Chapter 133: The Spider Tripped Again, and Lost Two More Legs
Ross walked out of the 249th floor master's private room.
The meeting with Younger Toguro was over, but Ross could feel that something in Toguro's presence had distinctly shifted.
His working theory: he had indirectly given a man with powerful self-destructive tendencies a brand-new, fully adequate reason to not die yet. That reason might even be sitting at a higher priority than "kill Genkai."
Younger Toguro's longing for the Dark Continent was never about wanting the human world to fall apart. He just wanted to fight stronger demons. And even fully demonified, the care for the human world that his original self had held hadn't actually diminished in him. He just needed a sufficient excuse not to show it. That was why he'd asked whether Sensui was strong.
Toguro still couldn't confirm whether Ross had simply been reading him well and saying what he wanted to hear, or whether Sensui genuinely operated at Netero's level. If the latter was true, taking him out would be something truly worth doing.
And if all of Ross's revelations held up, then killing Genkai would lose its point entirely.
The meeting had ended up scrambling Toguro's own intentions (he had come to knock Ross into harder training through pressure) but overall he seemed to have left with more excitement than anything else. His interest had been genuinely rekindled, for the first time in a while.
As for Ross, the source of all this, he had no sense of guilt whatsoever about being a spoiler. He stepped out of the room with an expression that was growing progressively more Light Yagami by the second.
According to plan.
When Ross had found out Younger Toguro still intended to take Genkai's life, he hadn't been particularly angry about it. He had known about this development for more than twenty years before he ever transmigrated. At this point it had zero novelty to it.
What had surfaced instead was a question that countless readers had spent time debating over the years: when it came to sheer antagonist presence, who was the more impressive villain, Younger Toguro or Sensui?
Ross had never liked purely hypothetical debates. If you wanted an answer, make it real. So he had thrown Sensui's name out as bait. Toguro took it immediately, exactly as expected.
Knowing Toguro, he absolutely could not resist going after Sensui, both from the perspective of a battle addict and from the perspective of someone whose ideology put him in direct opposition to what Sensui was trying to accomplish. This would redirect Toguro's energy away from Genkai and toward Sensui's operation, which would also disrupt Sensui's timeline to some degree. Two goals handled at once.
That said, this didn't mean Ross could sit back and relax.
Younger Toguro's appearance was a useful reminder: methodical training was the right path for any Nen ability user. But in a world this dangerous, with this many exceptional individuals running around, throwing in some unorthodox acceleration wasn't an unreasonable choice.
Time to go back and work seriously.
Ross had a very strong feeling that today's Nekketsu New Record Secret Realm run was going to go extremely smoothly.
But before that.
"Just one look. Absolutely no more than one look."
Back in his room, his hand moved entirely on its own and pulled out the Graveyard Story cartridge. Castlevania: Dracula's Curse.
This confirmed something for Ross: his previous lack of addiction to games like Stellaris was probably just a mismatch of wavelength rather than any lack of interest. Once he was on the same frequency, this kind of game hit harder than most.
He set himself a strict preset condition: just check the current state, confirm everything is fine, then stop. He ran Entertainment Mode.
But the moment he entered the control interface, the main screen was already showing a string of new notifications, every single one related to soul imprisonment.
Since gaining Grand Cemetery control and upgrading his Castlevania authority, Ross had been making adjustments across various settings. Among them: he had set soul imprisonment to automatic. Anyone who died inside would be imprisoned immediately, but if the soul happened to belong to a Nen ability user, an additional notification would be flagged for his attention.
Ross went through the soul imprisonment notifications one by one.
[Castlevania has captured and imprisoned the soul of "John." Soul meets elite unit configuration specifications. Currently in standby, awaiting castle lord's processing.]
[Castlevania has captured and imprisoned the soul of "Nobunaga Hazama." Soul meets special BOSS configuration specifications. Currently in standby, awaiting castle lord's processing.]
[Castlevania has captured and imprisoned the soul of "Phinks Magcub." Soul meets special BOSS configuration specifications. Currently in standby, awaiting castle lord's processing.]
"...?"
Ross rubbed his eyes and looked again at the bottom two notifications.
He had read them correctly. Nobunaga and Phinks.
How had two more spider legs broken without him being involved at all? How did they even die?
He pulled up the death playback mode immediately. The function replayed the circumstances faced by units under Ross's control, and by souls imprisoned by Castlevania, in the moments before their deaths. Imprisoned souls played back from the first-person perspective.
When Ross ran back Nobunaga's death footage, the first thing that filled his screen was a familiar, stubbly face.
"What the you picked a fight with Ging?! Were you two genuinely done with living!?"
A brief moment of thought was all it took for Ross to piece together what had probably happened.
The Phantom Troupe's incurably larcenous instincts had kicked in. They had seen Ging being one of the last people to exit the castle during its collapse, figured he must have walked away with some kind of valuable treasure or Nen tool, and decided to rob him at the first opportunity. The result: a straightforward counter-kill.
In Nobunaga's death POV, the Ging in frame was walking along while making a slightly unnatural arm rotation movement. Anyone who had seen Phinks use his ability would recognize it: the Nen output strengthening with every revolution was unmistakably the activation form of Ripper Cyclotron.
If memory served correctly, Ging had an ability in the general range of "after being hit by an Enhancement-type Nen attack, he can replicate it with about eighty to ninety percent accuracy." Not some Sharingan-style wholesale technique copying, just an exceptional innate facility for imitating Enhancement-type attacks.
In other words, when Ging was facing Nobunaga, he had already fought Phinks previously and taken a Ripper Cyclotron to the body. And appeared to be completely fine.
What came next: Nobunaga's draw-cut against Ging's fist loaded with several accumulated rotations. The next second: black-and-white screen, soul release, death playback over.
Ross pulled up Phinks's death playback. As expected, Phinks had intended to punch Ging to death on the spot and search the body afterward. He had used Ripper Cyclotron as a sneak attack against Ging, who was in the middle of making impression rubbings of markings on Castlevania's walls. The punch didn't even crack Ging's Ken.
Just as Phinks was wondering if he simply hadn't wound the arm up enough, his neck went tight. He was lifted entirely off the ground. A fist the size of a boxing glove connected squarely with his Ken-active face.
It did not matter. Black-and-white screen. Soul release. Same result.
The frontal surface of Phinks's face had a horrifying fist-shaped concave impact crater. For the closest visual reference: imagine Gian punching Nobita's face directly inward.
Though honestly Phinks had gotten the better end of it. Nobunaga's entire body had been detonated into fragments and blood mist by the knockoff Ripper Cyclotron.
The Phantom Troupe. Two more legs gone.
***
jeez the phantom troupe are canon fodder in this Fic basically...lol