Chapter 331: Battle in the Mirror-Space
Observation Haki let Ryū pick up on a sliver of King Piccolo's inner thoughts. It couldn't read minds with perfect accuracy, but Ryū could still tell — King Piccolo was, right now, extremely tense and on edge.
He didn't even need Observation Haki for that, really — the beads of sweat rolling steadily down King Piccolo's forehead said it all. This so-called great demon lord of the Dragon Ball world was, deep down, unusually rattled.
Like he'd just run into the single strongest enemy of his entire life.
And on top of that, an enemy he had no idea whether he could actually beat!
King Piccolo forced himself to steady his thoughts, settling into a stance and expression that screamed full commitment, his mind swimming with question after question no one was around to answer.
He desperately wanted to know where Ryū had gotten power like this. Was it because of Shenron?
Had this human standing in front of him made some wish to the dragon at some point?
That had to be the only explanation. Otherwise, how could a backwater planet like Earth possibly produce a being this strong?
And the real problem was that this level of strength apparently wasn't limited to just one person — there'd clearly been five powerful presences a moment ago, and now the other four had simply vanished.
"Care to tell me exactly who you are? And I heard you all mention something about transmigrators just now — the transmigrators you're talking about must be those two humans I turned into demon-kind, right? They should be your real target this time. So why turn on me?"
King Piccolo asked the question he most wanted answered — why had this group made him their enemy?
Was it simply because King Piccolo had killed too many people?
Honestly, King Piccolo didn't buy that so-called reason for a second.
If it had been one or two so-called "champions of justice" this strong, that might have passed as vaguely normal. But five of them showing up at once? Had humanity suddenly developed this much of a sense of justice?
Bullshit!
He'd spent long enough on Earth to know exactly what humans were like at their core. This bunch of strangers definitely had some other agenda.
Faced with King Piccolo's question, Ryū... had absolutely no interest in giving him any kind of answer. Doing a quick mental tally of how long they'd been in the Dragon Ball world, he muttered to himself internally: Almost half an hour already. Still need to go track down the Dragon Balls too — can't afford to drag this out any longer.
He acted as though he hadn't even heard King Piccolo's demand, rolling his wrist once before fixing his gaze on King Piccolo, standing a hundred-odd meters ahead.
Without warning, the ground beneath Ryū's feet suddenly caved inward, a shockwave rippling outward from where he'd been standing — and his figure vanished instantly from King Piccolo's field of view.
The abrupt shift made King Piccolo's pupils shrink, a lethal sense of danger surging through him all at once, a chill sweeping over his head. With no time to think, he threw both arms up in a cross to shield it.
His instincts proved sharp — the moment his arms crossed over his head, they felt an avalanche of force slam into them, crashing down like a tidal wave!
The sheer violence of the impact made his eyes bulge wide, nearly popping out of their sockets, as he went skidding backward faster than sound itself.
His body carved two long trenches into the ground as he skidded, the endless dust kicked up not even having time to rise before the ferocious shockwave blasted it who-knew-how-many meters away.
King Piccolo slid a full thousand meters or more across the ground before he finally managed to grind to a halt, both crossed arms trembling violently.
Sweat had soaked clean through the back of his clothes, his eyes shot through with dense webs of blood vessels, his whole body heaving with ragged breaths.
The pain in his arms had him hissing sharp breaths through his teeth, and before he could even catch his own, the space behind him rippled with a faint tremor.
With no time to turn and defend, King Piccolo had no choice but to flare his ki instantly, converting it into a layer of armor around his body.
But that "armor" wasn't nearly sturdy enough — or rather, against Ryū's overwhelming strength, it looked downright fragile.
King Piccolo's back felt, in an instant, like it had been struck by a falling meteor — a mouthful of dark blood erupted from his mouth, with more streaming freely from the corners of his eyes, his nostrils, and his ears.
His whole body shot forward like a cannonball fired from its barrel, tumbling wildly through the air, blood scattering down like a driving rain.
Sent flying backward through the air, King Piccolo clenched his jaw, gritting through the pain in his back and the damage inside his body, leaning on the Namekians' powerful regenerative ability to force himself through the aftermath of those two hits.
After being sent flying for over a thousand meters, King Piccolo finally managed to steady himself, hovering there at an altitude of a thousand meters or more.
His face was already drenched in his own blood. He licked at the blood on his cheek, gritting his teeth in fury — and though the distance was considerable, he could still sense Ryū's ki clearly.
"Damn you..." King Piccolo snarled. "Explosive Demon Wave!!" His right arm surged with sudden power, veins bulging along it, every muscle in his body straining and trembling.
Blinding light blazed out from his right palm, and with a roaring "HAAH!" he swung his arm forward with everything he had, sending a massive ki blast rocketing toward Ryū, a thousand meters away.
Massive as the blast was, its speed was staggering — it closed the distance in the blink of an eye.
Watching the blast bear down on him, Ryū made no move to dodge — didn't even bother charging up — and simply fired off a Kamehameha of almost identical size straight from both palms.
The two differently colored blasts collided in midair, and a violent explosion erupted instantly, the shockwave tearing more than ten meters of topsoil clean off the ground below.
Wave after wave of pressure surged out, snapping Ryū's clothes wildly in the wind, the blinding light nearly bright enough to sear the eyes.
A colossal mushroom cloud rose skyward, the terrifying shockwave from the blast rolling outward in every direction like an avalanche — as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off barely a hundred meters above the ground.
Power on that scale could level a major city outright, with even the surrounding region caught in the fallout — quite possibly catastrophically so.
The entire landscape shook violently, the ground sinking hundreds of meters into itself out of nowhere, leaving behind a massive, gaping half-dome crater.
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