Chapter 167: Manifestation of Power
Looking up, the ceiling was a carpet of descending arachnids, but not a single
person in the unit showed a hint of surprise.
The moment they had vaulted from the floor below, their senses had already
mapped the perimeter.
Between Ronin's Three-Tomoe Sharingan and the active En maintained by both him
and Muherr, the giant spiders were as visible as a neon sign in a dark alley.
The mercenaries opened fire instantly. Ronin, meanwhile, completed a new
sequence of seals.
Still Wind Style. But this time, it was a tier higher.
Wind Style: Pressure Damage (Atsugai).
In the Ninja world, this was a signature technique of Kakuzu. To Ronin, it was
the ultimate tool for crowd control.
He exhaled a massive, high-density tornado of compressed air. The wind sphere
detonated in mid-air, creating a localized hurricane that swept across the
rooftop platform. Thousands of spiders were torn from their anchors and sent
tumbling into the abyss, while the primary blast cleared a path straight to the
tunnel entrance.
As the storm raged, Ronin noticed several spiders shooting thick strands of silk
from their abdomens, anchoring themselves to the floor to resist the centrifugal
force. They were adapting, stabilizing their bodies against the gale.
But Ronin wasn't the only one attacking.
The Golem's flamethrowers retracted, replaced instantly by the Gatling Gun. As
the other mercenaries used their SMGs to pick off the spiders stabilized by the
wind, the Golem's heavy barrels began to glow with blue fire.
A solid line of lead and Nen-fire shredded through the swarm, reducing chitin
and silk to a fine mist.
The Golem marched forward, leading the advance through the slowly dissipating
windstorm.
Ronin stopped casting. The Pressure Damage would continue to churn until the
invested Chakra was spent—enough time to reach the exit.
He turned his attention back to the cavern ceiling.
The spiders were still coming. They were organized in three massive columns,
crawling down the walls toward the breach.
The windstorm on the platform had agitated them; those further ahead were now
swinging on silk threads, trying to "rappel" down onto the intruders.
Muherr and Mashur took the rearguard.
Muherr raised his specialized sniper rifle. Ronin watched as a massive volume of
aura gathered within the barrel.
The rifle was a physical, high-spec weapon, not a conjured one. But when the
trigger was pulled, Ronin felt a sharp spike of danger.
BANG!
The sound wasn't a standard gunshot; it was the roar of an artillery piece. The
projectile didn't just pierce a target; it detonated against the cavern roof.
A wave of explosive fire swept across the ceiling, incinerating hundreds of
spiders in a single burst.
An Enhancer? Ronin wondered.
Muherr seemed to be focusing his reinforcement on the rifle's structural
integrity and the bullet's kinetic potential, essentially turning a long-range
weapon into a localized tactical nuke.
However, the sniper rifle could only hit the ceiling. The spiders already
swinging toward them were out of Muherr's line of sight.
Mashur stepped up.
He dropped into a wide stance, hands at his waist. He gathered his Nen into two
dense spheres between his palms and thrust them forward.
A massive shockwave of pure aura erupted, streaking through the air.
A textbook Emitter, Ronin noted.
Mashur was a specialist in raw, unadulterated distance power. No spatial
warping, no complex rules. Just high-volume, long-range bombardment.
The aura orbs struck the swinging spiders, vaporizing their upper halves
instantly.
The destructive power was visibly higher than Franklin's Double Machine Gun. The
reason was simple: Mashur's AOP (Actual Output Power) was more concentrated.
Franklin prioritized fire rate; Mashur prioritized the "kill-weight" of each
individual shot.
The spiders were reduced to twitching remains, left to dangle uselessly from
their threads as the unit pushed forward.
High above, the thermal shock from Muherr's shots was melting the silk anchors.
Chunks of burnt chitin and dead spiders began to rain into the deep "void"
surrounding the skyscraper.
The support gunners held the line behind the Golem.
The wind faded. The Golem's Gatling barrels were now glowing red-hot. The
Emitter seated on its shoulder was pale, his aura flickering—the sign of
near-total exhaustion.
The swap happened with the cold efficiency of a pit crew. A fresh specialist
took the seat, and the Golem didn't even miss a step.
Swapping out his Gatling for the warhammer, the mech smashed its way through the
final barricade of spiders blocking the tunnel entrance, hurlng them into the
darkness with every swing.
Vanessa, moving through the shadows, was the first to enter the safety of the
corridor.
Ronin followed casually behind the Golem. He didn't need to use high-level Jutsu
anymore. He occasionally flicked a pebble reinforced with Shu, his accuracy
turning the small stones into lethal headshots for any spider that got too
close.
"Spiders are biological entities. They have blood, they need to eat," Ronin
noted, glancing at the mangled corpses. "But their food source clearly isn't
those plant-beasts in the towers. That means there must be a massive hunting
ground or a secondary ecosystem higher up on the cavern walls."
"The middle tunnel," Muherr analyzed. "It's infested with monsters. But unlike
the alchemical 'raptors' in the city, those are genuine meat-and-bone creatures.
If the spiders are feeding on something, it's whatever lives in that central
hive."
"It explains why we haven't seen mass die-offs in the Kingdom of Aitli over the
centuries. This place is a self-contained food chain."
Ronin nodded. "Then why are they swarming the exit now? They look like they're
in a hurry to leave."
"I don't know if you noticed," Muherr said, pointing toward the cavern walls,
"but the swarm isn't just coming for us."
"I see it," Ronin said. Through his Sharingan, he could see columns of spiders
converging on several skyscrapers near the cavern walls. Further into the
darkness, his vision failed, but the movement was clear.
If there was a path to the central hive, it was somewhere deep within the
cavern, far beyond the illuminated towers.
Ronin had zero desire to enter that "Monster Paradise" unless absolutely
necessary.
Based on what they'd found at the base of the Great Tree, the raptors were being
fed blood and meat via conveyor belts. Since the raptors were "plant-based,"
they were the refined product. The meat in the middle tunnel was the fuel.
The Mahavi Ruins weren't just a city; they were a massive, industrial-scale
biological refinery. And the spiders were just the pests living in the rafters.
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