Chapter 235: Reading Minds with Observation Haki
The instant that suspicion took shape in his head, sweat broke out across the swordsman's forehead, running down a face that had stopped looking confident several seconds ago.
The sweat reached his chin, dripped to the ground, mixed with the blood already pooling there. His heart was slamming against his ribs hard enough that he could feel it in his throat. Something in the back of his mind was screaming: leave. Now. The next second you're dead. You're dead the next second if you don't move.
He didn't have time to process why his teammate — another veteran like himself — had simply died without a sound. Didn't have time to turn and look at whoever had done it.
He jumped. Ten metres, in a single motion.
He landed on the corpse of a Spike Squad trooper, the impact caving in the dead man's ribs. Didn't matter. The trooper was already dead; nothing he did to the body changed anything.
Ten metres of distance bought him enough composure to finally turn and look at where he'd been standing.
His teammate's body. Face frozen in an expression layered with terror, disbelief, and something like betrayed fury — an expression that would never change again, because the head it belonged to had been separated from the body entirely. Unless you had vampire-tier regeneration, that particular condition was final.
And there — the figure responsible.
The black-haired girl.
This man had killed plenty of people across this world chasing Rainbow Stones — including civilians who'd had no part in any of it. Calling someone else a "murderer" while ignoring his own body count would have struck anyone with functioning self-awareness as absurd. But self-awareness wasn't really a feature of his profession. Reincarnators didn't carry that kind of weight well, generally.
"That's — that's the black-haired girl from before. I didn't even see her move. Couldn't track her at all. What kind of speed is that—"
He recognised her immediately. The one who'd vanished a moment ago hadn't fled — she'd gone to work.
And he hadn't reacted in time. If she'd targeted him instead of his partner, he'd be the one on the ground right now.
The sweat didn't stop. It got worse. His expensive jacket was soaked through at the back.
Run? If I turn around she'll be on me before I finish the motion. Where did this thing come from? Is this world genuinely this dangerous? Sacred Ground sold us a death trap.
If these Reincarnators had operated with even minimal discretion — avoided civilian casualties, kept a lower profile — the Chat Group's quest system likely wouldn't have triggered at all. Like the "legal transmigrator" in the One Piece world, established earlier in the glossary: someone who'd simply been born into that world and lived there without disrupting anything important never made the Chat Group's target list.
Reincarnators who tore through a world causing collateral damage for sport were a different category entirely. The Chat Group treated them as priority targets, full stop. The moment a quest like this popped up, the people responsible were already on the list.
So this outcome — being hunted — was entirely self-inflicted. A quieter approach would have left them alone.
He backed away, careful with his footing. He was certain, without needing further confirmation, that he was not a match for this girl. Even with everything he had, every trick, every reserve — the math didn't favour him.
While he searched for any kind of plan, her voice reached him again.
"You have another teammate, don't you? Where is he? Tell me and I might let you go."
The tone carried no overt hostility, and that made it worse. Something radiated off her that didn't have an easy name — not Conqueror's Haki exactly, but a presence Kaguya had spent considerable time cultivating in the Arena, distinctly her own.
The pressure landed on him like a physical weight. On an ordinary person, this kind of presence could induce unconsciousness outright. He wasn't ordinary, and he still felt the urge to resist simply evaporate.
What unsettled him most: how did she know there was a second teammate? They'd split up the moment they arrived in this world.
Had we been watched from the start? That seemed absurd — if she'd known from the beginning, why wait until this many bodies had piled up before acting? Unless she wasn't connected to any of this at all, and her presence here had nothing to do with the Rainbow Stones or the casualties.
Then why is she here?
He could have spent the next several hours on that question and arrived nowhere useful.
Kaguya had no intention of explaining. There was no benefit to it, and no obligation either — this man had no standing to be owed an explanation.
When he didn't answer, her brow creased slightly, then smoothed into something like amusement.
"Not answering? Strong loyalty to your partner, I suppose. Though it doesn't matter whether you tell me — I already know what's in your head. Observation Haki has a branch that allows shallow mind-reading."
Observation Haki's applications were extensive — wide-area sensing, X-ray-style perception, fine detail tracking, extreme-range awareness. Shallow telepathy was one further branch, limited to surface-level thoughts, and useless against anyone whose strength exceeded the user's own.
Against this particular target, it was more than sufficient. Fear had stripped away whatever discipline he might have maintained, and fear made thoughts loud.
"Your other teammate is to the west, seven or eight kilometres out. I think I've got a clear enough picture of what he looks like too. That's all I needed." She tilted her head slightly. "You can go join him now. Should be peaceful."
His face ran through several stages of disbelief in rapid succession.
Impossible. I said nothing. How—
A flicker of understanding crossed his expression.
He stared at her, horrified. "You can actually read—"
He didn't finish the word minds. His throat simply stopped working, the way a duck's throat stops working when something closes around it. By the time the realisation fully landed, she was already gone from his field of vision.
His last coherent thought was a single word.
Finished.
He wasn't wrong.
The body went down heavily. Blood poured from the wound where his head had been, the volume matching the kind of catastrophic bleeding that comes from a clean decapitation — like a tap left running.
Not a drop landed on Kaguya's shoes or clothing. Even mid-kill, she'd used her arm as the striking limb for a Tempest Kick-style air slash, executed precisely enough to take the head without splashing herself.
"Recovering the Watch."
She collected it. 500 Points landed in her balance, bringing her total take for this excursion to 1,000 across both kills. A solid return for the trip.
"One left. Should have this wrapped within the hour. This quest turned out to be on the easier end."
She shook her head slightly and vanished from the spot.
The bodies could be someone else's problem. This world would clean up after itself.
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