Blade watched him warily. He didn't take his hand, instead struggling to his feet on his own and picking up the silver knife from the floor. "You… who are you?"
"Saitama." Saitama withdrew his hand and didn't care. "A hero."
Just then, from outside the castle came a dense, scalp-prickling roar of flapping wings, drawing nearer from far away—as if tens of thousands of bats were gathering.
Blade's expression changed. "Damn it! The lord's dead—his bat swarm's gone out of control!"
The vampire lord Viktor's death seemed to have lifted his mental control over the bats around the castle, and might also have provoked these bloodthirsty creatures into one last frenzy. Tens of thousands of bats that had been roosting in the belfry and rock crevices poured out from every exit of the ancient castle like a disturbed plague of locusts—an endless black mass shrieking as it dove toward the village below, where scattered lights still flickered. Individually, the bats were weak, but in numbers this huge, once they swept into the village, they would be enough to cause massive casualties in a very short time.
Blade rushed to the broken window and stared at the bat swarm rolling in like an oncoming thundercloud. His face turned grim. He quickly pulled out a device from his utility belt that looked like a flashlight—but much larger, with a mesh-like structure at the front.
"It's a UV lamp! Hopefully it can hold back some of them!" he shouted urgently to Saitama as he aimed it out the window and hit the switch.
A fierce beam of ultraviolet light shot out sweeping across the incoming swarm. The bats caught in the beam immediately let out piercing screams, smoke rising from their bodies as they fell from the sky like dumplings dropped into boiling water.
But there were just too many bats!
The UV beam's coverage was limited—it could only clear a small strip along its path. More bats deftly veered around the light, splitting like black floodwaters and continuing toward the village. Blade whipped the lamp back and forth with everything he had, but it was a drop in the ocean—there was no way to stop this runaway tide.
"Damn it! There's too many!" Blade gritted his teeth, ready to charge out of the castle and try to draw part of the swarm away.
Then he heard Saitama behind him say, "That's a lot of bats. So noisy."
Blade looked back. Saitama had also walked up to the window, staring at the sky-blotting swarm with a slightly annoyed expression.
Saitama took a deep breath, his chest subtly expanding.
Blade froze—what was he doing? Don't tell me…
Before Blade could figure it out, Saitama faced the window and, at the bat swarm rushing in like a black storm, suddenly blew out a single breath!
It wasn't an ordinary breath. The instant the air left Saitama's mouth, it seemed to become an invisible shockwave—like a super-hurricane rising from flat ground! A gale of unimaginable force howled outward, even producing a deep, rumbling roar!
The torrent of air slammed head-on into the massive bat swarm!
In that split second, the "black cloud" that looked unstoppable was swept aside as if struck by an enormous invisible broom! The bats in the very front were blown to pieces, bones snapping apart, while the bats behind were caught up in the terrifying airflow and helplessly hurled backward, sucked into a rolling reverse current!
The howl of the wind drowned out the bats' shrieks. The monstrous gust didn't just scatter the bats in front—it even disrupted the entire swarm's formation.
(End of Chapter)
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