Boom

The train slowly departed Geleburg Station and sped along the tracks.

Watching the scenery outside streak past at high speed, Jing Yang unzipped his backpack a crack, tossed in some feed, and said, "Eat it all."

Shizuku sat across from him, quietly reading.

"Chirp chirp!" Little Gray Bird, Rock Sparrow, soon poked its head out through the gap in the backpack zipper.

"Don't make noise." Jing Yang pressed it back down with a finger. "If you stay quiet, I'll let you out."

Rock Sparrow nodded repeatedly, finally squeezing out of the backpack and hopping around on the table. A train attendant passed through the carriage and, catching sight of the little gray bird, could not help but stare in surprise.

Flap flap—

With a beat of its wings, Rock Sparrow circled through the air inside the carriage, turned into a gray blur, and darted into the next carriage. The attendant hurried after it.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" Shizuku asked.

"It's fine," Jing Yang said. "It'll come back when it gets hungry."

Leaning over the table, he looked at the book Shizuku was reading. "Do you really like reading?"

"Mm." Shizuku kept her eyes on the book. "Because I often picked up books."

Was she talking about her childhood in Meteor City? Jing Yang thought. Picking up books and things like that from garbage heaps—since they could not be eaten, of course all she could do was read them. There was no arguing with that...

Jing Yang asked curiously, "Besides books, what else do you like?"

"Jewels, accessories?" Shizuku said. "Because I could never pick those up."

"That makes sense too."

"What about you?" Shizuku blinked curiously. "What does Jing Yang like?"

"I like playing League of Legends..."

Shizuku's eyes filled with question marks.

Jing Yang laughed. "It's a video game."

"Oh..."

"And web novels, manga..." Jing Yang leaned back in his seat and looked at everything flying past outside. "The past drifts away on the wind!"

Shizuku did not know what he was lamenting, so she merely watched him quietly.

The faint rumble of the train continued beside them. After an unknown amount of time, Jing Yang came back to himself and smiled. "This is so boring. Let's go train together instead!"

"Okay." Shizuku closed her book and followed Jing Yang back to their room in another carriage.

This was not like the ship, where they had separate rooms. Jing Yang and Shizuku shared one room, with a soft berth on each side of the entrance and a rather rudimentary washroom farther inside.

After closing the door, Shizuku held out her hand and conjured Blobfish, sucking the book in her hand into it.

"You can already take things in and out whenever you want?" Jing Yang asked.

Shizuku stuck out her tongue. "If it's something important that I remember..."

Jing Yang beckoned with a smile. "In a few days, I'll let you try mine too."

"Do you have a new ability?" Shizuku was very curious.

"Not exactly new. Though it's actually kind of like a phone..."

"Why does saying it like that make my ability sound so cheap?" He shook his head, took off his shoes, and sat cross-legged on his berth. "Let's train."

"Mm."

Though Shizuku was curious, she did not ask further. After taking off her shoes, she sat cross-legged on the berth opposite him.

They released their Aura and wrapped it around themselves at the same time.

No one said that Ken had to be practiced standing up...

"That aura... is someone using Ken?"

In a nearby room, Slooe was catching up on sleep while Kang Jae suddenly looked toward the carriage wall. Though he had not used En, the two concentrations of Ken were not far away, and their strength was fairly decent, so he could sense that aura.

"It must be Jing Yang and Shizuku. Those two really are fairly capable. They're making the most of their journey to train—Chairman Netero will probably like that sort of attitude."

Kang Jae lay down with his hands behind his head and one leg crossed over the other. "But they're still far below the Zodiacs' average level. They haven't even reached the standard of an ordinary intermediate fighter... Is this what they call a wise man worrying too much?"

In the other nearby rooms, Dago and the others exchanged horrified looks. The terrifying aura that had suddenly appeared had startled them straight off their berths.

So it was Jing Yang and Shizuku...

"What are they doing?"

"Did they run into enemies? Why did they suddenly release such an aura?"

"Are they using Ren? It doesn't quite seem like it..."

Idiots, that's Ken, Dago thought silently. Ken, the application of Ren and Aura wrapping, isn't supposed to leak much aura at all... These two are even stronger than I expected. He had not expected that the seemingly vacant Shizuku possessed such strength, and he could not help feeling ashamed.

Then he thought of how the now-powerful Shizuku followed that childish-looking Jing Yang with such obedience... Dago wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and gave a bitter smile. People truly could not be compared.

Travel was simply that boring. The train raced onward and stopped at a station in the afternoon. Jing Yang and Shizuku rested for a while, bought some more feed, and gave some to Rock Sparrow, which was playing hide-and-seek with the attendants and passengers throughout the various carriages.

Through the night, the train tirelessly continued speeding toward its terminal station...

The carriages were brightly lit. Some were packed with people, while others were quiet and tidy. Some passengers had already fallen asleep against their backpacks and luggage, while others continued training in silence.

