Most Reincarnator teams run three to five people — no match for an organised force. If we draw in their main strength, we end up exactly like those unlucky bastards." He spat the next part with feeling. "Damn it. Didn't expect this. Wonder how the other team's doing on Rainbow Stone collection."
"If we get enough Stones before this world's response apparatus mobilises properly, and take out the protagonist while we're at it, we walk away clean. If it goes the other way, we're the ones getting hunted."
Sacred Ground's mission briefing had given them exact Rainbow Stone locations across the world. They'd successfully secured one — and provoked Earth's enforcement apparatus in the process.
What they were calling "enforcement" was, to anyone native to Star Hero, instantly recognisable as the Galactic Eye organisation's Spike Squad — a much larger problem than either Reincarnator currently understood.
These two had stumbled into a genuinely serious situation. The Galactic Eye wasn't confined to Earth. Across the galaxy, anywhere capable of supporting life, the organisation's coverage approached eighty percent.
If a comparison was needed: imagine the One Piece world's World Government — except scaled up. The World Government operated on a single planet. The Galactic Eye operated at a civilisation-spanning, multi-star-system scale.
"I had my suspicions before," a clear, musical voice said, from somewhere nearby, "but listening to the two of you talk it through — now I'm certain. You're the ones I'm here for."
Both Reincarnators' pupils contracted simultaneously.
They turned toward the voice. A young woman was walking toward them, unhurried, her expression entirely unmoved by the field of corpses around her.
Both registered her apparent youth.
Neither relaxed because of it.
Time in Sacred Ground, across enough worlds, taught you that. Looks lied constantly. Some of the most dangerous things you'd ever encounter looked the least like it.
The swordsman's frown didn't ease. He kept his eyes on her, murmuring, "Local enforcement, coming alone? Must be confident in her individual strength."
The moment he finished the sentence, his pupils contracted again.
The girl had vanished. Completely. No transition, no blur — simply not there anymore. The sensation crawling up his spine reached his skull before his conscious mind caught up to it.
He called to his partner without turning. "Careful! Something's off! Watch my back, stay close, don't give her an opening!"
No response came.
There were only two explanations for silence like that.
He hadn't heard. Or he was already dead.
His gut told him it was the second one.
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