Darkness enveloped everything.
The instant the giant maw of obi snapped shut, Inosuke's last thought was his frustration at failing to defeat that red-eyed bastard.
He felt no pain.
Perhaps death was like this: returning to nothingness in absolute darkness and silence.
Yet the tearing sensation he expected never came.
Instead, the entire underground warehouse-no, the entire earth-erupted in a violent roar the very next second!
BOOOOM!!!
This was no explosion.
This was the sky falling and the earth collapsing!
Inosuke and Makio felt the ground beneath them suddenly sink. Then the wooden ceiling overhead, along with the several meters of soil and stone pavement covering it, was instantly punched through by an unimaginably terrifying, irresistible force!
RUMBLE!
Rubble and wood splinters poured down like a torrential rain. An enormous hole opened directly above the warehouse, and the crimson night sky outside, lit by flames, illuminated this despairing underground prison for the first time.
The sudden upheaval left Inosuke and Makio's minds completely blank.
The obi worm about to devour them also faltered under the impact of that heavenlike might.
And in that very instant of hesitation-
A... no, that was no hand.
It was an enormous skeletal arm several meters long, formed from pure, blazing purple energy, thrusting down through the hole that had pierced earth and sky!
It ignored all the flying rubble and everything in the chaotic warehouse.
It had only one target.
With lightning speed utterly at odds with its enormous size, the giant purple skeletal hand seized the still-stunned obi worm!
CREEEAK!!
The obi, which had seemed indestructible moments before and could even bite through Inosuke's Nichirin Blades, was as fragile as sodden paper before the giant purple hand.
The obi worm let out a shrill, inhuman wail, twisting frantically as it tried to break