Chapter 194: The Resolve to Die Several Hundred Times
"A different environment again — and why does the gravity feel lighter? And that terrain, and the large blue sphere in the distance… don't tell me I'm on the moon."
Ryū tested it with a small jump, using only baseline human-level force. The height he reached was significantly greater than the same effort would have produced on Earth.
The weightless, drifting quality of the movement felt deeply wrong. Every arm swing, every step — something was off in a way that was difficult to describe but impossible to ignore.
So the Arena chose somewhere off-planet this time. Testing environmental adaptation — different gravity, different conditions. Makes sense. I've only ever fought in Earth-equivalent environments. If a group quest ever requires space-based combat…
This is targeting that weakness specifically.
Fine. Die as many times as it takes.
And he had the Points for it. After setting aside the 1,000 emergency reserve, he had 5,170 available — enough for 258 revives at 20 Points each, with 10 to spare. If the standard pattern held at 20 to 50 deaths per weakness corrected, he could potentially close five or more gaps in a single session.
But the enemies hadn't spawned yet. He'd been waiting for several minutes.
The other issue: no atmosphere.
He was holding his breath. He could do it for an extraordinarily long time — long enough to make competitive breath-hold records look modest — but fighting while doing it was an entirely different problem.
"No air at all. So I'm fighting while holding my breath. That's going to cause deaths. A lot of deaths." He paused. "And the enemies still haven't appeared. No idea how many. Previous sessions have been one-on-one, but Kaguya mentioned she once got a one-against-a-hundred-thousand scenario and got buried by the numbers."
His Observation Haki twitched.
He looked right. A crater in the lunar surface, one of the thousands formed by ancient meteor impacts. Something was moving inside it.
The radiation and vacuum of space weren't concerns. His physical constitution at this point laughed at environmental hazards. A few years living next to a nuclear meltdown wouldn't scratch him.
The crater pulsed.
"Here they come. More than one — Observation Haki is picking up at least… a hundred? Two hundred? Wait. It's still rising. Five hundred. That many?"
Each second was producing roughly a hundred new signatures.
Individual strength felt moderate from the Haki read — hard to confirm without contact, but not overwhelming. The number, though.
He didn't wait.
He kicked — sideways, at a gap, releasing a Tempest Kick slash that had a fundamentally different quality out here. The blade of compressed force was hundreds of metres long when it landed against the crater wall. The crater shuddered.
Almost no sound reached him.
Right. Sound needs medium to travel. No atmosphere, no sound propagation. Although — how is a Tempest Kick slash functioning at all without air? There must be something else here the technique can work with. Some property of the vacuum I'm not educated enough to name.
The Haki count dropped by fifteen.
Ryū's brow furrowed. That strike, wrapped in Decompose and calibrated for mass clearance, should have taken out dozens — even against Vice Admiral-level targets. Fifteen was unexpectedly low.
This is going to be annoying.
He stepped into the mass of them.
His first impression, seeing them at close range: three to four metres tall, uniform crimson colouration, insectoid chitinous armour, humanoid shape but four arms. More accurately, very large humanoid insects. The musculature visible on their arms was wider than Ryū's waist.
They were carrying weapons — long blades that matched the dark red of their armour.
Why do giant insects carry swords? What thought process leads to that?
"Individual strength is not below a Marine Vice Admiral. Not as strong as the elite Headquarters Vice Admirals, but standard Vice Admiral level — comfortably."
His feet pushed off from the surface. He vanished.
When he reappeared he was already inside their formation. One hand seized a limb. He pulled. The arm separated with minimal effort, dark green fluid spraying out. He held the blade in his free hand, oriented himself, wrapped Armament Haki around the captured weapon.
He had no formal swordsmanship training. But a slash carried by Haki and Decompose working together probably worked something like a Tempest Kick. Probably.
He tested it.
The slash ripped through a dozen targets in a single motion. Upper halves lifted away from lower halves.
Like playing a hack-and-slash game with the difficulty set to zero.
Except: they kept coming. Every second, a hundred more spawning from the crater. Conservative estimate. And the rate was escalating — a hundred per second becoming a hundred and ten, then a hundred and twenty, the total outpacing his clearance rate.
He wasn't killing them fast enough. Even at his current speed, the backlog was growing faster than he was reducing it. And fighting in reduced gravity, while holding his breath, against opponents this individually capable — the physical cost was accumulating.
There will be a cap. Has to be. The Arena doesn't run unlimited spawns. Probably two or three thousand total.
He was right, as it turned out. Around the 2,500 mark, the spawning stopped.
He examined the wound on his leg. Deep enough to show bone. The compound fractures and lacerations across his arms and torso told a similar story.
"At this rate I'm dying after maybe a thousand kills. But that's exactly how the Arena works. Die enough times and eventually you clear it. Enough Points to keep going."
Time blurred. He stopped tracking the kill count at some point. The lunar surface had become a sprawling field of segmented, multi-armed bodies. He was fighting with two of their blades now — both taken from enemies — Decompose active across both, black Haki coating the surfaces.
The ground was unrecognisable. Craters atop craters. A network of fissures spreading hundreds of metres in every direction. The largest single impact zone covered several kilometres in radius — the remnant of one particular moment when he'd committed everything he had and the result had exceeded what the terrain could absorb.
Yes — he was on his second life now.
The first had ended under a coordinated pile-on, enemies closing from every direction simultaneously while he was already taxed past recovery.
Revival reset the enemies. Complete restoration — every target he'd killed returned at full strength. What didn't reset was the terrain. The craters stayed. The fissures stayed. All the evidence of the previous round remained, overlaid by the second round's accumulation.
Good. Irregular terrain I created myself is terrain I understand. They don't.
He kept going.
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