Chapter 322: Chapter 320 You Don’t Understand the Power of Superpower_1
Steam rose in gentle bubbles from the oden pot on the kitchen counter, its savory aroma drifting through the air.
Morimoto Chiyoda didn’t offer him any white liquor or shochu. Instead, as usual, she placed a can of beer before him.
This low-alcohol beer was hardly distinguishable from a soft drink.
For those who disliked alcohol, a sip might only reveal its bitterness.
Yet, for those who enjoyed it, a hint of malt could be discerned beneath the bitterness.
"Tonight, we drink until we drop!"
Morimoto Chiyoda tilted her head, her long black hair spilling over one shoulder. Her red lips, moist from the drink, curved into a smile, and her eyes seemed to flash with an electric charge that struck Aozawa’s heart.
"No problem."
Aozawa nodded, resolving to drink heartily with her and help alleviate the gloom in her heart.
For working people, drinking wasn’t so much a hobby as a means to vent their frustrations.
He raised his canned beer to clink against Morimoto Chiyoda’s stemmed glass. "Cheers!"
"Cheers," Morimoto Chiyoda echoed, then tilted back her slender, swan-like neck and drained her glass of shochu.
PHEW. She exhaled, her breath, like a mysterious whisper from the night woods, was heavy with the scent of alcohol and brushed across Aozawa’s cheek.
Her eyes crinkled with a smile; she was clearly teasing him.
Aozawa shot her a sideways glance, set down his empty beer can, and said, "Here, have some meat. It’ll help slow things down."
He picked up a slice of beef and placed it in Morimoto Chiyoda’s bowl.
"Scumbag."
"Hey, Chitose, in this situation, shouldn’t you be calling me ’Mr. Warmth’?"
"The tenderness of a man juggling multiple relationships is just being a scumbag."
Morimoto Chiyoda chuckled in reply, picked up the meat, and pointed at him playfully. "You little rascal!"
Seeing Morimoto Chiyoda acting tipsy, Aozawa shrugged. "Fine, call me whatever you like."
...
The two chatted as they ate.
It was now seven o’clock. The sky outside had darkened, but the oden was still simmering, and they were still adding ingredients to the pot.
"That Ito is really disgusting; he reeks of disinfectant. I didn’t say anything about him, but he actually had the gall to say my perfume stinks! There’s definitely something wrong with his nose."
Morimoto Chiyoda launched into complaint mode, griping about everyone from her colleagues in the special task force to her superiors, Dr. Ditch and Ponte, and then about the crushing workload.
However, she wasn’t so drunk as to speak carelessly; she never revealed what her job actually entailed.
Aozawa knew that with Chitose in this state, going out for a night run was obviously out of the question.
"Okay, okay, so she’s not a good person," Aozawa humored her.
He responded while placing a piece of meat into his own bowl. Then, he activated his Time Suspension Ability.
In an instant, a grayish filter enveloped his vision.
Morimoto Chiyoda was frozen, her mouth open mid-sentence.
Aozawa sat there. He contracted his Defense Barrier into an arm-like extension, guiding it out through the open balcony, then curving it upward toward the sky.
After rising a hundred meters, he halted the Defense Barrier’s upward extension. Instead, he manipulated it to branch out into numerous tendrils, radiating across Honshu Island like a colossal firework exploding silently in the sky.
Unlike fireworks, however, the Defense Barrier didn’t quickly dissipate.
Aozawa guided these tendrils to settle upon buildings in major cities and rural villages across Honshu Island, then initiated Catalyst Induction.
Instantly, a torrent of images, far vaster than any he had processed before—even exceeding the intensity of the first week—flooded his mind.
With each tendril of the Defense Barrier as a focal point, every building within a one-kilometer radius became his eyes and ears.
Yet Aozawa’s brain felt no pain; his state of serene detachment allowed him to disregard the cacophony of sounds and instead filter the incoming visuals using pre-determined keywords.
For instance: a shoulder-length blond Caucasian accompanied by darker-skinned bodyguards, one of whom bore a horrifying burn scar on his left cheek.
Also, a powerfully built man over two meters tall with an afro, and a gaunt Vietnamese man with sharp, ape-like features.
And an elderly American, white-haired and blue-eyed, impeccably dressed.
These descriptions had been provided by Phoenix Academy Maggie, identifying Ponte and his bodyguards, as well as Dr. Ditch.
Using this information, he swiftly pinpointed his two primary targets.
One was Ditch, alone in the archives. The other was Ponte, who was currently dining.
The sensory input from other locations quickly faded, including the feed from Ditch in the archives—the archives weren’t going anywhere. He focused solely on maintaining the visual and auditory feed within a one-kilometer radius of Ponte. Sustaining this island-wide surveillance for an extended period... even with his detached mindset, it was difficult to bear.
The nine seconds of the Time Stop expired. The gray-white filter vanished from his sight, and Morimoto Chiyoda’s lips, no longer frozen, resumed their movement as she finished her sentence, "...cheers."
"Cheers," Aozawa replied, grabbing the beer can from the table and draining it in one gulp.
Simultaneously, he rapidly contracted his Defense Barrier, focusing its reach towards Ponte’s location.
...
「Tokyo, Ome City.」
A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting a warm glow. Speakers, embodying modern technology, played Beethoven’s Symphony of Fate.
Ponte sat in a high-backed chair, preparing to enjoy his dinner.
For security reasons, he hadn’t brought many servants; Armaniyaz was attending to all his needs.
