Chapter 166: Different PVP Rankings
The words landed.
The off-white figure bent its knees slightly.
Just that one simple motion, and the air around it changed. The pressure radiating from it was something else entirely.
Reiatsu pressed outward like a resource about to overflow, seeping out along the limbs, the mask, the neck, manifesting around its body as a hazy blue mist.
That boiling reiatsu channeled through suddenly released legs into a single explosive burst of propulsion and launched the figure forward.
BANG!!!
Like an off-white comet.
It streaked across the sky. Before the Menos had time to react, it slammed squarely into that white mask.
CRACK!
A dull impact. Fist-bone meeting mask, one of them shattering.
Half the Menos's face collapsed into fractures, riddled with terrifying cracks. Its entire body lurched uncontrollably, shoved by the force, and came crashing down.
First hit landed. No reason to stop there.
Left hand locked around the long narrow nose-protrusion. The right hand closed into a fist and drove down hard.
THUD. The already-shattered mask couldn't hold. A hole punched clean through it.
Nothing like flesh and blood inside.
Though it was called a "mask," it was in fact the outer body of the Menos. Just structurally different from a human's.
Two exchanges in and the Menos already had its defenses broken, the attack pushed through to something like its core. A matter of both power gap and combat ability.
A strange hiss rang out from somewhere.
Matsushita Yusuke squinted from a distance.
Here it comes.
On the Menos's face, against its chest, a pitch-black ball of light materialized without a sound. Reiatsu rushing inward from the surrounding air, small as a baby's fist, but giving off the pull of a black hole.
The description takes longer than the moment. From gathering, to formation, to the unstable moment just before release.
It all happened in the blink of an eye.
It activated.
The black ball twisted and boiled.
Hmmm...
With a hoarse, distorted shriek, the ball erupted. A pillar of light with terrible momentum swallowed the alt's figure entirely.
The black torrent shot skyward, driving through and past the figure, blasting off toward the distant sky.
Cero.
As the Menos's most well-known attack technique and its highest-damage skill, its destructive power varied by individual, but the technical precision behind it was genuinely terrifying.
Drawing on reishi from the surrounding air, it compressed and detonated an entire sequence of events into an impossibly short window.
Converted to a Kido equivalent, it would sit at Hado #80 and above, at minimum.
What was surprising was how universal this level of technique turned out to be. The moment something became a Menos, these attacks were learned automatically, as if by instinct.
Life was truly something.
Cough. Back to it.
Matsushita Yusuke rubbed his cheek and reset his expression.
"This Menos has some actual skill..."
Not empty praise. A conclusion drawn from multiple hunts.
Even with the technical knowledge, few individuals could execute the attack with full form, let alone compress the attack interval down this tightly. This one was a special case.
A direct full hit from a Cero at that range. Any ordinary spirit body would have simply ceased to exist.
So... how was the alt doing?
Matsushita Yusuke shaded his eyes with his right hand and squinted at the distance.
"..."
The smoke hadn't fully cleared. But through it, he could still make out a faint figure.
It appeared to have done something. He couldn't tell exactly what.
But.
Reiatsu couldn't be hidden.
A deep crimson ball of light appeared silently where the blast had just hit, squeezed out of the air itself. Small. Thin. And radiating more pressure than the black ball had.
The remaining smoke scattered as if it had encountered something it wanted no part of, peeling away in every direction and revealing the figure within.
Several cracks ran across the off-white body.
Concentrated on the limbs, chest, and jaw.
Numerous, but none of them connecting. Based on experience, surface wounds.
The Hollow body's unusual construction worked in its favor. The brittle outer layer cracked under force, but without connected fractures spreading inward, there was no cascade, nothing life-threatening.
Solid defense.
Also...
The accumulated crimson ball had begun to pulse.
It roiled with quiet menace. An unstable substance reaching its brief equilibrium before tipping toward release.
Tipping.
Activated.
The deep crimson ball detonated, driving a thin pillar of light directly through the Menos's head and blasting toward the distant sky... until it was gone.
Vision caught the mark before anything else. Then the sound arrived, a howling roar that pushed straight through the eardrums and transmitted something like primal dread.
HMMM!!!
Like a distorted, overloaded rumble that lingered in the air long after it should have faded.
Matsushita Yusuke looked at the collapsed remains of the Menos and couldn't help thinking it.
Genuinely brutal.
Without manual override, the alt ran in full auto mode. Combat was handled entirely by instinct. It sounded unreliable, but in most situations it performed better than if Yusuke stepped in and took over directly.
Because the fighting instinct was built from actual combat over time.
Different from Shinigami-style fighting, Hollow vs Hollow was more direct. More brutal. Pure high-efficiency killing.
So the alt's PVP ranking might actually be higher than the main's.
As that thought settled, Yusuke watched it crouch over the Menos's remains and start tearing into them.
Feeding. Also a way to accumulate experience.
Brutal to watch, but that was Hueco Mundo's survival logic. Yusuke had nothing to add.
He was here to carry the alt through the zone. Fastest growth possible.