The rain of fire and the golden sand vanished together into the night sky.
Only the faint afterimages left on the retina continued to serve as a silent reminder to the people living in this city, telling them that they had just survived a disaster in which death was certain.
The joy of surviving a calamity welled up from the hearts of every survivor in Gorin City. They hugged the people beside them, both familiar and strangers, with all their strength, tears and smiles blooming together on their faces.
After crying and laughing, they subconsciously looked toward Ryosuke, who stood before Shinnō's corpse.
Countless complex emotions flashed through them, and in the end, all of them turned into reverence.
A young woman was about to kneel, wanting to offer her gratitude to Ryosuke through an action.
But a hand caught her arm.
"Attention and gratitude are enough."
Sasuke gave the woman a gentle smile, "Brother Ryosuke doesn't like others kneeling to him."
"Attention and gratitude…"
One by one, the survivors cast their gaze toward Ryosuke.
For many of them, this was their first time seeing him. Some hadn't even caught his name clearly.
But when they looked at Ryosuke's back, for no reason at all, they felt that deep within their hearts, where endless torment and suffering had long since buried everything, something was being reborn.
It wasn't only the survivors of Gorin City who were watching Ryosuke.
As mentioned before, because of the nation's advanced puppet techniques, large cities across the Land of Wind were filled with surveillance cameras.
At this moment, all of Gorin City's cameras had shifted their angles, recording Ryosuke from every possible direction without leaving a single blind spot.
They captured Ryosuke's battle with Shinnō… or rather, the entire process of him crushing Shinnō one-sidedly.
And the recordings were sent back through threads of chakra, transferred layer after layer, until they appeared, inside a pitch-black room.
The room was lavish and refined, with a television set in the center. Besides the television, there was no other light source.
Several silhouettes sat in the darkness. Some held red wine in their hands, others pinched cigars between their fingers.
They sat motionless on the sofas. If not for the television still flickering and the faint trails of cigar smoke rising, one might have thought they had fallen into Ryosuke's time-stop space.
Every face was solemn, but not long ago, they had all been laughing.
Laughing when the destruction ray injured Ryosuke.
Laughing when Shinnō seemed able to fight Ryosuke to a standstill.
Laughing that the destruction of Gorin City would bring one of them considerable profit.
One of them had even joked about buying Gorin City cheaply.
But now, not one of them could laugh.
They had never really thought Shinnō could win, at most, maybe one or two imagined it, the same way someone fantasizes about winning five million when buying a lottery ticket.
All they wanted was for Shinnō to give Ryosuke some trouble.
Wound Ryosuke, force him to expose some of his trump cards, his weaknesses.
That would have been enough.
If Shinnō could do that much, then their money was well-spent.
But what did Shinnō do?
Time and again he used the lives of civilians as leverage, taking them as bargaining chips to attack Ryosuke… how vile.
It wasn't that using human lives as leverage was vile.
Lives were assets, when needed, the consortiums never hesitated.
What they meant was, depending on gambling with Ryosuke's kindness, using that as the basis of an attack… that could never be turned into usable experience. It could never serve as a standard tactic for the consortiums going forward.
Shinnō had shamed the money and resources they invested. His methods went against the principles of transaction.
Disgusting and base.
If Shinnō's actions made them angry, then Ryosuke's counterattack… truly felt like a hand had stretched out of the television screen and seized their throats.
One by one, they sat in silence, shoulders sagging. Instinctively they wanted to lean away from the television, hide themselves deeper in the darkness, as if,
They were the rats scurrying in the night.
"Ryosuke has grown stronger again."
"His growth is faster than the speed we can spend money."
"We must find a way. But before that, we have to kill Arima Teru…"
The man smoking a cigar set it down.
"Still haven't found him?"
———
Arima Teru strode quickly through the street, the brim of his hat pulled low, his hand clutching tightly at the handle of his suitcase.
Inside was his entire fortune. With this money, no matter which country he went to, he could live as a man above others.
He turned his head to glance toward the direction of the battlefield's core.
"Sorry, Shinnō, I wronged you."
When Arima Teru had called Shinnō, he hadn't spoken more than two sentences before the other hung up.
At the time, Arima had cursed Shinnō for being heartless. Who would've thought that without a word, Shinnō launched a full assault to draw Ryosuke's attention?
Originally, when the main cannon and secondary cannon opened fire, all the officials at Arima's residence had scattered to flee with their wives and children.
The assassins the consortiums had sent still hadn't appeared. Arima guessed the chaos in Gorin City had delayed them.
Now, hidden in the sea of people, even the greatest assassin couldn't possibly pick him out.
In other words, this life of his, he owed it to Shinnō.
Arima Teru felt his nose sting.
After so many years in politics, he thought he had seen through the ugliness of human hearts. He never imagined that a man so old-fashioned, so poor with words, could still be so loyal and warmhearted.
"Rest easy, Brother Shinnō. I'll live on well for the both of us."
Arima rubbed his nose and kept walking forward.
"Hey! You there, in front. That bag in your hand… looks pretty nice."
The voice came from behind.
Arima turned around and met the gaze of a middle-aged woman.
Her figure was thin, her head tilted, her body leaning unnaturally backward, looking at Arima from a strange downward angle.
As she spoke, she kept coughing lightly.
Just from one glance, Arima judged her to be a textile factory worker.
Workers in those factories breathed cotton dust and hemp dust for years. Almost all of them suffered from lung disease.
Looking again at her twisted thumb and forefinger, it was clear these were the result of years of operating a sewing machine, joint deformities.
Before Arima could even speak, the woman rushed forward, trying to snatch the suitcase full of his money.
A bottom-level textile worker… how did she dare stop him in such a chaotic city?
Then he noticed the faint trickles of pitch-black negative emotion seeping from beneath her feet, and he understood.
It was the collapse of the central core barrier. The woman had been tainted by the leaking negative emotions, her will corrupted, her desires magnified.
"Get lost!"
Arima had no time to waste on some lowly woman.
Every second he had now was bought with Brother Shinnō's life. He had to cherish it.
Hand the bag over to her?
What a joke, inside were gold, land deeds, proof of assets.
Arima kicked her in the stomach, knocking her down, and was just about to turn away when suddenly he felt all his strength drain from his body. Looking down, he saw a pair of textile scissors buried deep in his abdomen.
The woman climbed up again, snatched the bag from his hands, opened it, dumped out all the gold and certificates, and left hugging only the empty bag.
As she left, she muttered, "This is my husband's birthday gift. I want to give him the best present."
Arima stared at the money and papers scattered, fluttering away in the wind, his whole body drained of strength.
"You… you could've just said you didn't want money, dammit…"
He collapsed to the ground.
He died in a corner where no one would notice.
A gust of wind blew past, lifting a single banknote. It drifted down and stuck to his forehead, covering his eyes that couldn't close in death, so as not to scare passersby.
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