Chapter 346: Transmigrator? Reincarnator? Or Reborn?
But the tremor beneath her feet, growing more pronounced by the second, told Anko this was no illusion — an earthquake really was happening, and the dessert shop's other customers, cooks, and staff were already scrambling in a panic toward the door.
Konoha might be a shinobi village, but its civilian population was hardly small — and with barely a year passed since the war's end, there hadn't been time to train up many more shinobi besides.
Civilians made up at least ninety percent of Konoha's population, easily — inside this dessert shop, aside from Anko, Kurenai, and Yūgao, not a single other soul was a shinobi.
With everyone else being ordinary people, the natural first response to a dangerous natural disaster like an earthquake was to run, not sit around thinking it through.
Ryū held a plate of pastries in one hand, forking up a bite with the other, not a trace of alarm on his face, and said calmly, "Better head out now. This place is about to come down."
Anko and the other two understood exactly how serious this was, and rather than staying seated, they followed Ryū straight out of the shop.
The moment they stepped outside, the once-faint tremor abruptly intensified, the violent shaking making it hard to even keep their footing.
Plenty of civilians who'd fled out into the street lost their balance in the shaking and went sprawling.
Barely a few seconds had passed since the shaking started, and it wasn't letting up — thin cracks were already spreading across walls, roughly a finger's width wide.
The snow on the ground trembled with the tremors, snow sliding off rooftops, and with a series of sharp cracking sounds, more than a few windows started shattering!
"An... an earthquake? How... how could there suddenly be an earthquake? Hell if I know, I was still in the outhouse a second ago — had to just clench and pull my pants up on the way out!"
"I remember Konoha had one before too, but the official notice said it wasn't tectonic in origin."
"Oh no, I need to go check on my kid!"
"Have you got a death wish? It's still shaking, you can't even stand up straight, the walls are cracking, and it's getting worse! You'll get yourself killed!"
"I think I left my wallet in the shop by accident..."
"You seriously going back for it?"
"...No."
"..."
All manner of voices carried through the air, and while plenty of them sounded panicked, genuine terror was surprisingly rare among them.
Maybe it was because Konoha had been through so much lately — everyone had already weathered bigger storms, so an "ordinary" earthquake just didn't rattle them the way it might have once.
Ryū, though, didn't think this was any ordinary earthquake. Observation Haki spread out to cover the whole village, and his expression turned faintly puzzled as he murmured to himself, "Was there anything like this in canon? Don't tell me some reincarnator's causing trouble again."
Just then, the shaking abruptly jumped several notches in intensity all at once, cracks spreading densely across the walls of house after house.
With a thunderous crash, one house collapsed — and like a row of dominoes, the rest began giving way to the shaking one after another.
The ground itself was torn apart into massive fissures, some over a meter wide and jagged in a way that looked almost menacing, thick clouds of dust rising up until it caught in people's throats.
Stray dogs and cats along the roadside all flattened themselves low, animal instinct screaming danger, their whole bodies trembling, eyes wide with terror.
Aside from the genuinely powerful, every shinobi below Kage level and every civilian alike felt an inexplicable dread wash over them, as though some primordial beast were about to descend upon them.
As a Chūnin, Anko didn't go tumbling to the ground the way an ordinary civilian would in shaking this violent, but she still staggered, none too steady on her feet.
She drew a deep breath, sweat already beading on her pale forehead, her mind struggling to keep up with the sudden "earthquake."
All she'd wanted to do was treat someone to a meal. She'd finally worked up the nerve to take Ryū-oniisan out for food, and then this happens out of nowhere? Talk about rotten luck!
And what was with that strange, bone-deep pressure crawling up from somewhere inside her?
Like she'd just come face to face with some overwhelming enemy.
Except there was no enemy anywhere in sight — where was this even coming from?
This was supposed to just be an ordinary earthquake, wasn't it?
"...Wait a second! What if... what if this isn't an ordinary earthquake at all? Man-made? No, that couldn't be, could it?"
The strange pressure and fear churning in her chest pushed one increasingly wild theory after another to the surface of Anko's mind, until she found herself murmuring them aloud without meaning to.
Even she thought her own guesses sounded far-fetched. What kind of person could cause an earthquake this violent?
The whole street was steadily crumbling into rubble by now — the earthquake's force was strong enough that even a Chūnin like her didn't dare get near the buildings, forced to watch anxiously from open ground instead.
Dust billowed high into the air, and in quite a few places, fires had apparently already broken out.
The shaking had already gone on for half a minute straight, with no sign whatsoever of letting up.
Anko was certain this wasn't limited to just this one street — she could see thick clouds of dust rising from somewhere at least a kilometer off in the distance too.
Destruction on this terrifying a scale, man-made? No way, surely not!
Kurenai and Yūgao both wore equally grim, tense expressions — they were feeling that same strange pressure, that same eerie dread.
The bone-biting cold on top of it all only made everything feel that much more unsettling, that much more wrong.
Kurenai's gaze suddenly landed on Ryū beside her — and there he was, this man Anko called "Ryū-oniisan," calmly munching away at a plate of pastries without a care in the world!
The ground's violent shaking had nearly knocked even a Chūnin like her off balance, and yet "Ryū-oniisan" here hadn't budged an inch, as if the tremors simply weren't registering with him at all.
Just then, Kurenai's expression shifted abruptly — she'd noticed a sharp cracking sound coming from right beneath her own feet.
She looked down, her red eyes contracting sharply — a fissure had torn open right under her feet, and it was widening by the second.
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