Trains did not tire, but people did.

And the people who had slipped into the carriages along the way had been waiting precisely for this moment.

They had rested with their eyes closed all night. At dawn, when the sky had just begun to brighten and everyone aboard was at their most exhausted, they made their move without hesitation.

They split into three groups. Some infiltrated other carriages, while those who remained divided again—one group blocked the exits at both ends, while the other used pistols and knives to quietly threaten the bleary-eyed passengers one by one.

"Don't move. Hand over everything valuable!"

"If you don't want to die, hand over your money."

Among the luggage stored overhead, Rock Sparrow tilted its head, curiously watching the strange scene unfolding in the carriage.

"Gurgle... ptoo!"

Jing Yang spat out his toothpaste foam and yielded the sink to Shizuku. After splashing his face with cold water, he said, "Some people are robbing passengers in another carriage. I'm going to pull a reverse robbery on them. Interested?"

"Sure." Shizuku began brushing her teeth, and Jing Yang clapped his hands to hurry her along. "Quick, quick, quick. Dago and the others seem to have heard the commotion too. If we're late, we'll miss it."

Shizuku hurriedly sped up her brushing.

Thump, thump, thump! Jing Yang knocked on the door to Kang Jae's compartment and called, "There's a group robbing the train in the rear carriages. Want to take a look?"

Slooe's sleep-addled voice came from inside. "Isn't it just a few train robbers? I thought it was something serious... Mmph, you handle it..." He seemed to yawn and roll over. Then Kang Jae said, "If he's not going, neither am I. Just a few petty thieves. Be careful not to kill them."

Even if you paid me, I wouldn't kill them... Jing Yang rubbed his chest and quickly headed with Shizuku to the entrance of the carriage that had already been taken over by the vicious train robbers.

Several railway police officers were speaking anxiously with Dago and the others. When Jing Yang and Shizuku arrived, Dago's group finally relaxed completely.

"You'll take the lead?" Dago asked.

"Our abilities aren't convenient to reveal." Jing Yang pointed behind him. "You should step aside."

"Fine." Dago and the others knew the rules and did not waste words. They pulled away the railway police officers, who did not entirely trust this girl-and-boy pair, and Dago's group reassured them, "Don't worry. Even all of us together might not be a match for those two..."

Jing Yang raised a curled finger and aimed it at the glass of the carriage door. A Nen bullet was poised to fire.

"Blobfish." Shizuku conjured her vacuum cleaner and switched it on. "Once the door opens, suck in all the pistols and bladed weapons."

Bang!

With a thunderous blast, the situation inside the carriage changed in an instant. Every weapon was sucked away at once. Before the robbers could even understand what was happening, two figures flashed before them, and after two thudding punches, they lost consciousness. No matter how vicious they were, these train robbers were still ordinary people. They had no chance to fight back—they could not even see Jing Yang and Shizuku's movements before being swiftly subdued...

The train sped through the morning sunlight. Cosmo, the city at the terminal station ahead, was already visible in the distance as the sun slowly rose.

At Cosmo Station, a group of bruised and battered train robbers who were questioning their lives were handed over to the authorities, while Jing Yang's group got off the train as though nothing had happened.

Slooe, an Ochima official, also acted as though nothing had happened, as if a train robbery was no great matter in Ochima... When they emerged from the crowded station, they found the streets outside equally packed, as though some sort of competition was underway.

Slooe's group was waiting for a car, but their arranged transport was late. Jing Yang and Shizuku intended to part ways with them here. Neither of them planned to wait for the remaining payment they might have been able to claim. Seeing the crowded streets, Jing Yang could not help asking curiously, "Is there some event going on?"

A staff member traveling with Slooe checked his watch and casually replied, "The Gatford Marathon... Damn it, who planned this route? Why would they put it right in front of the station?"

"What is it?" Jing Yang asked.

"It's the Gatford Marathon..." The staff member thought Jing Yang had not heard him, only to realize that Jing Yang had been speaking to Kang Jae.

Kang Jae's brow furrowed slightly. "Something feels wrong." He looked around and stretched out his left arm, blocking Slooe behind him.

"Woohoo!"

The spectators lining the street cheered for the marathon. At nearly the same moment, a young man in a baseball cap squeezed out from the crowd near Jing Yang's group. He grinned at Slooe and the others as rays of light burst from the bag on his back.

BOOM!!!!!

The fire that suddenly erupted by the roadside was like a thunderbolt, blasting apart the packed crowd. In the blaze, Slooe and the others looked stunned. Fangs protruded from Kang Jae's mouth. Jing Yang "silently" shouted something at Shizuku, and Aura surged from both of them to form Ken. Dago and the others barely managed to defend themselves, only to be sent flying head-on by the enormous explosive shockwave...