Chapter 134: The Speed Bumps Made a Run For It!
Crack.
A boulder shattered under Uvogin's fist.
"Hey! Machi! Even if you're one of our founding members, I won't let you make a joke like that!"
Uvogin's already wild-enough-to-shake-the-world temper had his hair standing fully upright like a lion's mane. But a close look revealed something else: his eyes had gone completely red. His rational mind understood exactly what Machi had just told him. His emotions refused to accept it entirely.
"Uvogin. Calm down."
Chrollo spoke up from where he had been silent.
"If Machi and Shizuku's information is accurate, your impulse would only cost the Troupe another member for no reason."
Uvogin's fist clenched so tight that blood was seeping through the gaps between his fingers. But he held himself in place. He didn't charge.
Chrollo caught Pakunoda's eye.
"This situation is unusual, though. Verbal description alone will inevitably leave cognitive gaps, and under the Troupe's internal rules, Paku's ability isn't used on our own members. However..."
His gaze moved to Machi, who looked composed on the surface but was clearly pervaded by something that couldn't be put into words.
Only Machi.
Chrollo knew his members' widely varying personalities and value systems. Among all of them, Machi was one of the very few whose thinking was closest to an ordinary person's. You could read that from her ability alone, the Nen Thread Suturing.
Shizuku was something else entirely: a person who placed equal indifference on her own life and others'. Even Chrollo, experienced as he was, had to acknowledge that Shizuku was a genuinely rare kind of person.
"Machi. Shizuku. Are you willing to let Paku read and share your memories?"
"Go ahead." "Feel free."
Both nodded without hesitation. They clearly agreed with Chrollo's reasoning.
Pakunoda spoke directly.
"Who killed Nobunaga and Phinks."
No one needed to answer. Her hand had already closed around the bare skin of Machi's palm.
Memory Bomb: activated.
Then Pakunoda's body shuddered. Sweat poured from her forehead without any control on her part. She didn't hesitate. She immediately reached for Shizuku's hand. By the time the second reading was complete, her jacket was completely soaked through.
She had seen what she needed from their memories. But the crushing weight of what those memories contained, experienced purely as a bystander, had transmitted through the reading itself.
A deep breath. She steadied herself. Her conjured revolver materialized in her hand, and she began converting the images from the memories into their bullet form: Memory Bullets.
"Leader. Uvogin. Shalnark. Franklin. Bonolenov."
She paused at that point. She wasn't sure whether the last bullet should go to Hisoka, who was an anomaly in every sense, or to Kortopi, whose direct combat capability was comparatively low.
"Don't bother giving me one. I can't do anything useful in a direct fight."
Before Chrollo could give the order, Kortopi answered for himself.
A person who could reduce Nobunaga to blood mist: what good would it do him to know what that person looked like?
Hisoka, meanwhile, arranged his face into a convincing expression of confusion and looked at Pakunoda waiting for an explanation.
The fact was, even after being formally in the Troupe for as long as he had, Hisoka only knew the abilities of two of its members. Three, if you counted the now-dead Feitan.
He had no idea how Pakunoda's memory-reading and memory-sharing worked.
"If you're willing to trust me, lower your Nen coating."
Pakunoda finished loading the last bullet, raised the revolver, and aimed it at Uvogin's forehead as he leaned in voluntarily.
"Stop talking and shoot."
Bang.
The moment Uvogin said it, his forehead took the bullet.
Then: Chrollo. Shalnark. Franklin. Bonolenov. But when it came to Hisoka's turn, Pakunoda paused.
The revolver could be loaded with conventional ammunition just as easily as Memory Bullets. For a man who clearly had designs on the leader, Pakunoda had long considered Hisoka a problem. This pause was her killing intent made physical: the temptation to swap the last Memory Bullet for a live round and finish Hisoka right here, right now.
She suppressed it, considering that the Troupe couldn't afford to lose any more members without reason. In doing so, she also let slip what would have been the best possible moment to actually kill Hisoka.
Bang.
Six bullets. Six shared memories. Everyone hit by the Memory Bullets had Machi's first-person perspective of watching Phinks and Nobunaga's deaths playing in their minds.
But more than anger at having members killed, what filled the people who received those memories was closer to shock. And fear.
As Nen ability users, none of them were naive enough to think there weren't people stronger than them. Three years ago, the Zoldyck family patriarch who killed the former No. 8 and walked away without a scratch: that level of power was beyond any single one of them to match alone. But it wasn't completely without a counter. Enough fighters, the right environment, properly prepared measures, in theory there were ways.
But the stubbled, unremarkable, wouldn't-have-warranted-a-second-glance middle-aged man in those shared memories represented something at an entirely different level.
If the Zoldyck patriarch killing a Troupe member was like an ordinary person being hit by a car and dying, then this man was an eighteen-wheeler loaded with steel coils. Phinks and Nobunaga had not even managed to constitute a fight. They had been driven over like speed bumps. That was all.
No different from how the Troupe itself handled ordinary people.
Strong enough that even Uvogin, who would normally have launched himself out the door the instant he saw the killer's face, was standing in place, swallowing repeatedly. His instincts were telling him plainly: this person is a complete monster.
"Move. Now. Immediately. Right now."
Chrollo processed everything from the memories and gave the order without any hesitation.
He didn't know who Ging Freecss was. He didn't know what kind of person he was dealing with. He only knew that his two companions had picked a fight with someone no one in the Troupe could match. If this person had any ability to trace them back, and if he held grudges, the Troupe would cease to exist today.
The Troupe fled.
In the humiliation of having left three spider legs permanently behind in Castlevania, without even being able to summon the desire for revenge, they scattered in complete disarray and left the country entirely.
And Ging, the cause of everything, was humming to himself while patiently trying to engrave the character for "divine" onto one of Castlevania's wall bricks.
If things went as expected, he was planning to stay here for quite a while.
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