The Unaffected "Monster"

"You... really... don't feel your magic being suppressed at all?" Gray asked again in disbelief, looking at Zoro as though he were an alien.

Zoro was even more baffled. "Magic? I never had that stuff to begin with. How could it be suppressed?"

His answer was simple and direct, yet it landed like the loudest slap across the faces of the three mages, making them instantly realize the crux of the problem.

That was right.

He had never possessed magic in the first place.

This curse was a specialized weapon against "mages." It weakened its targets' life force by eroding and suppressing their magic. But Zoro had never been someone who relied on magic to fight!

"Then... what about that feeling of having your life force drained? You don't feel that either?" Erza pressed, unwilling to believe that someone could completely ignore a curse that directly affected the very source of life.

"Oh, you mean that." Zoro finally seemed to understand. He rolled his neck and said, "Yeah, I felt it. When I first came in, it felt like a bunch of little bugs were crawling into my body. Pretty annoying."

"Then... now...?"

"Now?" Zoro grinned, flashing a row of white teeth. "I kicked them all out."

He said it lightly, as if he were merely talking about swatting away a few flies.

But Erza and the others knew what terrifying strength that implied. It meant that Zoro's monstrous, vast life force, along with his pure willpower known as "Haki," had become powerful enough to form a natural barrier, forcibly shutting out this S-rank curse!

As they spoke, an even denser aura of curses surged from deep within the mine.

Gray and Lucy let out muffled groans, feeling the pressure on their bodies grow heavier.

Zoro frowned, obvious irritation appearing on his face.

"Are you done yet?"

He growled and stopped resisting passively as he had before. An invisible yet overwhelmingly oppressive force suddenly spread outward from him!

Armament Haki!

This time, he was no longer merely coating his body in Haki. Instead, he released it from within, forming an invisible field roughly five meters in diameter.

Erza, Gray, and Lucy instantly felt the cold curse power that had been clinging to them, trapping them as though in a swamp, get forcibly "squeezed" away by an even more savage and domineering force, as if it had encountered its natural enemy!

The pressure on them suddenly eased! The flow of their magic also recovered to seventy or eighty percent of its usual smoothness!

"Th-this is..." Lucy stared at Zoro in shock.

"I let some of my 'Haki' out and kept those annoying things away," Zoro explained. "But the range is limited, so stay close to me."

After saying that, he ignored the three faces behind him that looked as though they had seen a ghost and strode straight ahead.

"Hey! Zoro! Don't run off!" Erza shouted instinctively.

"Relax. I'm following the strongest scent, so I can't go wrong." Zoro did not look back. "Stay close. If you wander too far and those 'bugs' bite you, don't blame me."