Chapter 327: King Piccolo's Bad Feeling
"This world might have too high a power ceiling — I need to parse the strength of its spatial fabric here before I can open the sturdiest gap-passage. Give it... maybe ten-odd minutes?"
Yukari extended a pale, elegant hand and brushed the space in front of her — where her fingers touched, faint ripples spread out, barely visible to the naked eye.
She suddenly turned her head toward Ryū. "So, is Admin-sama planning to go kill King Piccolo and those two rule-breaking transmigrators right now?"
Now? Of course not now. Privately, Ryū had no interest in seeing King Piccolo and the two transmigrators keel over anytime soon.
Because he still needed them to track down the rest of the Dragon Balls for him!
The chat group currently held one Dragon Ball — sitting with Master Roshi, as it happened, a three-star ball.
With one already in hand, all Ryū needed to do was wait for King Piccolo to round up the remaining six, then swoop in and finish him off.
Wasn't that... a little movie-villain of him?
Hm. Thinking it over, the resemblance really was uncomfortably strong. That was straight-up villain behavior.
After turning it over a moment longer, Ryū decided this line of thinking wasn't quite right.
Because every extra minute a piece of evil like King Piccolo stayed alive meant thousands more innocent lives lost. He had to be dealt with as soon as possible.
Sure, waiting for Piccolo to gather the other six Dragon Balls first, then killing him, would let them scoop up all seven balls in one effortless motion.
But nobody could say how many lives on that world's Earth would be lost to King Piccolo in the meantime.
If it were villains dying, he might not care. But if it were the good and the innocent, he couldn't just shrug that off.
Ryū wasn't the type to refuse to admit when his own thinking had gone astray.
He knew perfectly well he wasn't some youkai sage who'd lived thousands of years like Yukari — combine his current life and his last, and his total age still barely edged out Tatsumaki's.
So to Yukari's question, he gave his answer: "The moment the spatial analysis is done, that's when we go. The Dragon Balls can wait until after the quest's finished."
Yukari let out a soft laugh and nodded. "Here I thought Admin-sama wanted to let King Piccolo track down the rest of the balls first, then take care of him after. Ordinary people living or dying doesn't move me much, myself."
As a youkai sage, Yukari had long since grown used to every manner of life and death — she'd seen far too much to count.
Whether innocents got caught in the crossfire wasn't something she paid much mind to.
Maybe that was just how the very old thought. Take that dragon in the group who'd lived tens of thousands of years — she didn't much care about ordinary humans' fates either.
Mostly because those ordinary people had nothing to do with them — didn't even share the same species.
Ryū let out a helpless little laugh. "Group quests only trigger because a transmigrator's done serious harm to a world's people, or to the world itself. So while we're running one, we obviously can't let the casualties pile up too much further."
Two or three thousand kilometers away, King Piccolo had no idea that on some island on Earth, several beings capable of cracking stars apart were currently discussing how to end his life.
Nor did the two rule-breaking transmigrators have any idea — still basking in their newfound power, still scheming over how to make use of King Piccolo.
Still working out how to squeeze every last drop of value out of him before turning around and killing him themselves.
And so the minutes ticked by, the hour, minute, and second hands crawling steadily forward.
If Yukari had been analyzing this world's spatial strength alone, it would have taken at least half an hour.
But with the Sorcerer Supreme the Ancient One lending a hand, that half hour shrank down to just ten-odd minutes.
And ten-odd minutes wasn't very long at all — these days, a single episode of some throwaway anime ran over twenty minutes. Ten-odd minutes wasn't even enough to get through episode one.
"Whew — done! This world's power level runs a bit high, which made the analysis unusually tough. But it's sorted now — I could open the sturdiest passage on a whim at this point. Though there's an important question left: how do we pin down exactly where King Piccolo is?"
Yukari announced that she and the Ancient One had finished parsing the spatial strength — and then raised a genuinely important question.
At that, Master Roshi, who'd been quiet for a good while, spoke up, his expression solemn. "Leave that to me. I can sense King Piccolo's ki — that particular flavor of pure evil, there's no way I'd miss it. Wherever on Earth he's hiding, I'll know exactly where he is!"
There wasn't a shred of boasting in what Roshi said. He genuinely could sense King Piccolo's ki with precision — and he'd already started doing exactly that, quietly, in the background.
Drawing a slow, deep breath, Roshi suddenly closed his eyes, a strange pulse of energy radiating off his whole body, as if every bit of his focus had narrowed onto sensing something out there.
About a minute later, his closed eyes snapped open.
He let out a breath, paused, then said, "I'm picking up an intensely evil presence, southeast of here — roughly 2,347 kilometers out. Can't get more precise than that."
Hearing that, Yukari looked faintly surprised. He could sense it that precisely?
She'd learned the Dragon Ball world's ki sense too — so why couldn't she pick up on it at all?
Was her own cultivation in "ki" simply still too green?
Yukari didn't waste time dwelling on it. Her pale hand traced a casual line through the air, and a gap-passage — several meters wide, several meters tall — tore open in front of everyone.
Watching the space split open so effortlessly, the Ancient One couldn't help but remark, "That's even more convenient than my own magic. I have to trace out several circles with my hands just to open one passage."
Unfortunately, the gap ability was something Yukari had been born with — an innate trait, not a learned technique.
Which meant that no matter how badly the Ancient One might want to learn it, there was simply no way she ever could.
...
Meanwhile, two or three thousand kilometers away, King Piccolo — seated on his throne, eyes closed in quiet meditation — suddenly froze, his expression going still.
A look of disbelief flickered across his shadowed eyes as he tilted his head up toward the bare ceiling above.
His gaze seemed to pass straight through the ceiling, out to whatever lay beyond.
"Such powerful ki! One, two, three, four... five?"
"What is going on? Since when does Earth have that many powerhouses?"
"..."
Though he had no idea what was actually happening, King Piccolo's expression had gone grim.
An inexplicable sense of danger welled up in his chest, and for the first time in a long while, he had the feeling that something was very wrong.
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