Chapter 396: Hardcore "Gap"-Travel
The days of waiting passed quickly enough. Time was tracked according to the Dimensional Chat Group's own clock — meaning while it was still barely midday in Konoha, the chat group had already ticked over into Lunar New Year's Eve, 00:00 sharp.
The moment the clock struck, Ryū — already fully prepared — vanished from the chat instantaneously.
When he reappeared, he was no longer in the Naruto world at all, but standing in the event's destination world instead.
Group events, historically, almost never drew the attention of powerful figures with sharp enough senses to notice a crossover happening. Ryū figured the Dimensional Chat Group must actively shield its members' presence from anyone that strong — otherwise every single event would risk drawing unwanted attention from some world's resident heavy hitter.
Take Sakura's home world, for instance — neither Alaya nor Gaia had ever once detected the group's presence there. Had to be the system actively masking them.
The moment Ryū materialized in the Battle Through the Heavens world, an utterly unfamiliar landscape greeted him — strange plants, strange insects, nothing he recognized.
None of it particularly surprised him. Flora and fauna varied wildly between worlds as a matter of course, and after this many crossings, Ryū had long since grown numb to the novelty of it.
Observation Haki flared outward on instinct, sweeping across an area spanning who-knew-how-many square kilometers in an instant.
His Observation Haki had reached genuinely absurd heights by now — capable of covering something on the scale of the Eurasian continent, and that was probably underselling it.
Ever since he'd pushed Observation Haki past its ceiling with a Breakthrough Card, its growth had climbed like it was strapped to a rocket, accelerating faster and faster.
"This continent's enormous... my Observation Haki's basically maxed out its range and it still can't cover the whole thing. Has to be way bigger than Earth. No idea by how much, exactly."
Ryū mulled that over for a moment. A landmass this massive, and only ten days and nights to explore it — barely enough time to scratch the surface, surely?
His Haki confirmed he was currently standing inside a massive forest, thick with all sorts of strange "presences" — a fair number of them registering as genuinely formidable.
He looked around for a while, his expression shifting into something faintly puzzled — several minutes had passed now, and none of the other chat-group members had shown up. Had something gone wrong?
He slipped his consciousness into the chat and found the other members already deep in animated discussion.
Ying Zheng The Sovereign: Why can't this sovereign find any of you? Currently asking for directions in a small town — apparently it's under the protection of something called the Cloud Mist Sect.
My True Form Is Cola: I'm here with little Hinata, though — how come it's just the two of us?
My True Form Is Cola: Hm... did we all just accidentally get scattered somehow?
Eternally Seventeen: Over here I've got Sakura and Wolffy, three of us total. Nobody else around beyond that.
Edward Newgate: Gurararara, old Whitebeard landed by a massive lake, all alone.
Admiral Kizaru: Same over here, just me. What's going on?
Terrible Tornado: I'm with Stark, Maidang, and Tohru — four of us total.
Kaguya-sama: ...Just me over here, solo. Was this some kind of random-placement thing?
RawrSoFierce: Guessing it's because none of us actually belong to this world, so there's no fixed spatial coordinate to lock onto — probably scattered everyone's landing spots at random as a result.
Eternally Seventeen: Huh, didn't know that could happen. I was hoping to go shopping with little Kaguya and Sakura together. Well, guess I'll settle for Wolffy instead.
WolfKingOfQingQingGrasslands: Not sure why, but I'm detecting a certain amount of disappointment in that phrasing, Yukari-senpai.
Eternally Seventeen: Ahem, just your imagination. Trust me, purely your imagination.
RawrSoFierce: Alright, everyone just look after yourselves for now. If anything dangerous comes up, just head straight back to your home world.
Kaguya-sama: LGTM!
My True Form Is Cola: LGTM!
Street-Corner Illustrator: LGTM!
Wandering Little Planet: Breaking up the chorus here — poor little Sphere's completely alone too... well, poor little sphere, I guess.
Wandering Little Planet: Also, might've accidentally crushed a cow the size of a house when I landed. Whoops.
My True Form Is Cola: Pfft, crushing a cow's one thing, but a cow the size of a whole house? That's genuinely terrifying.
Crazy Diamond: RIP that poor cow!
Wandering Little Planet: Wahhh, I didn't mean to! I had no idea something that beefy-looking would turn out so fragile.
Kaguya-sama: Have you been putting on weight lately, Little Sphere? Might be time for a diet.
Admiral Kizaru: Little Sphere going on a diet, sure — but can you actually pull that off?
