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Among the heroes Oboro had created so far, aside from Nunu & Willump, there were also Master Yi and Kassadin.

At first, he had wanted to choose either Master Yi or Kassadin.

But he quickly abandoned the idea.

The reason he had not chosen them... was because there were too many variables.

Master Yi's Highlander and Kassadin's Riftwalk could grant him incredible speed and the ability to appear and disappear unpredictably, but there were too many enemies... With their Nen abilities unknown, they were not suitable choices.

Both Master Yi and Kassadin were highly vulnerable to being "restrained"... If he could not cut the enemy numbers by more than half in a short time, the balance would tip... Oboro did not like taking risks.

He liked fighting and enjoyed it. He pursued battle because he craved self-improvement... not because he coveted thrills like Hisoka did.

He was afraid of dying...

So he would not put himself in danger.

He needed to end the fight quickly... in one go.

Thus, after weighing his options, the best hero available to him... was Nunu & Willump.

"My Nen... is running low..."

Oboro murmured.

His injuries were manageable... He had deliberately guided the course of the battle and avoided several fatal wounds. The injury to his abdomen was the most severe, but it had not damaged his internal organs.

If the battle dragged on... it was hard to say what would happen.

If the "beast" beside Brown, one of the Ten Dons, had been here, and the number of Nen users had risen to around thirty... Oboro would never have confronted them head-on! There were many ways to fight... Using the terrain and environment to pick them off one by one was the optimal solution.

The hero he chose might have been different, too...

Only because there had been barely more than a dozen people was he willing to give it a try.

He had confidence in himself! But he did not think he could defeat an entire armed squad of Nen users under Brown in a direct confrontation.

Different circumstances called for different solutions. One had to remain flexible.

Across the plaza, people lay scattered everywhere. Some were dead... others still had a faint breath left in them...

Oboro walked over to a corpse and looked down.

This woman named Uka had her lower body torn apart, and her face was unrecognizable. Frost had formed over her wounds and was slowly melting, so there was no bleeding... Her ball of yarn had vanished.

She was not a Conjuration type. This woman was a Specialization type...

Once that ball of yarn had woven itself into a little doll, Oboro had a feeling... he would have been in trouble! He then walked over to Green. The boy's chest still rose faintly... His face had been shredded, even his eyeballs crushed...

"You're still conscious?"

Oboro raised an eyebrow.

What a pity...

For someone his age, reaching this level was already quite remarkable.

If he had not been an enemy, Oboro might have offered him some "guidance."

As his words faded, Green's aura went out.

Oboro finished off the remaining survivors one by one... Then he arrived before the person with the lightest injuries.

Lightest was only relative to being dead...

The man's entire body was covered in dense, horrifying gashes carved by wind and snow... But he still more or less retained a "human" shape.

His pupils were unfocused as he lay on the ground.

He was the one who had used a syringe to extract Nen... He had leaped away at the first opportunity, but he had not gotten far enough. It seemed he had intended to take advantage of the opening, letting his companions restrain Oboro first. By the time the blizzard descended, it had been too late to run...

"I can save you. Do you want to live?"

Oboro stopped and spoke to the man.

The man's eyes shifted slightly, but his body was too badly damaged for him to speak.

"Are you an Exorcist?"

Seeing that he seemed about to lose consciousness, Oboro asked again.

Extracting Nen... It inevitably made him think of an exceptionally rare kind of Nen user.

Exorcists.

Exorcism... To a certain extent, it could be called a bug.

Oboro had not expected there to be an Exorcist among the enemy ranks... If he could save him and make him work for him, he might prove quite useful in the future. No matter what kind of Hunter he became later, he could not fight alone forever... He would certainly have to build his own team, and in Oboro's plans, there was a place for an Exorcist.

Exorcists were hard to come by.

As if experiencing a final flash of life, the man's eyes suddenly cleared, and he grinned at Oboro.

Then, the life still remaining in his body suddenly vanished like a kite with its string cut...

He had voluntarily dispersed his aura...

"..."

Oboro frowned at the sight.

Without the slightest ripple in his heart, he turned and left.

Though injured and low on Nen, cleaning up the survivors in this palace was still no problem.

A few days later, four Nen users under Brown who were responsible for leading the armed forces returned to the estate.

They had been dealing with the unrest among the seven major families infiltrated by the Fills Family, purging the disruptive elements and leaving troops behind to garrison and impose control.

The four of them had only managed to take a rare break from their busy work to return for some rest and readjustment.

Still, they found it somewhat strange.

Their companions had not contacted them these past few days, nor had they conveyed any further orders or plans from their boss.

"Those bastards get to hide out here and enjoy some peace and quiet. Damn it!"

At noon, their car stopped at the entrance to the palace. One of them pushed open the door and got out, grumbling in dissatisfaction. "We're the ones suffering, having to—"

Before he could finish, his expression instantly tightened.

