Chapter 332: Dealing With King Piccolo
King Piccolo panted heavily, the sweat that had beaded on his dark green skin already boiled away by the ki blast's heat, dust and grit clinging to him — at a glance, he looked more than a little worse for wear.
The massive mushroom cloud had swallowed both him and Ryū whole — a single breath in that sky full of dust would have been enough to fill anyone's lungs with grit.
But a Namekian's specialized respiratory system filtered out those fine particles just fine — meaning even on a smoggy day, a Namekian never needed to bother with a mask.
Visibility, though, was another matter entirely — King Piccolo figured his current sightline couldn't reach more than five meters; anything past that was essentially invisible.
The blast from the two colliding ki waves had carried enough terrifying force to wipe out a major city outright — being caught at the epicenter of something like that was never going to feel good.
Yet King Piccolo hadn't let his guard down for even a moment — if anything, he'd grown even more tense and grim, because to his utter shock, he realized the human standing dead center in that blast's epicenter still had a ki signature that hadn't so much as flickered!
Even with his sight badly obstructed, he could still sense that ki with perfect clarity — a presence vast and majestic as a dragon's, with not the faintest hint of injury in it.
That human had come through completely unscathed?
No way!
How could something like that even happen?
King Piccolo was certain that had he himself been standing at the epicenter of that explosion, he'd have come out badly hurt at the very least — quite possibly critically wounded.
And yet a human, that fragile species, had come through... completely unscathed?
What was that thing?
Was he really human?
A monster wearing a human's skin, more like!
Even a monster shouldn't have defenses that terrifying!
It's like his body isn't even human. Any normal person catching a blast like that would end up critically wounded, on the edge of death, at the very least. That guy... he must have made a wish to Shenron before. And not just once, either — but how could he have found the Dragon Balls that many times, that fast?
Even now, King Piccolo couldn't shake the suspicion that Ryū must have wished on Shenron at some point — that was the only way to explain power this despair-inducing.
"Hm? What's going on? That guy's ki — it just vanished, all of a sudden? What is this?"
King Piccolo's heart gave a sudden lurch, and a lethal sense of threat washed over him — the abrupt, overwhelming feeling that he was about to die.
Without a moment's hesitation, in this life-or-death instant, King Piccolo unleashed his strongest technique, ki surging wildly inside him, his whole body blazing with blinding light.
A tremendous surge of energy erupted off him — if his baseline power level had sat somewhere in the two-hundreds, it was now climbing without pause, rocketing from the two-hundreds straight up past three hundred, even toward four hundred!
The instant he finally sensed Ryū's ki reappear, King Piccolo's pupils shrank sharply — Ryū was already just a few meters away!
Without hesitation, King Piccolo seized the first move — a beam of concentrated ki shot skyward from him, looking, from a distance, like a sword of light driven straight into the Earth.
An instant later, an ear-splitting roar erupted, and the energy beam expanded outward in every direction at a speed rivaling light itself — swallowing an area the size of an entire city in the blink of an eye.
Right on its heels came an explosion of jaw-dropping magnitude, and the ground — already stripped down ten or even several dozen meters deep — caved in yet again.
Dust and debris flew countless meters into the sky, a colossal mushroom cloud hundreds of kilometers across slowly taking shape — rising from a few thousand meters, to tens of thousands, to over a hundred thousand... its width and height climbing without end.
The mirror-space itself seemed to strain at the edges of collapse, but the Ancient One proved more than up to the task — even as the violent explosion shook the space to the point of near-failure, she held it steady.
Had this blast landed on the Land of the Rising Sun, the shockwave alone would have leveled all of Honshu flat. The resulting tsunami would have crested at over a thousand meters, with none of the other islands escaping the fallout either.
In other words, a single hit like this could obliterate an entire country outright, with even neighboring nations' coastal cities left at risk — a threat rated at the very highest disaster tier.
Which said everything about just how terrifying King Piccolo's all-out, life-on-the-line strike really was.
Temperatures topping a hundred million degrees from the blast, paired with the terrifying shockwave bearing down on him — even Ryū needed to actually put up a defense against this one.
After all, this was King Piccolo's last-ditch, everything-on-the-line attack — the least he could do was show a little respect. Besides, getting carelessly blown away by the shockwave would've torched the cool, composed image he'd been going for in an instant.
The roar of the explosion gradually faded from earshot, the shockwave having rippled out who-knew-how-far, and a huge chunk of the mushroom cloud had been blasted apart — as if someone had taken a bite out of it.
King Piccolo looked utterly drained, cold sweat beading all over him — but the air around them had been blasted nearly free of oxygen by the violence of it all.
Even wanting to catch his breath and steady himself, there was nothing he could do about it.
"Well... looks like I'll need a change of clothes when I get back. Compared to that lava monster I ran into in the Arena, this blast's heat is barely tolerable, honestly."
Ryū casually smoothed down his windblown hair. His upper-body clothes were shredded practically to rags, but there wasn't a mark of injury anywhere on him.
He had picked up a few minor injuries earlier, sure — nothing but scrapes and bruises — but they'd all healed within ten-odd seconds regardless.
So at a glance now, he looked exactly like someone who'd never been hurt at all.
The sight nearly made King Piccolo's already-bloodshot eyes pop clean out of his skull, exhausted as he was.
And then Ryū's voice reached King Piccolo's ears — cold and final as a reaper come to collect. "Not bad, going all out like that. Shame you're a little too old for it, though. In your prime you might've actually left me with a real injury... hm, maybe."
"Judging by the look of you, you're out of steam. That last move must have taken a lot out of you. And honestly, I don't feel like spending much more time on you — good thing the two Dragon Balls on you don't look damaged, at least."
The instant the words left his mouth, King Piccolo felt a sudden, sharp pain in his neck, his eyes bulging as a powerful wave of dizziness crashed over him.
His thoughts began going blank, his vision blurring further and further, until everything gave way to total darkness.