Chapter 156: Swallowed Whole, Shizuku Gets Eaten
The True-Sight Sentinels were feeding a visual link to Kurama, not audio, so he narrated what he saw as he saw it.
And what he was seeing made the situation unmistakably clear: the Phantom Troupe had arrived, and the killing had started.
Inside the venue right now, the one doing most of the reaping was almost certainly Franklin. His Dual Machine Gun had an overwhelming advantage in exactly this kind of work, clearing out a room full of targets.
And "targets" here didn't just mean the unarmed crime organization guests. It also included the hired Nen ability users, most of whom probably wouldn't have made it past the two-hundredth floor of the Sky Arena.
Nen ability users were rare enough that even modest ability could put you in a position to perform miracles in front of ordinary people. That rarity was also what allowed a large number of coasting ability users to end up occupying positions they hadn't genuinely earned.
Because it only took a little ability to pull in serious money, and serious money had a way of killing the drive to push any further.
From that angle, the Rabid Hyenas on the two-hundredth floor who had tried to hunt Ross's group were actually reasonably capable fighters, at least by pure floor-ranking standards. But their final goal wasn't so different from these coasting ability users. Not to become as strong as possible, but to climb within the current ability hierarchy just far enough to reach a floor master position, then leverage that status to found a school and spend the rest of their lives profiting from the name.
They might have had real talent. But that kind of thinking guaranteed they'd never go very far on a road as dangerous as the path of a Nen ability user.
The Phantom Troupe had genuinely clawed their way up through blood. The hired help at this auction wasn't even in the same conversation.
No. 8, Shizuku, was not an original member. She had been discovered and recruited by Chrollo roughly two and a half to three years ago, filling the slot left open by the member Silva had killed.
"Ability name: Deme-King. Living vacuum cleaner. The casing itself is durable. On command it can absorb any non-living object regardless of size or weight, and no one knows where absorbed objects ultimately end up. A genuinely rare spatial storage class ability. Her role in the Troupe is cleaner and transporter.
"Under normal conditions the vacuum should be able to selectively eject absorbed items back out on request. But if Shizuku herself forgets something was in there, it's gone. Permanently exiled, no chance of recovery.
"Worth flagging: the 'non-living' condition seems somewhat subjective. If she genuinely perceives something as non-living in her own mind, as long as it isn't an entity containing Nen, she can absorb it regardless."
While Kurama paused his description, Ross filled in the rest of what he knew about Shizuku, though his attention was almost entirely occupied by calculation.
Shizuku's ability was genuinely unusual. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything comparable anywhere in the world. And that uniqueness was exactly why, if it dropped, the probability of pulling something in the same spatial storage category was extremely high. Ross had his eye on that very much.
He could use the Little Tyrant console as a roundabout substitute storage base, but the convenience wasn't even remotely comparable. There was no way to grab a Nen item and use it on the spot. The only gear Ross currently had on him as standard carry was the Mega Buster and the Dirt Bike, and even those put a dent in his maximum aura cap.
The problem was that the position Ross had stashed the Little Tyrant console was too far from this particular Troupe member. Otherwise he'd be moving right now.
Based on the Troupe's standard operating patterns, plus what he'd learned from working through Castlevania, Ross estimated they'd have at least half their active members moving together as a unit. Which meant that if he couldn't take Shizuku out instantly and pull back immediately, he'd trigger the Troupe's group response the moment he made a move.
He wasn't deluded enough to think he could take on half the Troupe by himself.
But there was no rush. The night was still young. Plenty of room to move later.
"Ross."
"Yeah?"
The call cut into his thinking. He glanced over at Kurama.
"Someone — no. Something just attacked the woman with the vacuum cleaner."
"Whose muscle, hitting that hard?"
Ross was genuinely curious, though not particularly surprised. If Tarukane could hire a demon organization as his private security, having some demons mixed in among the bodyguards at an event this size wasn't unlikely. Not that it would change much. Ordinary demons could probably slow the Troupe down for a few minutes at best. The dying would still happen.
A pink spherical creature. Wearing sunglasses.
"...What."
When Kurama finished describing the attacker, Ross went completely still. He even caught himself digging at one ear without thinking, as if that would help him hear it better.
Just moments before, Kurama had watched through the True-Sight Sentinels as Shizuku finished off the heavyset man she'd just killed, then turned and vacuumed up the still-warm body in its entirety. Every drop of blood on the floor, gone without a trace.
She had just turned back toward the doors, apparently to help seal them again, when something new entered Kurama's field of vision.
A pink spherical creature, wearing sunglasses.
What Kurama noticed as he watched was that this strange pink creature wasn't looking at Shizuku at all. More precisely: it was staring at Deme-King, the vacuum cleaner that sat somewhere in the space between a Nen beast and a Nen tool, complete with eyes, teeth, and the capacity for a few simple words.
The pink sphere had fixed its eyes on Deme-King.
Deme-King had fixed its eyes on the pink sphere.
The look passing between them carried an unmistakable charge of mutual hostility. Two of a kind, and hating each other for it.
Shizuku herself had gone a bit blank. Her processing capacity, never exactly voluminous to begin with, seemed to be struggling with the question of why a creature was aggressively eyeing her Conjured construct. But before she could put any kind of response together, the situation had already left her behind.
Without any visible signal from Shizuku, Deme-King cranked its suction up and turned it on the pink sphere. The pink sphere opened its mouth simultaneously, generating its own terrifying pull in the opposite direction.
Both of them vacuuming each other at the same time had one immediate consequence: both were yanked into the air and dragged toward each other.
Deme-King's mouth stretched open to an angle it had never reached before, straining to swallow the pink sphere whole.
But the pink sphere's mouth expanded instantly, wide enough to envelop the entire corridor, and without any hesitation, it swallowed Deme-King, Shizuku, and everything else in between in a single gulp.
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