Chapter 191: Quest Complete
My magical energy is being unmade. Dispersing. How is this possible. How is this possible. And yet it is happening.
In the Undead Sovereign's moment of stunned paralysis, the barrier simply ceased to exist — like glass shattering, dissolving into scattered points of light.
Yukari's white line landed on its body.
The sensation was not unlike someone taking a kitchen knife to sugarcane.
The Sovereign's arm bone was severed. The line didn't stop there — it looped around the enormous frame, constricting slowly, tightening, cutting. Each massive bone it encountered was divided cleanly, the cut surfaces impossibly smooth, as though machine-polished.
Kizaru's golden beam punched through its skull and directly through the soul-flame within.
Pain originating at the level of the soul itself. Its entire frame shuddered.
It wanted to counterattack. To struggle.
It couldn't move.
The invisible hand still had it in an absolute grip. It couldn't speak. Couldn't act. Couldn't do anything.
Only now did the Undead Sovereign truly understand why its subordinates had died so badly — nearly wiped out in under ninety minutes.
Not because they were weak. Because the enemy was incomprehensibly, inexplicably strong.
Any one of the four opponents it had sensed was at least its equal.
Some of them might be stronger.
A crisis it had never experienced before closed around it from every direction. The sensation of approaching death pressed against its soul. A fear it hadn't felt in centuries rose without warning.
So this is what fear feels like.
I'd forgotten.
Am I going to die here — in this strange world — unable to resist at all?
Nobody knew this was passing through the Sovereign's consciousness. Ryū had already moved on.
He landed on a rooftop, dispatched a skeleton soldier that had been standing there, and returned his attention to the vast numbers remaining below. The Sovereign's fate was settled — Tatsumaki, Yukari, and Kizaru could finish that. His Decompose field had dissolved its barrier cleanly. Without that protection, three of the most powerful members of the Chat Group closing in simultaneously — it wouldn't last thirty seconds. The barrier alone had bought it the ten-plus seconds it had survived up to this point.
Without the barrier: ten seconds, maybe twenty.
Not his problem.
His problem was the hundreds of thousands of standard skeleton soldiers still occupying the city. The quest required every undead eliminated. Not one exception.
"The numbers really are something. This is going to take most of the day to clear — there are several hundred thousand of these things."
He muttered this and disappeared from the rooftop.
The sun had tracked to the western horizon by the time the last skeleton's soul-flame finally went out.
The time was approximately 19:00.
The magic formation had been closed an hour earlier — Yukari had handled that. The Crown Kings and the Undead Sovereign were all reduced to scattered remains. What remained after that was pure attrition — hundreds of thousands of skeleton soldiers, cleared methodically across an entire city, until Ryū's Observation Haki found no further signatures.
The last one went out.
Five people received the Chat Group's completion chime simultaneously: Ryū, Kizaru, Yukari, Tatsumaki, and Umaru.
"Finally done. That was genuinely exhausting. Second most gruelling mission after the Qin's Moon one. The Sovereign was the only real threat — but there were just so many of the small ones."
He opened the Chat Group.
The completion windows were already waiting.
[Group Quest 1: Eliminate all Undead Legion forces that descended upon the Himouto! Umaru-chan world!
Quest Complete! Click → [LINK] to claim 5,000 Points!]
[Group Quest 2: Locate and neutralise the source of the Undead Legion's descent into the Himouto! Umaru-chan world!
Quest Complete! Click → [LINK] to claim 6,000 Points!]
He clicked both links. 5,000 and 6,000 Points landed in his balance in sequence.
From dead broke to 12,000 in one afternoon. 12,000 was a significant sum by any measure.
Half for the Arena, half for constitution upgrades. Can't dump everything into the Arena — Armament Haki, Observation Haki, and the Six Powers all have ceilings I can't currently break through with Points alone. Constitution is where the margin is.
He screenshotted the completion windows and posted them.
RawrSoFierce: [Image] [Image] — Both quests done. Fairly rough one. Just barely below the Qin's Moon mission in terms of effort.
RawrSoFierce: But 11,000 Points secured.
Eternally Seventeen: [Image] — 11,000 Points secured on my end as well!
Admiral Kizaru: Payday at last — it's been a long shift~ This old man suddenly has no desire to move whatsoever. Though I skipped work for an entire day — the Fleet Admiral is going to give me an earful when I get back~
Edward Newgate: Gurararara — Sengoku is about the only one who can actually keep you in line.
Admiral Kizaru: He is my direct superior, after all~
My True Form Is Cola: I just… collected Points without really doing anything.
Kaguya-sama: Standard Chat Group operation. Riding the coattails is a time-honoured tradition.
Kaguya-sama: Also, Umaru — if you want to start building your strength, you could ask the Admin for jing. The Admin has a lot of experience.
RawrSoFierce: …Why did you write that in pinyin.
RawrSoFierce: That's very easy to misread.
"…"
Meanwhile, in a secured government facility somewhere in Japan, a room full of middle-aged men whose authority was evident at a glance had gathered around a large screen.
The screen was playing footage. Shot from a distance — whoever had filmed it hadn't dared get close, so a telephoto lens had been used. The resolution was below ideal. Standard definition, at best.
But the content was clear enough.
The battle near the magic formation.
The room was completely silent. Breathing was audible. The atmosphere carried something that spread slowly and quietly from person to person — a feeling with a name everyone in the room recognised but none of them wanted to articulate.
Someone finally broke the silence.
"We can confirm it isn't any kind of advanced technology. The techniques they used — they look exactly like something out of an anime or a film. Especially the tall one." A pause. "That's Kizaru. From One Piece. Isn't it?"
The Himouto! world had One Piece. It had the same cultural saturation as any other country — the manga had been a global phenomenon even with the serialisation only reaching the end of Marineford. A lot of people in this room had read it.
The identification wasn't surprising.
Another voice picked up: "If it's not a cosplay — and that level of destructive output rules out any cosplay — then yes, that's Kizaru. But Kizaru is a fictional character. How does a fictional character appear in physical reality and produce that kind of force? That's not a person. That's a walking nuclear device."
The dam broke. Multiple voices overlapped.
"I cannot believe something like this exists on Earth."
"Why has no one reported this before now?"
"Other countries will have satellite footage. This won't stay contained. Ordinary civilians witnessed it directly — millions of them."
"…Are they protecting us?"
"Unknown. But based on observed behaviour, they don't appear to be hostile."
"What if they become hostile later?"
"Could we stop them if they did?"
"…"
Silence again.
Composure was maintained. It was professional composure, the trained kind — but what was underneath it, in the corners of the eyes and the set of the jaw, was harder to suppress.
The power these four had demonstrated was enough to make the people holding the levers of a nation genuinely afraid.
It was the feeling of something incomprehensible existing in the same space as you. The way you would feel if you came home to find an apex predator sitting in your living room.
Except that what Ryū and the others had shown was not anything as small as an apex predator.
Four of them, working together, with sufficient time and motivation, could reduce every surface feature of this planet to nothing.
That was simply a matter of how long it would take.
☆☆☆
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