More than half the bats were blasted away by that force, like fallen leaves in a gale. They crashed with a rapid-fire rattle against the hard cliff face behind the castle, turning into splattered heaps of flesh. With just a single breath, the despair-inducing bat swarm visibly shrank by more than half!
The remaining bats seemed scared witless by that sudden, natural-disaster-level power. They lost any unified direction, circling and scattering in panicked loops through the air. But out of fear of the ancient castlethey didn't dare approach the castle again, and they didn't dare charge the village either. They just spun above the castle like headless flies.
Blade stood there holding the UV lamp, completely frozen. He stared at the sky that had been instantly cleared by half, and at the dense mess of bat corpses smashed against the cliff, and his brain nearly stopped working.
A… breath.
Blew away tens of thousands of bats?
That was already beyond his understanding of what the word "power" even meant.
Saitama looked up at the leftovers still chattering and circling, and frowned. "There're still some? What a pain."
His gaze swept the ground. In the courtyard, a few torches from the earlier fight were still burning. He walked over and picked one up. Then, facing the bats above, he started to… swing the torch?
It looked kind of ridiculous—like some ordinary person shooing mosquitoes.
But what happened next nearly made Blade's sunglasses fall off.
As Saitama's arm swung, the flame on the torch was dragged along—but far more terrifying was the airflow his arm created. A violent current wrapped around the torch, stretching and twisting the flame, pulling it into a rotating ring of fire whose diameter kept expanding!
Saitama's arm snapped forward.
The massive flaming ring shot into the air as if it were alive, screaming straight into the circling bat swarm! As it flew, it kept spinning and expanding, instantly swallowing the remaining, terrified bats in one blazing loop!
Flame swept through the night. The air filled with a scorched, burnt smell. The bats caught in the fire-ring didn't even have time to scream before they were instantly vaporized. The ring of fire streaked into the distant night sky, then, once its energy ran out, slowly dissipated.
The sky returned to silence.
Only a few wisps of smoke and the faint scent of char remained, proof that a "bat disaster" had even happened.
Blade stood there, the beam of his UV lamp shining lonely and pointless into an empty night sky. Slowly, he turned his head and looked at the bald man who casually tossed the torch back onto the ground—like he'd just finished a household chore.
Without thinking, Blade touched the silver-bullet pistol at his waist, freshly chambered for a final desperate stand… then silently pressed it back down.
This man called Saitama… did he need silver bullets? Did he need ultraviolet light?
For the first time, Blade felt like his life's mission of hunting vampires looked a little… insignificant in front of this bald man. He opened his mouth, and in the end only managed to force out one hoarse question:
"…What the hell are you?"
Saitama brushed the dust off his hands and answered matter-of-factly, "Didn't I just say it? A hero."
He looked at the now-completely quiet castle and night sky, nodded in satisfaction, and said, "Finally quiet. Alright, I've gotta get back to the hotel. The tour group's going to the next sightseeing spot tomorrow."
(End of Chapter)
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