Chapter 422: A Bald Head, Amid the Crowd
RawrSoFierce: Log into the group and the first thing I see is all of you hyping me up — inexplicably feels great, honestly.
RawrSoFierce: Why do I suddenly feel a little shameless myself all of a sudden? Must be catching it off a certain youkai sage. Yeah, that's got to be it.
Eternally Seventeen: Just took a sip of tea and discovered I've somehow been handed a completely unearned scapegoat role here!
Eternally Seventeen: Admin-sama's been shameless from the start, this is nothing new — why am I suddenly the one taking the blame?
Kaguya-sama: Maybe because Yukari-nee's been even more shameless this whole time, even less dignified?
My True Form Is Cola: Pfft, a little too real there — Kaguya-senpai, aren't you scared of Yukari-senpai grinding your face into the keyboard for that one?
Street-Corner Illustrator: Yukari-senpai's already sharpening her blade, aimed squarely at Kaguya-senpai.
Kaguya-sama: Shocking... ahem! Yukari-nee, please believe me, that was absolutely someone hacking my account.
Kaguya-sama: Vile account thief. If I ever catch whoever did that, I will not be showing mercy.
Eternally Seventeen: ...Why does everything little Kaguya just said feel weirdly familiar? Like I've heard it somewhere before.
RawrSoFierce: Because it's exactly what you used to say all the time, that's why it feels familiar.
Eternally Seventeen: Eh? I used to say that kind of thing? Genuinely no memory of it at all, huh.
RawrSoFierce: Probably because you've selectively forgotten it — sounds like it might be part of your own dark history.
My True Form Is Cola: Oh? Yukari-senpai's got some dark history? If I go digging through the chat archives, would I actually find it?
Edward Newgate: Gurararara, Yukari-senpai's dark history, huh — that'd be from about a year back, wouldn't it.
Edward Newgate: At the pace this group chats, though, digging that far back would probably take you a solid month.
My True Form Is Cola: A whole month?! Emmm... okay, giving up on that plan.
Eternally Seventeen: I'm catching a distinctly suspicious scent here — Umaru-chan, why exactly are you so interested in my dark history?
My True Form Is Cola: Personally, I don't believe Yukari-senpai could possibly have any dark history at all, so I wanted to dig through the records specifically to prove Admin-sama wrong.
Crazy Diamond: Nailed it, genuinely impressive flattery there — noted for future reference.
Wandering Little Planet: Whoa, that's a move? Writing that one down in my notebook.
Nine-Tailed Fox Spirit: Little Sphere's a planet — do you even have a notebook to write in? Wouldn't it just end up scrawled across some giant plain somewhere?
I'm Rolling In It: Breaking news: Earth scientists have discovered a mysterious line of text carved into a vast plain, reading: "36 Tactics of Flattery, Technique #1..."
My True Form Is Cola: Delete that, delete that right now, I'm calling dibs on roasting that one myself!
"..."
If Gongbieerzi, the rule-breaking reincarnator, or The Other, commander of the Chitauri army, had known that Ryū and the rest weren't just casually shrugging off their entire assault, but also had plenty of spare bandwidth left over to chat idly in a group thread, they might well have coughed up blood on the spot from sheer disbelief.
At present, the collision between the 500-cannon planetary superweapon and Ryū's own Ki blast had already cost the Chitauri army at least a third of its total forces, the resulting shockwave devastating everything in its path.
The Other's expression had gone genuinely grim. This army represented his own foundation of power across the cosmos — sure, he hadn't committed the entirety of his forces to this invasion, but losing this much of it here would still hit him hard. A serious, genuinely unprecedented blow to his standing.
If they'd actually managed to take Earth, that loss might've been worth swallowing. But if the invasion failed on top of it?
That would be an outright catastrophic loss. Catastrophic enough that he genuinely wanted to punch Gongbieerzi's face in right then and there.
What unsettled him even more, though, was a simpler question: why was this one Earth human this absurdly powerful?
The Other had seen the full might of those 500 cannons firsthand — a single unified volley from all of them ought to have been enough to blow Jupiter itself apart.
And yet here, right now, that entire volley had just been held back by a single person — a single human, from Earth of all places!
Worse still, the 500-cannon barrage was actually losing ground. The Other watched with his own eyes as the enemy beam's energy stream steadily pushed forward while his own side's beam slowly retreated.
That "slow" push might have sounded gradual, but it really wasn't — Ryū's Ki blast was already advancing at over a hundred meters per second.
And with every passing second, that advance kept accelerating. If it moved at a hundred-plus meters per second now, give it another minute, and it'd be pushing at two hundred-plus. Another minute after that, three hundred, maybe four hundred meters per second.
The disparity was plain for anyone to see — Gongbieerzi's side was losing, badly.
And Gongbieerzi himself, being one of the actual parties responsible for this mess, couldn't possibly miss it either. His expression, at this point, had turned even grimmer than The Other's own.
He genuinely hadn't expected Earth to house something this absurdly powerful. Who exactly was that black-haired young man? Did Marvel actually have some obscure hero this overwhelming that he'd simply never heard of?
"Why does this feel nothing like the Marvel world I remember? Has too much time passed, my own memory gone hazy? Or is this some kind of butterfly effect, caused by my own presence here?"
Gongbieerzi felt a genuine headache coming on. Teaming up with Thanos to invade Earth was starting to feel like a serious miscalculation.
But the quest handed down by his own system wasn't something he could simply walk away from — failing to take Earth would trigger the system's own punishment mechanisms, and that alone was more than enough to make him suffer.
Just then, without warning, the ship he was aboard began shaking violently, an ear-splitting alarm blaring to life alongside it.
Gongbieerzi's expression shifted again, sharply — and before he could react, an unfamiliar voice suddenly spoke up from directly behind him.
"Finally found the boss. So you two are this quest's targets, huh? Didn't expect there to be two of you — works out even better, honestly, gets my blood pumping even more. Let's have a proper, honest fight."
Gongbieerzi spun around at once, his expression freezing in shock.
Because standing right behind him, at some point without his noticing — was a bald head.
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