Kaguya-sama: ...Emmm, probably... maybe? I'd guess so?
Wandering Little Planet: What's with that uncertain tone, come on! I think it's probably just that all my recent training's made my density go up.
Eternally Seventeen: Hm, that explanation actually sounds pretty reasonable, honestly.
"..."
Slipping his consciousness back out of the chat, Ryū's expression settled into something faintly odd. So everyone was scattered across the world this time — was that actually going to be a problem? Any real danger involved?
Battle Through the Heavens, after all, wasn't exactly a low-power setting. By the story's climactic Douhuang-tier confrontations, tens of thousands of feet of pressure-waves and lightning bolts the size of entire mountain ranges were practically routine.
Punches capable of blasting out craters hundreds of thousands of miles wide, or gouging thousand-foot-deep tears straight through space itself — all standard fare by the end.
Ryū thought it over for a moment, then formed a blade-edge with his hand and gave the air in front of him an experimental swing.
The atmosphere split violently in two directions, a terrifying gale ripping outward in every direction.
Space itself tore open in jagged rents, dust and debris rocketing hundreds of meters into the air, boulders and trees flung wildly in every direction.
Half a minute later, Ryū nodded thoughtfully and swept the settling dust clean away with another casual gesture, revealing a stretch of scorched, barren earth beneath.
Everywhere his gaze landed, not a shred of life remained — total devastation.
"Space and matter here feel unusually dense — way tougher than any other world I've come across so far."
Watching the gash in space slowly seal itself back up, Ryū's brow rose slightly. That single test swing had already told him plenty — the spatial density of this continent ran considerably higher than he was used to.
Made sense, thinking about it further — a landmass capable of producing this many powerful beings would need correspondingly dense space and reinforced terrain, or the whole place would've been reduced to rubble ages ago.
Setting the tangent aside, his Observation Haki still couldn't detect any human settlements nearby, which told him he was probably deep inside some genuinely massive forest.
Not that he had any intention of spending all ten days and nights stuck in one forest — that would defeat the whole point of a fun group excursion.
A forest the size of an entire continent, though — clearly this world's inhabitants hadn't gotten around to fully developing their wilderness. Probably thanks to all the beasts roaming it. Without dangerous monsters to worry about, humanity likely would have colonized every last patch of forest by now, given how resource-rich these places tended to be.
"Guess I should scout further out, see if I can find any actual human settlements..."
Ryū didn't have any particularly efficient way to cover ground — he couldn't manage Yukari's "gap" technique, no way to casually hop across a tenth of a solar system on a whim.
He did, however, have a genuinely simple, brute-force method of his own devising — something he'd worked out inside Solo Mode back in the Arena. Simple, effective... and admittedly a little heavy-handed.
Expression flat, Ryū raised his hand, fingers formed into a blade, and swung once through the dense space ahead of him.
A faint sound like something shattering rang out, and the space in front of him tore open in an instant, leaving behind a gaping rift dozens of meters across and seven or eight meters wide.
At a glance, it looked like someone had dipped an enormous brush in ink and drawn a single, decisive stroke straight through reality itself.
Inside the rift lay a black, hollow void, churning with wild spatial currents, countless fragments of shattered space caught up in the chaos — the whole thing radiated an unnerving, deeply unsettling presence.
Toss a chunk of alloy into that, no matter how sturdy, and it would be shredded to ribbons in an instant.
Ryū simply walked straight in. The moment he stepped through, the raging currents inside battered against his body from every direction.
His flesh, strengthened to a genuinely absurd degree, shrugged off the spatial turbulence entirely — if it weren't for the risk of his clothes getting torn to shreds, he wouldn't have even bothered coating himself in Armament Haki for protection.
Still, better safe than emerging on the other side stark naked, so he wrapped himself in Armament Haki regardless — he hadn't brought any spare clothes along, after all, and lost was lost for good.
Anyone tailing Ryū across this world would have found his travel method genuinely, absurdly hardcore. Tear open a rift, step through, reappear tens of thousands of miles away. Tear open another rift, step through again, reappear tens of thousands of miles further still. A genuinely bizarre sight to witness.
By the time he emerged from the third such rift, his Observation Haki finally picked up signs of an actual human settlement up ahead.
As for the rifts he'd torn open behind him along the way?
Eh — not his problem. They'd seal themselves shut eventually, given enough time.
Whether some unlucky soul happened to wander into one of them in the meantime, though, he had no way of knowing.
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