Chapter 48: The Blackbeard Unit of Measurement
In his excitement, he'd nearly blurted out "the Great Wolf King." Wolffy was privately relieved he'd caught himself in time. Saying that in front of the Admin-dono… wouldn't that basically be asking for trouble?!
Wolffy did, in fact, possess a certain degree of self-awareness. Or rather, he was very good at reading the room.
After all, within the Dimensional Chat Group, the Admin-dono was the biggest big shot there was.
In terms of both authority and raw strength, the Admin was almost certainly at the very pinnacle of the group.
How else would he have become the Admin in the first place?
Generally speaking, the Admin of a Dimensional Chat Group…
Had to be the strongest member.
That was simply how it worked.
Without question!
It had to be!
Wolffy hurriedly collected his thoughts, forced himself to calm down, and suppressed the elation of having finally found the target after hours of searching. He continued: "I've pinpointed the target's exact location. Margin of error: less than one meter."
"But the target… isn't the twenty-three-year-old. It's the five-year-old girl, also named Meyu Inkyo! The five-year-old is the traverser!"
Wolffy had considerable confidence in his inventions.
He was, after all, the renowned scientist of the Green Grasslands.
Well — renowned to himself, and to the lambs of Goat Village.
Whether the rest of the Green Grasslands' animal kingdom knew he was a scientist… Wolffy couldn't be bothered to care. In his eyes, beyond himself and his family, the only things that mattered were those infuriatingly uncatchable little lambs in Goat Village.
Ryū pulled his consciousness out of the chat group and turned to look at Wolffy.
A five-year-old girl turning out to be the traverser… that was genuinely unexpected.
But he didn't dwell on it. The target was a traverser, after all.
Anything was possible, right?
At least he hadn't transmigrated into a woman.
Otherwise things really would have been… awkward beyond words.
Ryū couldn't help but observe a moment of silence for his fellow traverser. Then again — why was he mourning, exactly? For all he knew, the traverser had been female in the previous life too.
He spoke up, curiosity piqued: "That fast? Where's the target?"
Wolffy answered: "Approximately 13,983 meters from our current position — just under fourteen kilometers. Due east."
Ryū: "…Due east? Fine. Let's move."
Yukari smiled languidly. "Fourteen kilometers isn't far at all. And now that we've confirmed the enemy's location, there's no need to rush. But since the Admin-dono says we're going — let's go."
She had never seen Ryū fight. But given that he seemed to know most of the group members' "futures" — that near-omniscient quality…
It was clear this Admin-dono was far more than he appeared on the surface.
And then there was the matter of a certain planet in the group who was several billion years old.
For all anyone knew, the Admin-dono might be even older…
That was entirely within the realm of possibility.
Several billion years… Yukari couldn't even remember exactly how long she'd been alive, but surely she wasn't that old? She estimated a few thousand years at most. Probably hadn't broken ten thousand…
Setting aside her wandering thoughts, Yukari… extended a single, elegant finger.
She pressed it lightly against the empty air ahead, then drew a line without the slightest effort.
The space before them fractured.
A wide Gap corridor materialized in front of everyone.
Yukari spoke: "Walking would be a bit slow. Let's use this one's power to get there directly. Killing a traverser worth 2,000 Points probably won't be all that difficult — but stopping this virus from spreading? This one suspects that will be the real challenge."
Ryū agreed. The hardest part was definitely halting the virus.
And yet, Quest 2 — stop the virus — was worth a mere 1,000 Points.
Not even a third of a Blackbeard.
Was the reward system broken or something?!
A mission this difficult should have been worth 3,000 Points minimum, and yet here it was at 1,000. That was borderline insulting!
Wait… since when had he started looking down on 1,000 Points?
He glanced at his own Points balance — zeroed out completely after buying the full set of Six Powers.
Ryū fell into contemplative silence.
Had the prospect of recovering the System for a one-time payout of 11,000 Points… somehow gone to his head?
That was actually very possible. Highly likely, in fact.
Meaning he really had gotten cocky.
No, no, no… stay grounded! Stay humble!
* * *
Kaguya's voice cut through Ryū's internal crisis. She was staring at the Gap corridor Yukari had just torn open, unease written across her face. "Yukari-nee-sama… does this corridor seem… a teensy bit… creepy to anyone else?!"
Kaguya's constitution had been enhanced with Points. She wasn't strong enough to learn the Six Powers yet, but she was already well beyond an ordinary human.
Even so, looking at that eerie Gap corridor gave her chills.
Because Yukari's Gap corridor looked… frankly evil.
Could you imagine a pitch-black spatial tunnel…
Lined wall-to-wall with crimson eyes?
Each glowing red eye was clearly not a real eye — you could tell that much — but they all seemed to be staring directly at you. The effect was viscerally spine-tingling.
Yukari glanced at her own Gap corridor and saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.
As for the countless red eyes? She selectively ignored those.
She couldn't help it… she was used to them. They didn't register as unusual anymore.
"Creepy? There's nothing creepy about it. This is a perfectly normal Gap corridor. Think of it as a spatial tunnel for teleportation."
Yukari stepped into the Gap and walked back out the other side, completely unharmed.
As if to demonstrate to Wolffy, Kaguya, and the Admin-dono that her ability was perfectly safe. This was a normal power, thank you very much.
Mm… though, come to think of it, on closer reflection, it was perhaps a tiny bit creepy.
But she was a Gap Yōkai!
A yōkai being a little bit creepy…
Wasn't that completely normal?
The minor episode passed quickly. With Yukari, the Yōkai Sage, leading the way, the group filed into the Gap corridor one by one — first Yukari, then Ryū, followed by Kaguya, with Wolffy bringing up the rear.
Just as Kaguya had said, the interior of the Gap was… indeed a bit unsettling.
Even Ryū thought so.
The passage through felt instantaneous.
But the memory of those crimson eyes lingered vividly.
When they emerged from the other side of the Gap corridor…
The scene before them had changed completely.
Moments ago, Ryū and the others had been on a wide, nearly deserted street where the few remaining pedestrians hurried past with their heads down.
Now, having traveled through Yukari's spatial shortcut…
Ryū found himself standing on the roof of a tall building.
The sudden shift in reality was disorienting.
He scanned the surroundings… and murmured to himself: "This should be a rooftop, right? The walking Points are here?"
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