He had smelled blood and rot.

The other three, who got out after him, did not react immediately and continued agreeing with him. "Quit complaining. The sooner we finish, the sooner we're done. Once things settle down, we can get the boss to give us a long vacation... Anderson and the others have practically wiped out the Fills Family. Their headquarters building has been destroyed too, so they've moved faster than us! All that's left are the gangs among those smaller factions... It probably won't be long before the boss—"

Likewise, they stopped halfway through.

The three men's expressions changed dramatically.

"Hey, hey, hey... What happened?!"

"Did someone attack the estate? The Fills Family? Impossible... If they had assembled a large force, we would have heard something... Besides, their people have been fighting Anderson's side this whole time. If they shifted their manpower, that side would have wrapped up long ago... They could never have held out this long!"

They saw decaying corpses in the distance, surrounded by swarms of flies and giving off a foul stench. They were the guards.

Their hearts immediately sank.

"What are you panicking for... Green and the others are here. Maybe they just couldn't be bothered to clean up. Lazy bastards!" One Nen user came back to his senses, rubbing his hair with a helpless expression. "Looks like something really did happen while we were gone... A lot of people died. Let's go in and take a look."

With that, he was the first to head toward the gates.

The other three followed.

"Judging from the traces left behind, this does not look like a large force gathering or a group brawl... Were there only a few enemies? Or... just one?" The four advanced deeper into the palace. Corpses lay everywhere, untouched and uncollected. Some had been patrolmen, while others had manned the checkpoints. "Almost all of them were killed instantly... The murderer is strong!"

The experienced four immediately saw the issue.

As the number of corpses they encountered grew, and the ways they had died became increasingly bizarre, the expressions on their faces were no longer relaxed.

"Anderson and the others still haven't found Fills Lily, that butler... or Oboro, the leader!"

"You think... Oboro did all this?"

"By himself?"

"What kind of joke is that! He can't be that stupid, can he? If he relied on the Fills Family remnants and the still-unsettled gang situation, he could use the chaos to fight for a slim chance of survival. He might even escape... But if he came here alone, wouldn't that be suicide? How arrogant would he have to be to think that just by himself—"

After discussing it, one of them curled his lip and mocked him.

But before he could finish, another companion with a grave expression cut him off. He took a phone from his pocket and dialed a number.

It was Green's.

Beep, beep, beep...

The line remained busy. No one answered.

They quickened their pace and finally passed through the tall corridor.

Before them was a plaza deep within the palace.

A scene came into the view of the four men.

It made them... feel as though they had fallen into an ice pit.

Under the bright daylight, a man sat on the stone platform beside the fountain, watching them with a smile.

On the ground before the fountain, eighteen corpses had been laid out in neat rows.

They had all rotted away...

But the four men knew... those... were their companions...

The Nen user still holding the phone to his ear swallowed hard, his pupils filled with terror.

He saw that the man by the fountain also held a phone, which rang without end.

That seemed to be... Green's phone.

The man waved the phone at him, then... from dozens of meters away, answered it.

"Welcome... home."

Hearing the man's warm voice from the other end of the call...

Clatter. The Nen user's phone fell to the ground.

"Run!!!"

He roared himself hoarse.

The weather was clearly warm and sunny today... Yet at this moment, they felt as if they had been thrown into a biting winter!

A short while later, less than ten minutes afterward.

Oboro, his body spattered with blood, dragged several fresh corpses to the fountain and arranged them according to their places in the sequence.

"Then... I'll wait for the next batch of guests..."

Elsewhere, the meeting between the Ten Dons and their partners finally ended.

Brown immediately took an airship back to the Republic of Padokea.

The foreboding in his heart was growing worse...

The Nen users he had raised had all gone out of contact! The only good news was that the gangs within the country had been brought under control... The Fills Family had been purged, though Fills Lily and the butler had not yet been caught, nor had Oboro, the most important one! His armed forces had also suffered considerable casualties. With Green and the others nowhere to be heard from and no leader in command, the follow-up arrangements could not proceed.

He had to return at once and take charge.

Inside Brown's private airship.

His cigarette addiction had become severe lately. He had stopped smoking cigars and switched to cigarettes, which practically never left his hand, one after another.

He had also gained much more gray hair... Unable to sleep through the night.

Standing before the window and looking at the scenery outside the cabin, he said in a low voice, "They should... all be dead, right..."

Behind him, Sato and the other two Nen users said nothing.

"Was it him? How did he do it..."

Brown felt his temples throbbing and his head splitting.

There were many things he could not understand.

"I'll find him and kill him."

Sato suddenly said coldly.

Brown turned back to look at him. After pondering for a moment, he said, "I'll leave it to you. I trust you!"

The three people before him were his strongest three trump cards.

Sato in particular had never failed.