Chapter 116: Does Ross Count as the Hunter World's First Virtual Game Streamer?
Burned alive with Rising Sun while breathing, had his remaining value extracted by Ross upon death, couldn't even escape as a soul — imprisoned by Castlevania in the end, and potentially destined to face his former Troupe members someday in the line of duty guarding its peace.
Tsk. In a certain sense, this was the most fitting end possible for a cold-blooded wretch like Feitan.
...Oh no. He forgot to take the photo.
Ross's expression went regretful as it hit him — he had been too absorbed in admiring Feitan's final moments and reading through the notification system text, and had completely forgotten to hold his phone up to the screen to capture the soul crawling out of the corpse.
True Castlevania existed somewhere in the real human world. No pause button. No way to go back. A minor loss, nothing more.
Though, come to think of it: imprisoning Feitan's soul had indirectly confirmed that the Spirit World genuinely existed. That counted as an unexpected bonus.
Ross's side was full of gains. The Troupe's side was a completely different story.
Nobunaga's face at that moment could only be described as having undergone a complete transformation.
Having personally witnessed the spider lose a leg — and especially knowing he'd had the chance to follow along and keep watch but had chosen not to for his own reasons — cut Nobunaga to the core. As someone whose fundamental value was his comrades above almost anything else, this was the kind of pain that didn't go away quickly.
Fortunately, the internal torment lasted only a moment. Because the target for retribution was standing right in front of him.
He had no idea why the phantom-like Feitan had turned into a sphere and flown away, but there was absolutely no question that the massive rock creature in front of him was the root cause of all of this. (It wasn't, but.)
Nen... BURST.
Nobunaga's foot came down on the freshly-cooled floor and left a crater. His entire body surged forward.
A flash of cold light. He was already behind Genbu.
A diagonal slash appeared across Genbu's chest at a thirty-degree angle, and the upper half slowly slid down along the cut line.
A single strike, splitting Genbu's admittedly quite hard body clean in two.
Which was completely useless.
"Nobunaga!"
Machi noticed that Genbu's body, rather than being critically damaged, was beginning to sink into the now-cooled stone floor. She called out on instinct, and with a flick of her right hand threw Nen-charged sewing needles directly at Genbu's distinctly human-featured eyes.
Neither the material quality nor the Nen charge behind them were anywhere close to Genbu's own durability.
Crack.
Franklin's expression hadn't visibly shifted, but his killing intent and his Nen made his current emotional state perfectly legible. All ten fingers snapped apart simultaneously, and a massive cascade of Nen bullets poured directly into the parts of Genbu's body still above the floor.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Stone fragments flew everywhere. But Machi noticed: the shattered pieces of Genbu were also sinking into the floor along with the main body.
And the expression on Genbu's face before it disappeared into the stone was one of pure mockery — mocking these people wasting their effort on physical strikes.
Worth noting: the camera that hadn't been closed was continuing to perfectly project Ross's own real-time expression across Genbu's face. Whether that counted as the Hunter world's first virtual game streamer was an open question.
Nen battles were, in reality, information battles.
Having prior knowledge while the opponent was in the dark, having intelligence while they had none — the advantage in that position was overwhelming.
Other than the leader Chrollo, who never fully showed his hand even in the original story, there were essentially no secrets from Ross when it came to the other Troupe members.
Meanwhile, counterintuitively, Genbu — the first of the Four Saint Beasts to die in the original story — was, from Ross's perspective, the most mechanically bizarre of the entire group.
As long as the core wasn't destroyed, the rock shell around it could be ground to powder and it didn't matter. With a small expenditure of demon energy it could regenerate indefinitely.
The reason it lost to Kurama in the original story was pure self-inflicted stupidity: when splitting its body to fire the Explosive Rock Barrage, it exposed its own core in the process, and the opponent it was facing happened to be Kurama, whose observational precision was in a category of its own. That was what allowed him to finish it.
The reason it died at Ross's hands earlier was that Ross had simply fused Genbu's body through the wall and eliminated it in an entirely unreasonable way.
But now the one controlling Genbu was Ross himself — a seasoned operator who had spent over twenty years immersed in exactly this kind of thing. Facing three Troupe members at once? Not even slightly concerned.
That said, if there was one thing that genuinely limited Genbu, it was the fixed amount of demon energy in its body, the blue bar.
Whether regenerating physical form, submerging into rock, or splitting off pieces to throw — all of it cost demon energy.
Which meant Ross couldn't submerge indefinitely and drag the fight out without end, grinding down the other side's Nen and stamina forever.
Having stalled all three of them for another ten-plus minutes and drained Nobunaga and Franklin's Nen as much as possible, Ross's screen finally and unavoidably shifted to the black-and-white death effect.
Nothing to be done. Without enough demon energy to submerge and forced back to the surface, without enough blue bar to reconstitute the body properly, the truly furious Nobunaga and Franklin had cut it to pieces in very fine detail. This finally left the core exposed — the one that pulsed like a heart and emanated red light — out in the open, whereupon Machi, who had been providing sideline support throughout, stabbed it with needles until it looked like a lotus root.
With the core heavily damaged, the rest of Genbu's body disintegrated entirely. But it left one object behind.
This time, Ross had not deleted all of Genbu's drops. He had very deliberately left one thing.
What did he leave?
A money bag stamped with an "S" on the surface — the mark indicating it contained Old Drac's private stash funds. The entire bag was flat. Deflated. Completely unable to hold its shape.
Nobunaga carefully lifted the bag with his sword tip, flicked his wrist to slice it open, and out dropped a single lonely gold coin.
Yes. Ross's doing.
Nobunaga had defeated Genbu and wore not a trace of satisfaction on his face. Fresh veins were appearing on his forehead.
Provocation. Unmistakably.
"AAAAAAH!!!!!" A pause. "...AAAAAAH!!!!!"
Nobunaga threw his head back like a prairie dog and roared.
This sense of powerlessness was eating into him like a viper.
Machi and Franklin's expressions were grim as well, but compared to Nobunaga they were considerably calmer.
Franklin, the big man, reached down to lift Feitan's charred body. The moment he touched it, the structurally carbonized corpse immediately performed a passive full disintegration.
A wind gusted in through the window at that moment — a demonic sort of wind — and carried off all the carbonized skin, muscle, and organ matter, until only a fairly complete... skeleton remained.
"...Let's leave this place. Don't go deeper. This needs to be reported to the leader first. We wait for him to make the call."
Staring at the only thing Feitan had left behind in this world, Franklin seemed to have reached some kind of resolve, and spoke in a low voice.
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