POP. Armaniyaz uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured it into a stemmed glass, filling it halfway.
Ponte listened to the stirring strains of the Symphony of Fate as he picked up his knife and fork and cut a small piece of beef.
"Ah, no, don’t!"
A woman’s shrill scream erupted from the smartphone placed on the table before him. The sound didn’t disturb Ponte; on the contrary, it seemed to complement the music perfectly.
The livestream had been started by Young Dragon. Using the same method as at noon, he was broadcasting live on the Dark Web, having hired thousands of fake viewers to prevent his location from being traced.
The rationale was simple: with so many people watching, even if Dio discovered the stream, he couldn’t possibly kill all the viewers, could he? The law doesn’t punish the masses.
He swallowed the beef and chuckled. "Young Dragon’s methods haven’t dulled in the slightest."
Armaniyaz frowned slightly, unable to comprehend his master’s peculiar tastes.
A man in a lavish mansion, listening to the Symphony of Fate, savoring Kobe beef and red wine, ought to be watching something artistically refined. Yet, this man paradoxically seemed to relish a nauseating livestream during his meal. Watching that yellow and white... stuff... gushing out as if from an open faucet—how could anyone eat while seeing that?
Ponte chuckled and explained, "You don’t understand. The suffering of others is the most exquisite seasoning. That woman is being tormented, flushed with torrents of water, causing that... filth... to pour out. Her utterly debased state, in contrast, only serves to highlight the elegance of my current life.
"So, you ask, why wouldn’t I be interested in watching? It’s not like the smell can reach me here."
He raised his glass of red wine and took a contented sip.
Armaniyaz’s ears twitched. He turned his head sharply. "It sounds like someone’s here!"
Ponte shook his head with a smile. "Armaniyaz, don’t be so childish. Do you think you can scare me like that?
"Dio’s information-gathering ability has a limited range. Unless he considers me extremely important and scours the land inch by inch for me—but in his mind, I doubt I’m that significant."
Though arrogant, Ponte was still clear-headed enough to know that Dio wouldn’t search every inch of Tokyo just to find him. He wasn’t that important.
Armaniyaz’s expression was grave. "This is no joke! Look, my hands are trembling. Something is targeting us! He’s here!"
The sudden intensity in his voice shattered the leisurely atmosphere, instantly ratcheting up the tension. Ponte’s smile vanished, and the red wine and beef in his mouth suddenly seemed to lose all their flavor.
"Let’s go!"
He chose to trust his bodyguard’s intuition. Forgetting his meal, he immediately dropped his knife and fork. Twisting the ring on his left hand, he sent out a call for the Fifth Air Force from Yokota Base.
...
"AH!"
A piercing scream tore through the walls, reaching the dining room and making Ponte’s heart clench.
Armaniyaz’s face was grim. "Too late. He’s already outside the door."
GULP. Ponte swallowed hard. He truly hadn’t expected Dio to place such importance on him.
Did he really search every inch of land? Or does Dio possess some unknown intelligence-gathering methods? So, I am this important after all, huh?
He muttered, fervently hoping it was the former and not the latter.
BANG!
The sound nearly made Ponte’s heart leap out of his chest. He watched as the heavy door was suddenly blasted inwards, flew upwards, spun a few times in the air, and then smashed against the ceiling, sending the crystal chandelier swinging violently.
The door then crashed heavily to the floor, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Ponte stared at the empty doorway. There was nothing to see.
"Dio, is that you?" Ponte yelled.
Armaniyaz’s heart was also pounding. His eyes scanned the floor and walls, desperately searching for any trace of someone’s passage.
But he saw nothing.
The living room remained empty; apart from himself and Ponte, there was no one else.
Even the carpet on the floor showed no signs of being trodden upon; its fibers remained undisturbed, pointing upwards.
Where is he? Armaniyaz thought. If they couldn’t even see a trace of the enemy, they’d have no power to resist at all.
Ponte’s face was composed as he said, "Dio, you can’t kill me. If you do, the self-destruct mechanism hidden on my person will activate. You’ll die with me."
"It’s useless to say anything now! A hungry tiger has its prey in sight. We can only fight with all our might!"
The oppressive sense of danger hadn’t faded. Armaniyaz grabbed a wine bottle from the table and splashed its red contents around him.
The crimson liquid arced out in front of him but didn’t immediately splatter on the ground. It was as if an invisible person were standing there; the wine clung to an unseen form, slowly trickling down and vaguely outlining a human silhouette.
Armaniyaz didn’t advance to engage. Instead, he forcefully hurled the wine bottle at the outline.
CRASH!
A multicolored, diamond-shaped radiance suddenly flared in their vision. The wine bottle, intact a moment before, shattered mid-air, its fragments transforming into a hail of deadly blades hurtling towards them.
Armaniyaz snatched the tablecloth from the table, flicked it upwards, and with a deft shake of his right arm, executed a skillful maneuver, enveloping the shards within the cloth and neutralizing their force.
It was the principle of ’using four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds,’ a kung fu from a certain Eastern Great Nation. The force on these shards clearly wasn’t as terrifying as what Pavao had faced. This Superpower probably adjusted its rebound strength based on the force of his own attack.
Having reached this conclusion, Armaniyaz hooked the dining table with his right foot and kicked it forward. He then turned, grabbed Ponte around the waist, and with the agility of a cat, leaped out the window, intending to buy time for the air support to arrive.